11/15: I found this sitting in my drafts... Oops! This isn't finished, but I have no memory of what else happened on this day or the following two days leading up to vacation, sooo, I'll just post it as-is.
Wednesday 10/19
Have I mentioned how bad my Wednesday morning class is? I was super excited because today I got to do a lesson on Halloween, and I even wore a Halloween sweater. I thought that maybe they would at least be a little interested in this topic... But nope. Just like the last two weeks, they never stopped talking ONCE. Their teacher screamed at them constantly, but it never had any effect. These kids just do not care. I used the method of going around the room and making every student read one word off the board and then making the whole class repeat after me, so at least I was able to get them to say the Halloween vocab words I was teaching, but the talking in-between these words was nonstop. To make matters worse... Let me back up a little. Over the weekend, the teacher sent me a Halloween word search she had for the kids, and asked me to do a lesson based on the words in the word bank. So, I made a PowerPoint introducing all of those words. After I finished the presentation, I passed around the word search she had printed out.... and it was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the one she'd sent me. I even casually said, "Oh, um, this one has a lot more words than the one you sent me," and all she had to say about that was, "Yeah." So clearly she didn't even care that I had just done an entire lesson on vocabulary words that weren't even on the students' worksheet. I'm sure the kids didn't notice or care, but I was still really frustrated. Also, the word search she ended up giving them had bizarre words like "specter" and "wraith." Why teach 13-year-olds that barely know how to introduce themselves in English the word "wraith"? I didn't even know what a wraith was until I watched What We Do In The Shadows (the TV show, not the movie, although that is one of my favorite movies of all time). At the beginning of the lesson, I told the kids I would put on Halloween music if they were good; they obviously were NOT good, but I wanted to put Halloween music on anyway while they worked on their word searches, not because they deserved it but for my own sanity—something fun to drown out their incessant yapping. But their teacher told me not to because they were bad and I shouldn't reward them at all. Which is fair, but I wanted Halloween music. :( I tried to do the word search myself, but I suck at word searches so I didn't get very far. I had told the teacher that I'm going to Barcelona during next week's vacation, so she brought me an old guidebook and told me I could keep it because she's never going back there. I'll look through it later today.
I had my weekly lunch with B and Zlata today.
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