During lunch today, I was playing Jenga with Adam, one of the year 9 boys, when Danni joked that she should take a picture of me playing games to put in my presentation at PC in the fall: "Look what I did with my Smith Fellowship -- learned how to play games!" It really does seem like that's a lot of what I've been doing, but I promise I'm doing legitmate work too!
This morning was actually one of those times. One of the RE teachers, Allison, asked me to come into her year 10 class to lead a double lesson on the Reformation. I'm doing similar stuff with Maria and her class, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It went pretty well -- we definitely covered a lot of information (looking at the Church and how it's changed over time), but the boys seemed pretty engaged (or as engaged as any 16 year olds can be), and no one feel asleep on me. After the lesson, Allison let the boys ask me questions about myself, which was pretty fun. I had one of them call me out for not following the NBA (he's the second one to do that -- the first one told me I'm not a true American because of it), and another wanted to know if they really play beer pong at college -- definitely different questions than the year 2's ask! After this lesson, I did another one that was pretty similar with Maria's class. Her class has a much different dynamic, so it's interesting to see how is best to work with them. Definitely something I'll work on learning!
These first three lessons were pretty draining, so it was a relief to move into the year 4 class afterwards. They were watching a show called "Mortified": it follows the struggles of a 12 year old girl, which was a bit Disney-esque but not actually all that bad. My buddy Christian pulled a chair up for me, right next to him, and chatted with me a bit while we watched it. He told me I'm one of the best teachers here and that he'll really miss me when I leave -- I couldn't help but smile, and assure him that we can still stay in touch once I'm back in America. At the end of the lesson, the boys took out a dodgeball, and I had to think fast when I suddenly saw it flying at my head. I played around with them for a bit, enjoying the fact that I'm taller than all of them and can easily grab the ball when it's over their heads.
After a Jenga-filled lunch, I made my way back to the primary school. My year 2's were out on an excursion, but the year 4's were all out on the playground, playing with jumpropes and handballs. Thinking about what Danni had just said about playing games, I figured "why not?"and joined in with them. It was a lot of fun! Some of the boys taught me how to play their version of handball, and another group had me join in with them playing skip-rope. After spinning around like a top with a rope in my hand and then making it through the whole alphabet while two boys swung the rope, I was feeling pretty drained. It was definitely a blast though!
When the bell rang, I was torn -- should I stay with the year 4's or go to the year 7's like I'm supposed to? Seeing as how I've skipped out on the year 7's the past few days, I decided I would go -- I can be responsible after all!
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