i wear my glasses when i teach cause it makes me look like a teacher

So if I haven't already told you about how my first day of school went, you might be curious.

Well, it started with me waking up at 7am and realizing I hadn't turned my alarm clock on. Thank god I woke up early, cause I have a feeling it would have been really poor form to sleep through the morning of the first day of school.

So classes didn't start until 10:35, and on Fridays I only have class from 1:10 to 2:10. I got to my office, printed out the two handouts I had prepared, and made copies. I was pretty nervous about running out of things to do during the hour-long period, so I asked my group leader if he thought I should assign homework or anything. He handed me a placement test to give my kids, and told me that if they couldn't answer any of the questions, they shouldn't be in my class. So I was totally nervous, sweating, went to the cafeteria for lunch, and then we all sat in the office until it was time to go down to class.

I walked into my classroom, and all the kids were already there. I guess I probably should have waited until the bell rang to start class, but I was pretty nervous and realized that I hadn't brought any white board markers with me, so I couldn't write my name on the board. Whatever. I passed out the first two handouts, introduced myself, and had them fill out the survey thing for 10 minutes. I immediately noticed that several of the 19 students in my class had electronic dictionaries to look up words...and that makes me sort of uncomfortable. I mean I was told that a lot of them would need electronic dictionaries, but I still sort of hoped that they'd be slightly more proficient than that. Anyway. One of my students, whose English name is Thumblina (yes, that's right, THUMBLINA) had to ask me how to spell "Madagascar" cause I guess that was her favorite movie. When I spelled it for her and she wrote it down, she looked at it and said "...wow." It was cute. I told them some information about myself, including answers to the questions that I had asked them on the sheet...but I sort of lied. I knew they probably would have no idea what "Forrest Gump" was, so I told them my favorite movie was the Lion King. Some of the boys groaned.

So we went over the rules for the bulk of the class, and I kept asking if any of them had questions and really really wanted them to ask me some, but I only got like 2. I made each of them read one line from the rules sheet, so I could see just how bad some of them were at reading. I don't think they loved the idea of reading out loud, but I tried to make it less embarrassing by making everyone do it. When we were done with the rules, I passed out the placement test and had them do that for 15 minutes...I haven't had a chance to look over it yet, but I have a feeling that they probably didn't do all that well on it considering the way they answered the questions on the student survey. I asked "Who is your favorite music group?" and about half the class answered "no." hmmm...

So when I told them time was up, we still had like 10 minutes left in class....so I went around the room and made each of them read one sentence from the story on the test. Some of them are pretty good readers, but some of the others...oh man. It's going to be a struggle. One girl named Ruby started talking to me in Chinese and another girl had to translate for her. The only word she said that I recognized was lao tze (i think that's how you spell it), which means 'teacher.'

When class ended, I felt really good. I told the kids I didn't mind being called 'teacher,' so on their way out, a bunch of them either said "See you next week, teacher" or "Goodbye, Miss Stephanie." It was so cute. One of the kids, Charles (who I think is either an over-achiever or a horrible student, i'm not sure...), came up to me when almost everyone was gone and said "Miss Stephanie...do you know the music group ABBA?" and it took me a second to understand what he was saying...he has sort of a lisp...but when I told him that I did know ABBA and that they're 'really good,' he got really excited and told me about how his mom really loves them but she says that they're too old to sing anymore. I finally had to cut off the interaction, but it was adorable and made me really happy. After talking to some of the other teachers, I have the feeling that my kids were pretty well-behaved. I think it went really well.

but....I feel like itw as just practice. The real test is how I make it through all of my classes this upcoming week. I haven't met with any of my groups yet, so we don't have anything actually planned out yet. And I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with my music class for an hour and ten minutes on Thursday... ideas? let me know. it's gonna be a busy weekend...

today i miss ann arbor SO MUCH. go blue.