Lots of times I don't want to write anymore, but what good is any story if you're just reading/writing about and such an uneventful life? The events in my life, maybe I will enjoy more tomorrow, but today I am really really tired.
I had my second interview at the Somalian night school. It went fine, I guess. I was nervous, but it was more nervous energy from what is going on with our finances than the job interview. So, in that sense, I was able to enjoy teaching a little bit more - it was a bit of a break from my real life. I didn't really even mind that five people were observing me - they were all pretty nice people. I taught the high schoolers a middle school level lesson. I can't help it. I researched a lot of fun ELL lessons, but I decided to stick with what I knew. My students were pretty unresponsive. I couldn't read whether they were uninterested, annoyed, or just depressed. I went ahead and pushed a few to respond, and most did - semi-positively - but it was like pulling teeth. I tried the wait technique . . . where you simply wait as a teacher until its so uncomfortable that a student, out of embarrassment, feels they have to say something. It doesn't always work, in fact, it can work in the reverse - but I'm pretty patient. In the end, I just picked up student papers and read different lines from their papers, or pushed someone to share what he or she read. Maybe I was too brazen, but I didn't want to do all the thinking up front.
I'm not sure what my observer's response was - I hardly even glanced at them other than to give each copies of worksheets I was handing out. In my summary, when I was checking for understanding, I'm not convinced the students learned a thing . . .
The lesson I was teaching was about how visualization encourages reading comprehension, and we were practicing identifying sensory detail - words that invoked sight, smell, taste, touch, or sound. I read the short story "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros - a great heartbreaking short story about a girl on her eleventh birthday who doesn't really feel eleven, but feels sometimes three and sometimes five. She is in school and humiliated by teacher and wishes she was "one hundred and two" . . . the imagery is powerful, but I'm not sure the students were impressed - we'll see what the faculty says. They'll tell me tomorrow.
In the mean time, I'm substituting tomorrow.
And, in the mean time, the Coop decided to not vote on my request for an extension on the sub-leasing of my unit because the by-laws only allowed for one year - thus their vote was to not vote - their intention meaning that I cannot continue to sub-lease our apartment. They wouldn't even entertain my petition as the group was busy arguing about charging extra fees for this and that.
Tolga and I have some decisions to make, but right now I have a stomach ache and I'm really really tired.
I look forward to the day we can look back on this and say, "wow, that was hard, but we made it."
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