Today I subbed for 5th Class. It was a good day, but goodness they are chatty. They are a very social group of 10-year-olds, that's for sure. The principal has told me to give a warning and then extra homework to any students who are misbehaving. The funniest thing happened today. She came in to ask me if I had given extra homework to anyone yet, so I told her I had only had problems with one student. She said out loud, "Let me see if I can guess who looks guilty." As all the students tried to put their innocent faces on she scanned the classroom. About 10 seconds later she said, "Mr. Boylan, it was you wasn't it?" Sure enough, she was right! I could not believe the talent. She is a true principal at heart, that's for sure.
There were a few teaching struggles today. One of them ended up being actually kind of funny. The kids are learning about pie charts, so I made one up on the board. I made up a story about how I had eaten a bunch of cookies.
"Miss King.. we don't call them cookies."
So I changed it to "biscuits." Now, half the biscuits were chocolate chip. One fourth were peanut butter.
"Ewwww!! You eat peanut butter biscuits?? That's gross."
Yes, we like lots of things with peanut butter in America. Now, the last fourth of the biscuits were oatmeal raisin.
"What is oatmeal raisin?"
You know, what you call porridge.
(Laughter everywhere). "Eww that's disgusting!! How could you eat porridge with raisins as a biscuit?"
As you can see, this lesson was going no where fast.
Then, I was trying to demonstrate to the students what 9% of 90 was. Most of them thought it was 10, but I was trying to explain that the answer was actually 8.1. I was doing all this cross-multiplying and dividing and they were looking at me like I had come from another planet, not another country. We don't divide the same, we don't add quite the same, which makes it extremely difficult to calculate percentages together. None of the kids could explain it to the rest of the class either, so we left that problem for Miss Caulwell to do tomorrow. Sometimes I feel so helpless.
One thing I have found very difficult is to say "Euros" instead of "Dollars." After 7 whole weeks here I still can't get it through my head. I was standing in front of the class today saying "Dollars" over and over again during math problems. I finally told them to just shout it out when I make the mistake. Ten seconds later I had 27 students shouting at me.
As always, we had a small Q&A session in 5th class today. I love when they ask me questions about America.. I can't get over it. A lot of their perceptions of America stem from MTV.. what a tragedy. They think we all have extravagant 16th birthday parties, and they think people really live like the girls from Laguna Beach. One student asked me, "So what do the famous people do all day?" I had no idea how to answer that one. It was interesting for me to explain that there weren't famous people just walking all around the United States, especially not in Indiana.
One student's mother is a flight attendant. She got stuck in New York during the volcano a few weeks ago, so she brought him back Airheads, Warheads, and Chips Ahoy. He was asking me all about those candies and whether I liked them. He even brought me some Chips Ahoy to eat to make me feel more at home. What a sweet kid.
There is a woman named Catherine who takes me to and from school every morning now. I really like her so much. She's kind and makes me feel at home. I told her today how much I appreciate her "giving me a lift" each day, and she told me she really enjoys the company. It made me feel good to know someone actually wants to be in my company. Sometimes I feel a little bit lonely, and when people do me favors I feel a little like they're just doing it to be nice. It's nice to know she actually enjoys having me around.
Random:
-Sometimes they say "It's bucketing!" This is another way of saying it's pouring down rain. They also say, "It's lashing rain!" quite often.
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