Take that!

I realized that I forgot to tell quite a funny story from our preschool English class the other day. We are trying to teach the kids the names of animals in English, and we're teaching them the song "Old MacDonald." The kids shout out animals in Spanish, we tell them the equivalent in English, and then we sing the song. We kept getting the usual responses, pig, cow, cat, dog, etc. But one little kid next to me kept shouting "Lodo! Lodo!" Which means "Mud! Mud!" Each round I had to tell him that mud wasn't an animal, but he would shout it out each time anyway. Today when we sang it, a lot of the kids wanted to sing out a worm, but we didn't really know what noise to say that a worm made, so we just had to laugh and move on.

Today I had a small victory over the terrible first and second grade teacher. She was trying to make the kids (ages 5-8) copy pages and pages of notes from the board about the different phases of life (childhood, adolescence, etc.) Not being able to read or write very well, this was very difficult for them, so they were frustrated and kept misbehaving. Of course she left the room at this moment to go to talk to someone else, and left me and Georgina with the mass chaos. I was so frustrated by her inability to plan lessons that the kids are able to get anything out of and the fact that she always chooses moments like this to leave, so I told the kids to stop what they were doing, because I was going to read them a story. I have never seen them so well behaved. They all sat in silence (or near silence), some of them with dropped jaws and expressions of awe as I read them The Little Mermaid and some weird donkey story, only talking out of turn when they couldn't see a page. As bad as they are, they clearly are excited about learning and about reading, but nothing that their teacher does ever elicits this response. Elizabeth, the teacher, entered the room when I had just started the second book and still had the attention of all of the students. I kept going until the end of the story, just to stick it to her that the kids are capable of being well behaved and engaged in something. I finished the story and then she had them get out their notebooks again to continue copying, and for those who hadn't finished (because they can't write yet), Georgina and I had to copy the lessons for them. I'm sure they'll learn that material really well, considering they aren't capable of reading it! She didn't say anything about my diversion from the lesson, but to me it was a small victory.