Day 64

March 4, 2010

 

Day 64:

 

 

            I guest taught at Eric’s class today. Edie and I were supposed to go down there but Edie had several copies to make and couldn’t make it to Delap Elementary, where Eric teaches. He teaches 6^th grade. I know a lot of his students because we see them everywhere when we drive around Majuro. One student in particular, Bobson. Every time we drive through Small Island, we see Bobson. He’s even shown up at the trailer on occasion.

            He starts his class by doing a series of drum patterns on the desks with the kids; it’s a series of fist pounds and claps. They went through the five patterns that they know. It was great to se how he energizes his class. I don’t do anything like that at all with my kids. Granted he is teaching elementary school, but still. So after that I tried to teach the class how to do a new drum pattern, except the one I had in mind was a three part beat. So I broke the class up into threes and tried to teach them the new pattern. It was an epic fail. It was the beat that the drumline used to play outside the football locker room right before we run out  before kickoff. That beat gets me hype even still whenever I hear it. In my head, it sounded so good with a series of 12 year olds banging on their desks. Too bad that didn’t work out. I ended up making up a simpler beat, still in three parts, that the kids picked up.

            After that I taught them a lesson that I had given to my kids earlier in the quarter about parts of a sentence. I taught them about subject, contraction, conjunction. They already knew about verbs and adjectives. I used one of the pages from the review packet as a handout for the class. The kids did really well. I was thoroughly impressed by the study habits of these kids. It was clear to me that Eric has emphasized note taking and referring to those notes. I have to force my kids to have their notebooks open for worksheets and these kids had their notebook on one half of their desk and the worksheet on the other and referred to their notes for each question. I wish my kids could have had Eric as a teacher before they came to my class.

            After that I took some questions from the class about my city, Elani, my family, if I had any kids, if I was married, etc. The normal. So then I left and came back to the school. It was when I got to the middle school that I realized that the scheduled power outage was today. I was planning to finish the copies of my review packet for the kids and pass back their tests. I couldn’t do that though.  I ended up reading some more Obama before class. So I passed back the tests to the kids. They did so poorly on the test that I decided to let them do test corrections for half the credit back. They spent the day doing that. I feel like it was a breakthrough for me because some of the kids finally understood that the things that I write on the board, things that they write in their notebooks, directly relates to the things on the test. It took me up to ten minutes for some, but the finally started realizing that if they know their notes then they will do better on the tests. The scores weren’t great, but I feel like it was a success.

            After class I went to the trailer to read. The high schoolers were taking a college placement exam that day and so they got out at 1. So play practice started shortly thereafter. The test started close to an hour late and so did play rehearsal. I stayed for the whole rehearsal. The power didn’t come back on until 6:45. It was supposed to come on at 5. The rest of the night I worked on music and watched Family Guy.