Give me a bad day
To show you who I am
Disturb my applecart
And mess with my plan
Look at you, all smiles
The sun, it always shines
The measure of the man
Is found in difficult times
An easy day for me
Fills me with compassion
For those facing struggle
And life comes down a-crashing
So give me a bad day
I’m gonna turn it around
Enduring all the pain
With this attitude I’ve found
Today I’m feeling:
Good for pushing through exercise this morning setting me up for my long day ahead. I’m starting to run out of time each day doing all the things I want to do and I think something is going to have to go and that will be TV and YouTube videos. I’m already cutting down just because of lack of time. Focus on the things I really prefer and enjoy to be doing. Stop wasting time.
Today I’m grateful for:
The language learning app Drops which I use to study Thai but which I have also asked a couple of my poorer students, Namsai and Nomsen, to use to study English and they checked it out this afternoon and seemed find it a little more compelling than Duolingo. I will introduce more of my classes to Drops instead and in the future. I think it is a slightly better learning tool despite not offering any opportunities to speak.
The best thing about today was:
Kinda improvising a lesson with one of my classes today and having it go really well.
The original lesson I had planned wasn’t going to be long enough so I picked up a worksheet about ordinal numbers (they always struggle when asked what the date is) that could fill up the time. I started with it as I was expecting it to only take a few minutes.
As they were getting themselves used to ordinal numbers I figured a best way to remember them was by doing birthdays so I went around the class asking everyone and writing them on the board. I noticed some smart students grabbing pictures so they could remember their classmate’s birthdays.
Once we had all the birthdays I got everyone and asked them to form a line from the first birthday of the year to the last and then spent 10 minutes sorting themselves out and finally I took a photo of them all.
By now time was too short to finish my planned lesson too. So I got them all to write the list of names in the order that had just just stood. This took them a good thirty minutes and I could see everyone puzzling out which name came next until finally they were done. To end, a long Kahoot to reinforce their learning. Everyone was happy and maybe they even learned something.
What was out of your control today and how did you handle it?
I decided I needed to catch up a handful of students in one class and the best way to do was to clear out the rest of the students so these ones could concentrate better.
The class went well with the nine students, without all the usual distractions. They were initially a little miffed at their classmates going off for free time but soon understood the faster they got to it the sooner they’d be able to leave.
With some slow careful explanations, I could see some twinkling of understanding in most of them. They finished with 30 minutes spare and off they went and off I went to House for extra coffee.
Whilst I was there I got a message from our department head asking why my students were in the library at the time I was supposed to be teaching them. I got a little annoyed at this at first but I knew that it needed an explanation so I replied doing so. I didn’t get any reply.
Something I learned today?
Scientists have synthesised sugar out of carbon dioxide. Neat!
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