I have been teaching in my own class room for almost six months now. A couple of weeks before that we arrived in Telmar to a rush of city-shock and hurried planning while learning such simple things as how to shop or how to travel on a bus. To all of you who condemn the up and coming generations, of which I may or may not be a part depending on your view of things, for their use of the internet, I say "Try living overeseas and you will appreciate the wonders of Google and its translation program without which shopping would be nigh on impossible." Back to the teaching... Six months is not a lot of teaching experience, this I know, but I feel that I'm quickly finding my footing and a teaching style that fits well with my personality. I have a fun classroom where the students are so free to learn that they do so without knowing it. I know I'm a new teacher, but I think thats pretty spectacular. I say that, because at this point I've structured my classes in such a way that the students are the teachers and learn through hands on imaginative activities.
I plan on posting my classroom rules here and maybe doing some updates on different activities we do. A good friend of ours has a fantastic teaching blog "Teacher Extraordinaire" (Click the link to check it out) where she chronicles her experience as a relatively new teacher. While I'm not going to copy that idea,I am going to incorporate more classroom oriented posts in the future. Writing helps me process and if I'm going to think at all I might as well think out loud, right? So the blondes tell me.
This week saw the second meeting of the newly recreated Ultimate Frisbee Club at Hogwarts Academy for Gifted Youngsters. Let me say, I haven't played Ultimate Frisbee very often. Thrown a frisbee, yes. Ultimate Frisbee, no. Still, once I settled into teaching and saw that we had a lot of kids who wanted to play, but couldn't because there was no one to organize it I thought, why not? So I talked to the principle, talked to the Athletic Director, and started talking to students and posting flyers everywhere. We had our first game last week in a covered, though not heated or air conditioned, sports complex across from the school that was, according to the scoreboard, 0 degrees Celsius. A cold day for frisbee, but fun nonetheless. Yesterday we had even more students, more fun, and though it was fiercely competitive, we realized afterward that none of us had bothered to keep score. What an awesome way to enjoy a sport and have fun! I may have inadvertantly thrown a frisbee hard enough to cut a kid that got in the way of it reaching its intended target though. Talk about casualties, yeah?
A Question, in closing. Can anyone be moral? I'll write more on this next week, but please give me your thoughts in the comments as it is a topic I want to explore in depth. Now, I did not post a Song of the Week last week so this will serve as a Song of the Day instead.
Kurt Vile
Ghost Town
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