Sweet Sing

On Wednesday I woke up at ghastly o'clock and was on a bus with 40 ten year olds by 5 am. There's only one thing in my world that could induce me to willfully engage this insanity. Singapore.

The purpose of our field trip was a visit to the Australian International School of Singapore for their PYP exhibition. It opened with 37 students 17 years ago and has grown exponentially to a population of over 2,000 students. They have a swimming pool. They have a bouncing tent and face painting at lunch. I thought it was paradise and was worried my students would be envious but it turns out they prefer their leaky school with buckling floors. "I'm glad I don't go to school here. So far to they have to walk to the canteen!"

Personally I'd walk half a day to get a their cafeteria where, besides pizza and spaghetti, they serve a green garden salad (that's right people. Lettuce!) with a lip smacking vinaigrette dressing, fruit bowls and yogurt. Heaven!

From there we were off to the sixteen story Singapore public library which I was in awe of.

It wasn't exactly the kids' idea of fun but I managed to get them curious about the sculptures (Look kids, art you can touch! I don't think it's wood, any other guesses?) and an exhibit on Arab immigration to Asia (Find the display that teaches you how to build a mud house. Who can find the giant incense burner?).

But the highlight for all of us was the Science center. Iron pellets that danced to music (look Kleenex Kid electromagnetic fields!) optical illusions (Hey! It's Ibu's head on a platter) agriculture (Ms! come watch the chickens hatching!) genetics (Hey guys, remember when we talked about Frankenfoods?) and fire tornadoes.

I really didn't want to leave, and almost didn't have to when one of my student's lost his boarding pass for the ferry. But, after retracing his steps and digging through the garbage, he found it again and the whole fiasco worked out well for me because by the time we made it to the terminal all the kids were already boarded and I was able to quickly duck into the duty free to buy some wine.

On the ferry, the kids ate too much junk food (apparently, though not surprisingly, Singapore McDonald's has much better food than Batam McDonald's), we played with the toys we bought at the overpriced Science center souvenir shop and played "I'm going on a trip and I'm bringing ..."

Only a few more weeks and I'm going on a trip and I'm bringing my plane ticket, my backpack and a digital camera in case I see komodo dragons!

Hapless or Hopeless: Lessons in Learning

As much as I love teaching I am having a difficult time with my coordinator and teaching partners. The national teacher doesn't take kindly to the chaos my kids create when they're, well, creating nor the amount of scrap stationary I allow them to fold into airplanes and ninja stars and players for a game they invented that's sort of like paper fussball.  The Phillipino ex-pat just feels threatened by me and I sort of feel sorry for her because I can tell she's stressed but considering the BS she pulls I mostly just try not to scream at her, despite the headmaster's encouragement that I do so.

I have not had any of the promised training in the school's teaching approach but was told I was expected to plan our upcoming unit. I spent all of last weekend working on an exciting unit on communication, then was told, triumphantly, in a meeting on Monday it was all wrong, I couldn't teach any of it blah blah. Fortunately the headmaster stumbled on our meeting and saved me by staying and, after listening to my pitch, siding with me on the matter. The coordinator said she'd think about it but hasn't gotten back to me.

I can't say I'm winning a lot of allies either when I slap together an impromptu lesson on tenses for my students who can't seem to grasp the concept of time. In what has so far proven to be a vain attempt to help them improve verb conjugation, I downloaded a task from the internet wherein I was to read my students a story, while they looked at badly drawn pictures, and they were to identify the past tense verbs in it. I skimmed the story during my prep time but didn't have time to read the whole thing because of an "emergency" counselling matter I had to deal with.

When I got to class I began to confidently, and with great theatrics, read aloud the story of how a bird came and sat on "my" teacup then began to talk. Just as I was exclaiming with great gusto, "Oh my god!" exactly as it was written on the page, the classroom door opened and in walked the coordinator with the religion teacher. A crashing silence filled the room as they stood stunned in the doorway. I'm guessing that didn't really win me over to anyone's good books but I can't imagine I'll ever again use material in a class that I haven't fully reviewed. Lesson learned.

On Friday there was  a particularly violent storm, possibly the outer edges of a typhoon that was threatening Singapore, and, at some point between fourth and fifth period my classroom floor buckled. This was both enthralling and exciting for my students. Despite my strict instructions to stay away from it, when I returned from trying and failing to find someone to come and inspect it, the students had taped cautionary signs all along the floor fault including this one:

Pregnant floor! indeed.

Of course yesterday was ASA (After School Activities) and I am in charge of, you guessed it, English Club. Unfortunately last week was Parent Teacher Conferences and the kids missed their club so we had to get reacquainted. I had just started them on a game where I put up random letters and they have to make as many words as they can from the letters when there was a knock on my door. It was the coordinator with the Mother of one of my students who didn't come last week at any of the times she said she would. She happens to own the school so I guess that's her prerogative but I had a classroom full of students from Grades 2-5.

"No problem, I supervise students you talk," the coordinator said.

But no, the owner needed a translator.

I hadn't put nearly enough letters on the board to keep the kids occupied for the length of a meeting. Just as we were finally wrapping up our meeting, in walked the father of another of my students, a student with problems, who also hadn't bothered to show last week, along with his three of his children. Oblivious to the situation, they insisted on talking to me NOW.

"Um, one second," I pantomimed a please wait and ran to the board to write a new set of letters for my club.

Ten minutes later, as the door closed behind the father and his interpreting entourage, one of the Grade 4's piped up, "Ms., there's a bad word on the board." I turned to read the letters on the board:

F, U, D, C, K, O, A, L

I guess not all of Freud's theories were wrong.

A la Mode

I am quickly becoming known among my students as the teacher with mottoes and sixty second life lesson lectures. It started with:

Listen, when it's time to listen
Work, when it's time to work
Play when it's time to play.

Their behaviour has actually improved a lot in just a week so, who knows, maybe it's working.

Tuesdays are bad days for us. We have no less than five, count 'em five, 45 minute math lessons on Tuesday and most of what I'm teaching them I've not used since I was their age. So yesterday we learned  tried to learn about the median and mode but halfway through the lesson I started losing them. I moved the Wee One from a table with his friends to a desk at the board beside me in a vain attempt to curb the talking and playing.

I resumed explaining all about how the mode is the most frequently occurring number in a data set but the noise levels began rising and after 30 seconds of me trying to be noticed above the din I just yelled.

Everything stopped and, quietly, I began to speak, "Shall I tell you a secret about life?"

There were wide eyed stares and head nods.

"You get out of it what you put into it. You can show up here to school and do nothing. Just put in time-don't finish or bring your homework, don't listen to the lessons, don't do your work, talk and play through everything. But, if you do, don't expect to get anything out of it. If you put nothing into it, nothing is what you will get back. Because what is zero plus zero?"

The Wee One's hand shot up into the air.

"Yes?"

"A mode!"

Sure, they always have an answer for the rhetorical questions...

Dr. Seuss Does Sympathy

The teacher who was supposed to mentor me got called back home for a family emergency last Monday so I've taken her place and just been winging it in her absence. Today I had to tell the class that their teacher's father passed away yesterday and, in their spare moments, they should consider making condolence cards. This one really stuck out:

Welcome back
Have a snack
It's too bad
About your Dad.

I sent it back for a rewrite but, in keeping with my positive teaching philosophy, I did give kudos for the rhyme scheme.

Bahasa Indonesia Word of the Day:  jodho= soul mate