aspects of my daily life that i would find absurd if they weren't aspects of my daily life
1. milk bucket: milk bucket is a bucket that you pour milk into when the children in your homeroom are finished not actually drinking the milk you distributed at breakfast. many days i forget to bring in the milk bucket from the supply closet until the last minute. today one of the little girls who is extremely kind and helpful, but in this one instance creepy, leaned in and whispered "milk bucket" as she walked to her seat. milk bucket is my least favorite part of morning duties and my most favorite phrase to use as an interjection.
2. it recently occured to me that i spend the majority of my weekend pretending to be an off-task child. let me explain. monday through thursday my job is to tutor and do milk bucket-type things, but friday and saturday i spend in teacher training. in teacher training, we get in small groups and practice teaching a 6-minute lesson while our "students" (the other teacher residents) act like real students, a.k.a. misbehave. but in order to make it a useful simulation, we as students have to do "planned misbehaviors." so we get little papers that say, like, "at 3 minutes, make weird noises until the teacher gives you a demerit." i like to think that this is how our students actually think about their time in class. like, "i was trying to learn math today, but i had to make a cat noise at 27 minutes, so."
sidenote: we have our big teaching gateway test this weekend, which is where we have to teach a 6-minute lesson to real students, except they're not real real students, because they're actually really good students who are doing, yes, planned misbehaviors. i failed my practice gateway because i missed a student standing and walking in the middle of my round. that is all my feedback form said: "missed a student standing and walking." teaching is sort of like doing this experiment: http://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo
3. waking up at 5:30 a.m.
4. oh, here's another story about dead chickens for you. i am not even trying to make this the theme of my blog, but sure. today i sat in on the 7th grade ancient world history class, and they were learning about mummification by mummifying chickens. 7th graders and dead chickens and salt and something that smells like formaldehyde. i left half-way through class. it is a really unnerving experience to have a child make eye-contact with you at the same moment they realize they have inserted their arm all the way through the body of a dead chicken.
on the plus side, the past two weeks (post-winter break) have been great. one of the teachers told me that over winter break, the kids forget they hate you. she was totally right. yesterday this one kid, who shortly before break told me he would never speak to me ever again, bought me a cherry donut.