What I learned at institute...

As I continue my efforts to try to catch up, I realized I have left out a few things. So...

**I passed the Texas high school graduation test, the THEA, though I didn't get a perfect score on my essay somehow. Apparenly a 10-minute, 5-paragraph essay is only worth 7 out of 8. It was worth the extra few minutes of nap time on test day, though.

**I also passed the short bilingual test we were required to take, but we have a bigger one coming up.

All right, I can move on to explaining something else I left out:

Institute learning

I know way more now than I did when I started institute. I have a higher opinion now of institute than I did when I was there (when it was sheer torture) and I almost (though not quite) understand why people go back to be CMAs and so forth.

This additional respect for what we did at institute has not extended so far to giving "generosity of spirit" (as we would say) to other things I am told to do, such as orientation, but more on that later.

It was, mostly, worth it in the end. There are things that could have gone better. I would have had a way better summer had I bought into it myself, but I didn't because the unit plans provided for us were not on the correct page for our students. My students were, in retrospect, quite underinvested.

But of course, I'm not sad to leave behind the condemned Moody Hall, or RFoC, or anything else about U of H...

A week off!

Yes, I received an awesome week off, though I did not get such valuable things done such as registering my car (since I was missing some documentation). I did get a desk and a bookcase from IKEA, a store which I do not wish to see again, at least for another two years. My room is set up, kind of.

Next time around... my complaints about "orientation," as well as my developing vision for the coming year!

I am a horrible blogger so far

Well, it's certainly been a while, a testament to what I went through at institute and what sort of break I needed. That said, yes, I am still alive, and doing much better.

So... what happened during the last 10 days of institute when I didn't write anything? A lot, I guess... the end of school was really sad... the kids drew pictures about how they would miss me and all that. Did they learn? They certainly learned something. A lot of them were way better at English than when they started, and it was really cool on the last day when one of them (who was a constant mumbler in both English and Spanish) finally started talking to me in understandable English phrases. A lot of them still had trouble distinguishing "ch" and "sh", and nobody except one or two could really write good English sentences, but they did improve and clearly had the desire to keep going.

I can't help but think of the ones that we didn't impact as much as we would have liked. One kid who was a perpetual discipline problem and actually got suspended from summer school... but he scored rock bottom on his real tests (the ones he took before we came), in Spanish reading as well as ESL, and I can't help but think it's that lack of success that prevented him from engaging at all. We had another student who was just always distracted, always fidgeting, and it will stick in my mind the one morning we were doing phonics as a class--I tried to go over and help him, and I just remember I would point to a letter and ask him "what sound does this make?", then when he just stared, "¿qué sonido tiene esta letra?"... and he still just stared. I felt rather helpless because I didn't have the time to help him individually, but he was such an engaged kid when you could deal with him and not speak over his head. It is those kinds of cases I will have to think about how to address, as well as the ones who are ahead of the pack.

But yes, they learned some other things too... when I brought my animal slideshow they all loved it, and some of them yelled "a larva! a pupa!" They liked the laptop too, of course, and I told them they'd need to graduate from college too to get one. I showed them pictures of my school and they all wanted go to there, at least for a day, and they loved some of the animals from the homeland that I showed them. They got so excited when we played "a verb is something you can do," and they understood and (I hope) retained what a verb was, after so many attempts! My idea, which was a joke, that "a noun is something you can poke" actually proved successful at getting some kids to learn too...

So yes, it was sad to leave the summer kids, although I'll never be mistaken for a first grade teacher. We had a pretty good sendoff speech from one of the other 2006 corps members, though I'm sure he'd given pretty much the same speech before. It was also sad to say goodbye to all the CMs from other regions, but I certainly didn't mind leaving Moody for my own new apartment...

I'll update more on the week off and the beginning of "orientation" (bleh) soon. Hope everyone is doing well, and feel free to call or email, I want to stay in touch with everyone :)

Ready to teach? Who knows...

I know it's been a while since I last wrote on here... things are so busy that there isn't too much time to update everyone on what's going on, and "three times a week" is definitely more like "three times a month."

Good news first. There's only a little over a week left in this endurance test, and I think everyone will be much better off for it. It's a really rough ride and it's led most people here pretty close to breakdowns if not directly to it. That said, the worst is over. Nobody need worry about me and thank you to those of you who have been supportive.

The difficult... I don't relate to first graders and don't really care to. I'm not motivated because I don't see any goals or reason for achievement. I think I've described all this before. Writing engaging lesson plans for first graders is remarkably difficult. I could keep an entire college lecture interested, I'm pretty sure, but a class of first graders is pretty much impossible for me. And I don't really see it getting that much better. Yeah, it's summer, and I have no idea if they know the material, and I only see them for an hour a day, and there's a language barrier... but none of that really makes it less of a downer to not be able to get the kids interested.

Other events... I went out to an Asian karaoke bar here in Houston where everything was written in Korean (I think)... for the Fourth, saw the fireworks which were pretty big... managed to get a new spare tire... the few bits and pieces of time I have outside of institute are fun and I do like this city, except the roads.

Unfortunately there's still much to be done tonight, so I have to go, but I promise to try to update everyone again soon...