continued story time

My classes all went really well today, even my class of 6-year olds, which I was dreading. I can't tell you how excited I am about that. What a relief! They still crawled all over me, offering me a piece of candy, tattling to me in Vietnamese (futile), showing me the sentance they wrote, wanting me to get the gum out of their clothes... But I'm learning that it's not impossible; I really can be their teacher.

I feel like I did little but yell at them to be quiet last Saturday, and I even resorted to banging on the white board to get their attention. But when I walked in the classroom this morning, I was greeted by huge grins and shouts of, "Hello Teacher!" and I was dumbfounded. Could they possibly have forgotten how much I yelled at them (or maybe they just weren't listening..)? They immdeiately began to tug at my clothes to show off pictures they had drawn or just to smile at me! That made me want to love them so much better today.

I tolerated much more noise today and smiled. I encouraged abundantly and smiled some more. I took up some kind of pokemon cards, and I smiled sadly. I removed a "desk" that they broke from the room, and I smiled. And I sang the hokey pokey and smiled until my face hurt. And class went so much more smoothly today. Who would've thought that a smile would make such a difference (They probably teach that in 'teaching 6-year olds 101.' But I never took that class)? The pryr probably didn't hurt either.