Wow! There really is never a dull moment teaching. I feel like life is crazy here all the time. Not even just at school, just living in a foreign country is always full of challenges. Walking down the street is an adventure even! You have to make sure you don’t fall in potholes, don’t get hit by cars or run down by motorcycles, avoid getting hit on too much, and watch out for the occasional donkey.
The new high school building is finished. It’s really nice! (Well, compared to something in the States, maybe not, but by standards here, it’s really good!) We moved over about two weeks ago. 10th through 12th grade have classes there, and 9th grade moved into the old 11th grade room and out of the science lab. It’s so nice to have some more space!
I taught my first science lab on Tuesday this week. It went really, really well actually, despite like everything else being an adventure. First, I had to go to the grocery store to get some yeast for this experiment. Trying to explain to a worker that you need yeast when you don’t know the word for it is quite interesting. He kept giving me baking powder and telling me it does the same thing. Eventually he got one of his buddies to find it, so that was good. Then, I had to figure out what to do since I don’t really have much equipment at all. I ended up kind of making things up as I went, but got the yeast cells broken up enough that the enzymes were released and activated, which is what I needed for my lab. Everything else we actually had at school, including Benedict’s reagent, which surprised me. I tested the lab twice before we did it with good results, so I was pretty pumped. Doing it with 25 ninth graders was a little more challenging. Especially things like measuring 1.5 mL for example with a 50 mL graduated cylinder. Fortunately precision was not vital in this lab. All the kids got really good results which was good! It’s a pretty cool lab with really neat color changes if everything goes as planned. So, it was pretty fun to have a successful first lab.
Cheating is a huge problem here. It’s so frustrating to have to deal with it nearly every day. So if anyone has any good suggestions as to how to deal with it, let me know! I caught one of my seniors cheating on a chemistry quiz a while back. One of my ninth graders came and found me after school last week and told me, “Miss Scislow, I want to tell you something before Mr. Hernandez does. I was copying someone’s biology workbook, and he saw me…” Then, I’ve caught quite a few other kids cheating for other teachers classes. It gets really frustrating because I don’t go out of my way to look for cheating, yet when they are dumb enough to do it right in front of me, it obviously needs to be deal with. So like I said, any suggestions? Let me know!
On the plus side, my ninth graders are really starting to come around. Juan, my little trouble maker that HATED me at the beginning of the year because I “got him in trouble” over something he wrote, is one of my favorite students. He does his work, participates in class, listens well, answers questions, and is really good for me. I know he still causes problems for other teachers, but he’s really helping turn ninth grade around for me. They are still loud and talkative, but are doing much better. Eduardo, my senior tutoring charge, I figured out is not as dumb as he tries to make people think he is. He’s actually really smart, just lazy. He got an 89% on my pre-calc test today though, so that’s exciting! And definitely promising! My eleventh graders also told me I’m their favorite teacher today and that they really like my classes, so that’s always nice to hear! One of my senior girls, Alana, brought me an apple on Thursday for being a good teacher, which was super cute. I thought only happened in make-believe! Haha! Anyways, even though it's a constant challenge, I'm loving teaching!
Oh, I’ve got two interesting stories that are slightly connected. First, my ninth graders were giving group presentations last week. At recess, Oasting and Marcel come up to me and angrily tell me that George (their other group member) was refusing to present because he said his braces hurt too much to talk. So, I asked if they could do it without him, and they said that of course they could since George hadn’t done anything anyways. So, they presented without George, who mumbled something to me about how his braces hurt. I told him when I handed back grades later that I couldn’t give him a grade because it appeared to me he didn’t help his group much (I didn’t include the fact that both his group members, who are friends with him, and separately given him a 0 out of 10 for group participation.) This was Friday, so I told him he had to present on Monday, by himself, to me at recess and that he better be ready. So, later that day, when I don’t actually have a chance to talk to him, I notice something a little weird…. That doesn’t quite fit with his not-believable braces excuse... So, I decided to call him out on it on Monday. At recess, we went to the lab so he would present, and I was like, “Ok George, I really don’t appreciate getting lied to.” And he responds with, “I don’t know what you are talking about…..” as he can’t make eye contact. So I told him that generally, I’m pretty easy going when I know what is actually going on, but that I know his braces weren’t the problem. The reason he couldn’t talk all week was because he had just gotten his tongue pierced. Smart kid, huh? He did his presentation well though at least! So the next day, I was chewing on a paper clip while my tenth graders were working on geometry activities. I was walking around helping, and like always, I was chewing on something. That day it just happened to be a paper clip. And Chris was like, “Miss Scislow, you have your tongue pierced?!?” And I was like, “No, what are you talking about???” Apparently, the whole class thought I did because the paperclip in my mouth apparently looked like a tongue stud. How funny is that?
So, like I said, life is never dull here! I fly back for medical school interviews on October 7th (October 8th: University of Minnesota-Duluth; October 10th: Creighton, Omaha, Nebraska), so wish me luck and say some prayers that they go well!
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