Running Marathons

One of the hardest parts about teaching is knowing that your success depends on other people.

I think God was laughing at me when he heard me thinking yesterday, “Man, kindergarden is going to be a piece of cake after 2nd graders.” I am utterly spent after the first full day of teaching, which included spending 4 whole periods with 27 4-5 year-olds, plus a period of 2nd graders. I came home feeling like I had just run a marathon, and the discovery that my AC was broken so that I would no longer have a cool haven to escape to was just the icing on the cake- if icing comes in tragic flavors anyway. As unkind as it sounds, I felt much better after hearing that other people's days were just as exhausting, and some were downright shitty from what I heard due to the ongoing chaos in the management department. Also, I was told that last year, one kindergardener cried for a month straight before she finally decided to shut off the ducts (either that, or she ran out of tears to cry). Whether this is a comforting piece of news or something that should worry me further is something I have yet to decide. 

The hardest part I would say is that while a couple kids are fairly good at English for their age, there are others who know absolutely no English at all and just babble on in Kurdish the entire time, or say nothing at all. For these kids, it's like starting at square zero. How do you make something out of nothing? How do you make a cake without the ingredients? It's like trying to cause a Big Bang, creating an entire universe out of absolutely no materials. “How many?” I would ask holding up one pencil. “Pencil!” they would all shout gleefully. “No, not 'what'; how many?” “Pencil!” they would shout with amazing enthusiasm. And that is when the pencil game was invented (more about that below). The scary thing is, I don't know if these are proper methods of teaching. What if I'm doing exactly what the experts say should not be done? I have no clue, I'm just entertaining some 5-year-olds man. And their parents are paying so much money for me to teach them well. This is the scariest, most burdensome part for me.

After sitting at my kitchen table with my usual can of diet 7-up, though, and mulling over the events of the day, and trying very hard to re-energize physically and mentally, I could feel my optimism returning because suddenly, I had this vision of the future where the little 5 year-olds knew how to speak and write whole words and sentences in English, and I look forward to this, I really do. The key to surviving any journey is focusing on what will be...this may seem like an obvious bit of advice, but it meant very little to me until today. Also, despite the criers, there were the other kids who actually chanted along to my stupid little diddies (a-a-a-apple, or 1, 2, 3-4-5!) and did all the motions and got really into the count-the-pencils game, so that's an encouraging start, even though they seem like such little things to be happy about. 

The count-the-pencil game was invented really out of sheer necessity, during the “How many?” “Pencil!” conundrum. I would take a pencil in each hand and hold up one or two, saying out loud how many there were. Heh. It was really cute when I hid both pencils behind my back and asked “how many?” Befuddled faces gazed up at me until I said “zero!”, and then they shouted with the usual exuberance “zero!!!” One important thing I learned today is that kids love to chant. It doesn't matter if you do it over and over again until you feel that they MUST be bored of it. They don't get bored of chanting. This could be a very handy tool for future lessons.

As for the second graders, they were angels today, especially compared to the other two days. There was still too much rustling and murmuring going on for my satisfaction, but what an improvement! Tomorrow, I will have to take matters into my own hands and divide them into groups myself if this “point system” is to be used at all. God sometimes I really hate systems.