A normal day

I've been extremely busy so far at institute, which has been awesome, but it's also meant I've done a really poor job of keeping in touch with everyone from back home.


Anyways, I figured people might be interested in what I do in an average day.

7:20 Get up, do morning necessities, swing by dining hall to grab food before getting to the classroom at 7:45
7:45 Students start showing up around this time, which means I have to be in the classroom. I normally spend this time eating my breakfast, addressing any questions that students have, and reviewing my lesson plan for the day.

8:30--9:10 Class. I'm teaching an 8th grade class (English) to about 16 students. Right now we just finished up discussing the differences between inexact and exact adverbs of frequency (i.e. I usually do something, or I do something twice a week).

9:10 Run down to the elementary school. When I got there today there were around 70 kids in the classroom. The teacher who teaches the class before had combined their class with another one so that both could practice their greetings, and it was disastrous. The Chinese of these two other fellows isn't very strong, so I got to restore order and calm. I felt pretty dictatorial and powerful afterwards.

10--Yell at kids who are running in the hallways.

10:10-10:50 Class. I also teach a 5th grade phonics class, so today we learned how to say the short vowels o, and e (think odd and egg) and d. They got it pretty well, which is good because tomorrow we're going to read our first book. It's pretty exciting! The kids are starting to have English accents because of how I stress the vowels to them, it's pretty cute.

11--Yell at kids who are going too close to the river or who are running in the hallways.

11:10 Grab lunch with people on the way back to campus.

12: See a cow running down the street. Shortly thereafter see two men on a motorcycle chasing said cow.

12:10 Try to sneak a 30 minute power-nap in. See a cockroach on the inside of the top of my mosquito netting. Dive desperately out of bed taking my pink mosquito netting with me. Decide napping isn't going to happen. Take a bucket shower, and then start doing laundry (in the same bucket).

1:00 Group meeting with our team leader. Talked about time management. I really wanted to be working on my lesson plans the entire time because that would have really been the best use of my time.

2:00 Go to print shop to print out giant copy of "Get the Pets"--the book we're going to be reading in phonics class. Chill with an old Chinese guy and his dog while my stuff is printing. He had a really strong accent, but we managed to have a conversation which was pretty cool.

2:20 Spend time writing lesson plans. I needed to be done with the lesson plans for Monday through Wednesday by tonight for both my classes .

3:30--5:00 Lesson on how to teach phonics. Pretty interesting, but I'm still of the opinion that we probably should have had the lesson before we started actually teaching phonics.

5:00 Lesson plan some more.

6:15 Grab dinner with some friends at this local restaurant that we like. Like pretty much every conversation here, we ended up talking about teaching, our students, our placements, and food we miss. For once, strangely, we didn't end up talking about bathroom issues.

7:00 Write lesson plans.

9:00 Now, taking a break to write a blog.

9:30--2:00 Finish writing lesson plans. Write guided notes and assessments for tomorrow. Print stuff out. If time, work on posters and trackers for class.

Sleep