Around the World

When Liridon told Sara, Vanessa, and I that we would be teaching seperately from now on, I was pretty scared. First of all, I didn't have a great connection with the students because we would just walk in, sit down, and read out of the book until the bell rang. Secondly, I wasn't sure how they would respond to me as someone completely different from them. However, the next day Liridon sat down with us and set up a schedule. Vanessa teaches the two eleventh grade classes, and Sara and I have the six tenth grade classes split between us.
I like all three of my classes, but my favorite is 10-2. Liridon is in charge of this class, which just means he's sort of like a homeroom teacher or advisor to them. There are about two people in this class of 34 who can speak English fairly well, but the rest...well. I can only hope for a miracle. Just kidding. I have a lot of fun with them because I plan things to do and what to teach, plus they like me. Or I think they do. Most of the time I think they think I'm ridiculous and they tolerate me because I laugh at them and they laugh at me. Last week, I taught them how to play Around the World.
Around the World is something I played in middle school and high school Spanish. Two people at a time stand up and compete to say the answer first, and then the winner moves on to the next person and the loser sits back down. I had to explain this a couple of times to my class, even with someone translating. After about ten minutes of a lot of people yelling and a lot of me trying to demonstrate the way to play, we finally started. I decided to play with ordinal numbers. For example: I would say "Your number is...62." and they would have to say "sixty-second". The hardest number for them was five because they would always try to say five-th. I even wrote it on the board and they still didn't quite get it.
I had to throw someone out of the room for a couple minutes, do some seat rearranging, and take toys away, but everyone had fun, even the girl in the back with the attitude problem. Each time I had to yell or discipline someone, I tried to remember what my teachers in school did.
At the end, everyone came up to me to say goodbye and I left school on a high. There wasn't a winner, but they did so well that I brought them a snack the next time we had class.
Yes, I will definitely miss my students when we leave.
-Jin