The daily grind

School is still going ok but the classes are over-populated, excessively noisy and at times out of control. The intercom continues to blurt out messages from the principal several times a day, often calling a teacher out of a classroom to see him and leaving the class unattended...a terrible waste of the children's time.

Due to the large class sizes, individual children don't get the tailored attention that they need in order to learn and address the gaps in their knowledge. Children come up to me and hug me whenever I'm walking around the school and I think this is down to appreciation of my attention as well as general friendliness.

On Monday I had a whole class for a literacy test they had to do. I have found that over the last week I have become much more stern as a teacher and more openly irritated with the children, but it seems to work as long as you don't lose your cool.

I'm also continuing to help with P.T. (that's Physical Training to us Brits) lessons and after school football. I got snapped today playing a fun game called 'Land Water' with a class. The idea is that you stand outside a line on the land, and in front of the line on water. The children have to listen to what I say and follow the instruction i.e. step onto land when I say 'land' and on water when I say 'water'. My body does different things, however, and I try to trick them by standing on water when I have actually said 'land'. The children have to listen and follow the verbal instruction and not the physical one as the game speeds up. Does that make sense?! Anyway, if I catch their mistakes I point at them, they are out of the game and they have to sit in the middle of the water. The winner is the last child standing:





I also regularly get dragged into I.T. lessons when I'm using the internet. Because the computers were donated to the school, they are all old and slow, with error messages appearing all the time while the children try to play learning games on them. The games program itself is prone to crashes and half of the lesson time is spent wandering around restarting the program for them.

Thank you for all of your emails and messages. Sorry if I have not replied to them all, I'm quite busy and the blog takes ages to do as the internet is so slow here at the school. Thanks for the support for the beard...my beard is very humbled.