First Year Teaching Placement: Day Five

           Thank god it's Friday! It's finally the end of the week and I am looking forward to the weekend and sleeping in, mostly sleeping in. So today was a special day because we had a woodwork workshop and it was quite cool. The students were responsible for creating these wooden helicopters which was controlled by a lever that made the propellers spin, it looked really complicated and all but it was really easy to make actually. The students really enjoyed making these funny wooden helicopters and it was fun to supervise and help out all the munchkins. After the event, the man who hosted the workshop was like "my company is always looking to hire students, so here's my business card" and I was like whoa that's cool, actually being recognized for my work. But to be honest, I'm not going to do it because I don't want to do that kind of work and it does not seem enjoyable at all, so thanks but no thanks.

          Now it was lunch and there were no staff meetings so I got to eat with all the teachers again, and now it's gotten a lot more comfortable. I normally just listen to the teachers talk, mostly because I have no idea what they're talking about but I find their knowledge and experience quite enlightening. It's pretty awesome hearing what they have to say because they are (for the most part) really passionate about their jobs and strive to help students all the time, and I find it quite inspiring.
         After lunch it was measurement, where the kids continued to learn about how to tell time and it was okay. The teacher who taught it was alright, she could have been more understanding, accommodating and nicer to the students, but that was okay. I helped the students having trouble figure out the rest of the answers to their problems so that was good.
        Last period, we painted our helicopters that we made which was a fun but crazy arts and crafts afternoon. I literally made a random gradient of purple on my helicopter propeller then all the girls were like "Miss. Zhang can you do that for me pleeeeease." And being me, I was like fine okay. So I painted like several gradients for these girls. Who knew having some sort of artistic side would be so useful as an elementary school teacher. I literally have drawn, painted, and created so many things because of my ability to do art, weird huh? So that basically led the end of the day, it was a great end to my first week of my teaching placement. Crazy, but very valuable experience. I'm glad I blogged about it everyday, although it takes up quite a bit of time and I needed to incorporate it into my routine but it's okay. Also, waking up at 6:30 has become a lot more bearable now, it's not as hard as it was on Monday.

Until next time!
Suzy Zhang