Yeah, that's exactly what my students said this morning when they had to come to school even though it's Easter vacation period.
Hey, it's not my fault they're in a high performance football program and are required to stay on until their coaches set them free. I don't even know if they are actually going to have any free days; but that's not for me to decide.
Do you actually think I wanted to come in on Saturday??? Of course not but I'm always here, aren't I??? I'm sure Maryk, Carlos and Adriana could use some R&R. Well, at least we won't have to come to class for two weeks and we can all use this time for "school madness detox". I might need more than two weeks, though.
:) GLB
Wednesday 7 November 2012
Teacher's helper can be a real pain in the butt...
If you've ever had one of these kids in your class you'll understand.
English pronunciation is a difficult part of teaching. Usually kids come in with whatever they learned when they were younger and it seems they didn't get much help from their teachers. I mean, it's a bit frustrating when their pronunciation of 'yes' comes out as 'jesssss"; or this funny way of adding 'ation' to the end of any word in spanish, which in their opinion, is spoken English.
Such is the case of Andres. Whenever a student asked me the ever present "how do you say such and such word in English, teacher?????" Andres would come to the rescue with one of his magical words ending in 'ation'. Needless to say, this resulted in greater confusion for his classmate and everyone else suppressing laughter unsuccessfully. He really meant well. Andres had been a student at the American School his whole life, so he figured he could be my helper and basically answer his friends' questions because 'he knew the word and they didn't'.
So every day of that semester I had to put up with all kinds of nonsense from Andres...frankly there were days when I laughed out loud, I just couldn't help it. Take for example, how do you say 'engrapadora' in English, teacherrrr???? (engrapadora is the word in spanish for stapler. Before I could say it, Andres would answer 'engrapadoration' without missing a beat. So we had a great number of these popping out from Andres at all times.
I did get back at him one day (sometimes you really wish you could make the kid experience some of the annoyance he causes).
Andres himself had a "how do you say such and such word in English??" question for me. It was too good not to take adventage of. Andres wanted to know how to say "cuadro" in English. He meant portrait or painting and I knew that but I answered "for you, it's 'quadration'". After two seconds the whole group was laughing (I was too) and Andres just blinked and frowned. I let him process that while the rest of the group finished their writing test.
English pronunciation is a difficult part of teaching. Usually kids come in with whatever they learned when they were younger and it seems they didn't get much help from their teachers. I mean, it's a bit frustrating when their pronunciation of 'yes' comes out as 'jesssss"; or this funny way of adding 'ation' to the end of any word in spanish, which in their opinion, is spoken English.
Such is the case of Andres. Whenever a student asked me the ever present "how do you say such and such word in English, teacher?????" Andres would come to the rescue with one of his magical words ending in 'ation'. Needless to say, this resulted in greater confusion for his classmate and everyone else suppressing laughter unsuccessfully. He really meant well. Andres had been a student at the American School his whole life, so he figured he could be my helper and basically answer his friends' questions because 'he knew the word and they didn't'.
So every day of that semester I had to put up with all kinds of nonsense from Andres...frankly there were days when I laughed out loud, I just couldn't help it. Take for example, how do you say 'engrapadora' in English, teacherrrr???? (engrapadora is the word in spanish for stapler. Before I could say it, Andres would answer 'engrapadoration' without missing a beat. So we had a great number of these popping out from Andres at all times.
I did get back at him one day (sometimes you really wish you could make the kid experience some of the annoyance he causes).
Andres himself had a "how do you say such and such word in English??" question for me. It was too good not to take adventage of. Andres wanted to know how to say "cuadro" in English. He meant portrait or painting and I knew that but I answered "for you, it's 'quadration'". After two seconds the whole group was laughing (I was too) and Andres just blinked and frowned. I let him process that while the rest of the group finished their writing test.
Hi again. Not been here in a long time. My life has been going around in circles and has been changing a lot in the past two years.
For starters, I moved to a different part of town. Got a new job. Left it. got another one and left that one too. Haven't you ever felt like you just don't fit in?
Anyway, I am working with kids again and not with annoying middle school brats or with high school good-for-nothings who don't give a rat's ass about school. I have 6th graders. It really is such a relief. These kids work better than the older ones and have a lot more enthusiasm and self-respect too.
For now this is enough for me.
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