It's not easy

Tuesday 11^th October

I’ve been ill since the president’s bash.  Many of us are putting our bad throats and colds down to being made to sit outside in the fresh air for too long but for every year I have been in teaching, other than last year, 3 weeks into the school term I have lost my voice and had a bad cold.  All those germy kids.

Two funny little things.  On Thursday, I nipped out of my year 1 class to get a drink of water from the staffroom.  “Sit down” I was forced to sit down and eat aubergine cooked in garlic and parsley and cheese bread (Khachapuri) and home-made wine.  They all chat and say “tchame tchame” and I give in and eat and drink.  Then they send me home when they find out that Martin is in bed as I should be at home to look after him.

The next day Juliet says that I have to go into her year 7 class as they are asking for me and they want to make a supra (feast) for me.  So I go in and they have bought some cola, biscuits and sweets and we sit round a couple of tables and sing songs in English and Georgian.  Juliet went and got some more wine and we drank that while the kids stuck with cola.  We had an attempt at Wink Murder but no-one understood that the person I whispered “yes” to was the murderer and so no-one did any winking.

However later that day I was absolutely furious.  I said before, that unusually for schools,  in my school the lower classes come in at 2 until 5:30 which means that I have limited opportunity to run any after school English classes for the upper school and that particularly the lazy boys in these classes are the ones I have  a heart for and want to give them an opportunity to catch up so that they can participate in lessons.  Our contract states that we are to work with grades 1 to 6 and if we want to we can work with other classes.  I was hoping that I could skip a couple of the lower grade classes so that I could run after school classes and also teach the teachers.  I thought that I had agreed with Juliet to do this but either way she was insisting that I went to her class and if the students do turn up to my after school class someone would fetch me.  I wasn’t happy about this at all but felt I had no choice and went into the lesson.  She just turned this over to me without any planning or discussion and said she wanted me to teach the lesson according to the book.  The task in the book was to colour in tins of paint according to what was written on it.  This is not a lesson ok, This is an activity.  Somehow she was hoping that I would turn it into some exciting lesson.  Well she could stuff off – I am not a performing monkey.

 I had been singing all day in the other classes (One finger and thumb keep moving – thanks Janice) and my voice had almost given up (I lost it completely the next day) and I knew that she wouldn’t have called me in if it was HER students that were due in for after school club.  Plus she had actually  SENT ME HOME the previous day so I missed the lesson with this class because MARTIN was ill in bed and I should look after him. 

She could see I wasn’t my usual co-operative self and so asked me if I had “The toy” and then gave it to a good student who threw it around asking each person “What is your name?”   The thing is, she missed the point of the whole alien ball throwing thing.  She thinks it’s just about making the children laugh which is does do (it has a bright light in it as well)  It is an important tool for questioning as students have to be alert and waiting as they don’t know who is going to be next, the teacher adjusts the question according to the ability of the student, and you can throw it back to the same student 2 or 3 times to get a deeper response to a question or to check out other pronunciation etc.

It just highlights the reality of my situation here.  It’s me who isn’t getting it. It is me who has to adapt.  So I went home, redid my timetable so that I am in all the lessons from 1 to 6 and tried to think of another way to work with the older students without overworking myself.