Observations From This Week

I did end up teaching this week. Not a full schedule, but not bad. I also taught a good number of individual lessons. Here's what I noticed/decided:

So much gets lost in translation. What I said: "She gave me the list in the hall." What I wanted to say: "She handed this list to me in the hallway on her way out. No discussion because god forbid she spend more than one minute of her time talking to me in any given week."

I spent part of last year debating whether it was better when my 7th form classes behaved like monsters or zombies. I've decided I prefer zombie mode.

Which reminds me: I'm teaching the two 8th form classes now instead of the 5th form. This is a bummer. The little kids are fun and usually more willing to work. The 8th form classes were my worst last year and not much seems to have changed over the summer.

I had an individual lesson with one of my sixth form students. This is how this situation came to be: Some woman knocked on my door. I answered. She asked if I would tutor her younger brother who's in the sixth form, and then she said his name. [Side note: Ukrainians name people by their last, first, and patronymic names which usually results in a really long, fast blur where I rarely remember anything but the first name]. I have three students with this first name in my sixth form class. One is an excellent student, one is mediocre to low, and one is non-existent. I figured this was probably the sister of the mediocre student (I even tried to figure out which student she physically resembled). Nope. It's the non-existent student, aka the student who rarely has his book, or paper, or a pen to write with and who usually just distracts everyone around him. When he showed up, I knew we were going to have to work on all the really simple things because in class I can tell he doesn't know/understand much English. This is fine. It became apparently quite quickly that I will probably spend my next lesson with him teaching him the English alphabet. He's been "studying" English for four years...

There's a staircase in my school that is for teachers only. I didn't know this until a student told me. My first thought: awesome. Then I thought about how sometimes I get mobbed by hyped up, semi-psychotic children and I thought about how I could just stand on the landing between floors and none of them would be able to follow me, and then I thought: AWESOME.

I had a penis shaped clay-mation thrown into my office this week. Oh, children.

Only one student in my 11th form class did their homework (and he only wrote one sentence) for the second lesson of the year. This didn't really surprise me. I don't know if it's a good thing that I now have realistic expectations or just sad that my expectations are so low.

In theory, Ukrainian students can be trilingual by the time they finish secondary school at the age of 17 (they study Russian, Ukrainian, and English languages starting in primary school). How many American schools can claim the same?

September 16 is the day my village was freed from the oppression of fascists. There was a flower ceremony at school to commemorate this holiday.