Listen up! School has started! You should show up, pay attention to the teacher, and do your homework. Unless it's raining outside. Apparently that is Georgian for "school is optional".
Oh, school. I remember that adorable day when I finished high school and said "I'M NEVER GOING BACK THERE." (Sorry, St. Margaret's). Right. Little did I know that not only would I be going back there but also back, back, back, back there. That's right, I teach the 5-year-olds who don't know how to hold a pencil all the way to the 12th graders who only pay attention if they think it's worth listening to you. So you better be worth their time.
And you'd better understand every age group.
Nowhere in Pre-Service Training did they teach us how to understand furious first graders. Or the phrase, "He poked me!!" in Georgian. This was instead accomplished by the first grader stating the crime, then lifting the edge of her shirt and poking herself emphatically. Demonstration understood.
So, while my partner teacher and I have shuffled classrooms, planned beforehand (and then inevitably again on the fly), made our own materials, and wrangled second graders, these are the things I have learned so far:
1) If you plan any kind of activity where kids get to move pieces of paper around on a desk, you rock.
2) If you are 9th grade or above, it is perfectly acceptable to write your essay about your summer vacation on the topic of how drunk you got. Hey! It's in English!
3) If you make homemade Play-Dough on the stove for the younger children to model letters/words with, it will become sticky in the humidity before class and this will result in a classroom full of 2nd graders who are having way more fun than you originally intended. And a partner teacher running frantically out of the classroom, hands covered in goo.
4) If chalk is gold, whiteboard markers are diamonds of an unparalleled degree.
5) When children are missing teeth, that is when they scream the loudest. I postulate that there is a biological connection here, somehow.
6) Grading is not necessary. Possibly it will begin next semester? But don't hold your breath.
7) The activity you thought would take 10 minutes will inevitably take 45. Conversely, the activity that you planned to take half the class will take your students 5 minutes. Then they will look at you very expectantly as you scramble to look prepared.
8) The classroom that you want to use will be busy. The classroom that you do not want to use will be 15 degrees hotter than any other room in the school.
9) Students will answer, "YES!" extremely emphatically to any question that they do not understand. I have learned to immediately distrust any affirmative answer that a student gives me. Also, the more enthusiastic the YES! ... generally speaking the less they actually understand.
10) In grades 4th and under, stickers are the highest form of currency. If you have stickers, you are God. If you do not have stickers ... wait, what? There was homework?
11) The bus is full. Walk.
12) Look, if you can just make it to 4th period, you get to go have coffee with the other teachers. You will sit in another room, scramble to understand the conversation topic (screw the details) in Georgian, but you have 5 minutes relatively to yourself. Just make it to 4th period ... just make it to 4th period ... just make it to ....
