Day 51
Tuesday
Kanye West is not someone I would call a good speaker. Too many public slip ups and outbursts to be respected. But he has one song, while granted it is a riff off of a cliché saying, that you can bop your head to in affirmation of the truth he raps. The title escapes me but the line is “that don’t kill me can only make me stronger.” This sentiment can arguably be applied to any situation in life, but I’d like to apply it to 4th grade A Science Class. It’s the joy of my week, to open up a 4th grade science book, staring down the head teacher busy on her iphone in the back of the classroom, and ask the English incompetent students to join me in a rousing good time of bi-lingual education. Last week we drew plants and talked about the photosynthesis cycle, which was awesome! Me scrambling to pronounce for the first time concepts like carbon dioxide, mitochondria, glucose and photosynthesis in Spanish and then writing the English words on the board while the class went haywire, taking it upon themselves to do their best at ignoring me. Needless to say I couldn’t wait for 1pm to roll around on Tuesday to dance this dance with them again. Facing the facts that the class couldn’t speak baby English, I concluded it useless to carry on talking about concepts such as photosynthesis when I couldn’t say the words in Spanish and they rolled their eyes at my English. Back to the basics. General health. I mean I went allllllll the way back. La salud. Alright kids, this is the body. Let’s talk about what good health is. Baby concepts in baby language. And somehow we scraped by and talked about good health, they were supposed to learn about heart rate and how it corresponds to general health, but the only thing I’m sure they’ll take away from my lesson was how they got to jog in class for 1 minute. It might have been counter-intuitive to get the already chronically ADD class even more riled up by jogging in class, but anyone that understands the concept “fill up the time” will nod in understanding, a 1 minute jog can easily be turned into a 5 minute activity. You have to explain they will jog in place for 1 minute. Then you must demonstrate jogging in place. Then you have them stand. Then you say go. Then you say stop after 5 seconds when they’ve already forgotten what jogging IN PLACE means and have begun to do shuttle races across the room colliding into desks. Then you must yell and have them sit down, which takes time because they are scattered like marbles. Then you must yell and jog in place and ask repeatedly what is not understood by IN PLACE. Then you must demonstrate jogging that is NOT IN PLACE so they can more clearly see their mistake. It’s complicated you know. Then you must say stand. And wait for the serious pause to settle in so they know you mean business. Then you say go. And you wait 1 minute (or more if you feel like realllly filling time :) and then you say stop and have them sit down, but that takes time because of course they take jogging in place to really mean run around the class room like a mad bee is on your tail. Once they are done laughing at the mundane activity and how crazy it was to (gasp!) jog IN CLASS you yell more and more and then try and coalesce it into a learning moment and have them count their pulse. But you don’t dare use your own as an example because it’s so high it might indicate high cholesterol or hypertension or just chronic fed-up-ness with Spanish children. Hopefully they’ve copied down the chart and the vocab from the board (as you stated to upstart Israel who demanded to know if they had to do the ‘copying thing again’ “Why yes Israel, we are doing the copying thing again because you still seemed to not have mastered it. I thought it best to give you more practice. I invite you to copy what I’ve written on the board, I promise I’m not here to just waste your time with a silly language like English). And if there’s time, but there never is, you end with your cute little conclusion that ties it all together and drives home the important point- GOOD HEALTH. (Now stop eating all that disgusting ham and start eating your vegetables).
Good riddance.
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