New School Year – Day 19

Here’s what wore me out with first-graders today: incessant questions, interruptions, and tattling.
Between the bathroom requests, the unasked-for-information about how to run the day and the class,
and especially any rewards or privileges, and the constant “he bumped me, she stepped on my
book, he hit me and wouldn’t apologize – did not – did too” it just wears me down to where it’s
really hard to care about the next ow-y finger or cut-into-line, and all I really want is for everyone
to sit still in one place and be quiet for a while.

Today I was at the Japanese Immersion school in Livonia once again. Overall, it wasn’t too bad –
just – occasionally intense. They actually did pretty well during actual lessons – it was more difficult
during the transitions – set-up, clean-up, walking here and there.

Today was the “Fun Run” for an hour and it was  nice to be outside. I think that after about ten minutes
of circling the cones in the field, some of the kids caught on to the fact that this wasn’t particularly
“fun”. It was also rather cold and when the sno-cone truck pulled up and the kids all waited in line
for something that made them feel even colder – well, it was fun for them but not 100% pleasant.

As for me, I have never seen the thrill of sno-cones – a bunch of ice with too-sweet syrupy kool-aid
stuff on it. The kids each had a HUGE one with a straw with a teeny spoon-like thing on the end of
it. Took forever to eat it and I finally made some kids throw the last of theirs out so we could go in.
SOME teachers took theirs into their classrooms, but the way this group wasn’t listening well –
no thanx – I couldn’t face the mess.

I had  a few breaks in the day and so I read my chapter in my HTML5-CSS3 textbook. It was surreal
to be sitting there studying this “language” while the other teacher and all the students were speaking
Japanese all around me. Weird….