Springing into Spring

It was a fairly routine day, as much as any of my days is  a routine day, teaching is certainly less routine than most jobs, but in  many of my classes  my teaching is in a rut and has been for years – because it’s a very comfortable rut, thank you very much.

Soon. Very soon, now.

Thursdays, my 1st class is at 7 and I almost missed the bus from Andel, but I ran and made it, and was panting for half the ride there.  I’ve got to start leaving earlier and avoiding the running.  But I only had one hour there, which left me quite a gap, so I wandered around the center for a bit and then walked over to Strossmayerovo Namesti.  My 6th grade class was fun, but they are a good group and always fun, I saw a Czech-English dictionary on the desk so I got them into a game of “stump the teacher” which is a good way to teach the phrase “How do you say _____ in English?” which should be the easiest thing in the world to teach but for some reason people just don’t get how important that phrase is.  With my 9th graders I did a little written exercise, which I generally avoid doing because it strikes me as teacher laziness on my part, I get a break for the first 15 minutes of class while they are writing the lesson, and then I have them come up and read it, but I wasn’t reaching them before and apparently less is more because it went well.  Then I had 1st graders and I tried something radical.  I made a game out of being quiet, giving them points at the end of each page if they were silent, and for most of them, their competitive spirit conquered their need to make noise.

Then I had the weird class, my 4 little girls.  There was an address change today, the girl whose flat we usually have it at was sick.  I didn’t actually get lost, but I was running and a bit frantic before I got there, right on time – but they were late.

They couldn’t focus on the lesson, but that’s nothing new.  I kept trying new things, and each one worked for about 5 minutes and it just seemed to be dragging on forever, but i couldn’t see a clock in the room and my phone was in my coat pocket, hanging in the hall.  Eventually, I asked them and they pointed to what looked like a child’s drawing of a clock on the wall.

I said “That’s not a clock” and they had a good laugh at me because, indeed it was, it had the mechanism in the back although the front was just a child’s drawing on ordinary paper, but it showed that it was 5 past 4 and we were supposed to have finished at 3:30.

No harm, no foul.  The number 11 went right in front of their flat, I hit it just as I was coming out the door practically, picked up Isabel from school and then Sam from football.

It started raining a little bit on the way, but that’s O.K.  At least it wasn’t snow.