On having a life.

Teaching is time consuming. Any teacher will tell you that--new or veteran. The job has no clear end in a day, because there are always meetings or after-school tutoring or lessons to plan or papers to grade or students to counsel or paperwork to do...I could go on. And it's not just the physical things to do that makes it so time consuming. It's hard to turn off the brain from thinking about teaching. I catch myself at all hours thinking about school, whether it's about students or the messy desk I need to organize or lessons I could do better or random ideas for future lessons--it even creeps into my dreams. At some point, I have to force myself to stop! It's well-known in the teaching world that it's important to take time out for yourself and to do things you like to do. Unfortunately, since I am in introvert, the things I like to do are to sit at home and knit or watch TV shows or something of the like, but in all of that, you can still think constantly about teaching.

So, I've been making sure to do some things outside of my apartment. I joined a small group at church and have been enjoying the new faces, fellowship, and discussions about God. I also volunteered with the church last weekend, which was fun. We taped up a house for women and children to prepare it for painting and then a small group of us went to do yardwork for an older widow. And tonight I'm going to see Catching Fire (the second movie in the Hunger Games trilogy, for those that are unfamiliar--I highly recommend the books!).

And next week is a two-day week and then it's Thanksgiving break--and boy am I thankful for that!! I'll be heading to Sanibel, FL to spend the holidays with my grandparents :-)

Clever (or not-so-clever) metaphors

Learning a foreign language was once described to me as a snowball--it just keeps getting bigger and bigger, the more you study the language, and if you lose a part of it, the snowball falls apart and there are problems because the snowball is then no longer a snowball. This helps when explaining to students why it's important to keep up on everything you have learned in the foreign language so far, and not let some vocabulary or grammar rules slip, since eventually you'll need those words/rules again and if you've learned them for the test and promptly forgotten them or just plain never learned them, you'll have problems later on. It's better to just learn it all at the right pace and keep up with it. Anyway, I love metaphors and I thought this metaphor was perfect.

Until I moved to the South.

I know it barely snows down here, but it never crossed my mind that IF these kids have seen snow, they've probably never even had enough to make a snowball (although the world shuts down, apparently, at the hint of snow...that'll be interesting). At the beginning of the year, I explained this metaphor to all of my classes, but I think they all just let it go in one ear and out the other. I was re-explaining this metaphor to my accelerated class (they're doing German 1 and 2 in one year, so I was emphasizing the importance of keeping up on everything we've done so far, since this is a faster-paced class), when someone interrupted me and said, "But Frau, we've never made a snowball. We don't know what that's like." I stopped dead in my tracks (probably mid-snowball mime) and really thought about that. Whoa. Poor babies. They've never had the joy of making a snowman...so many childhood memories not made!!

So I've been trying to think of another metaphor but haven't found one. I briefly considered explaining it like a recipe that needs all it's ingredients for the entire time you're baking, but my students are way too literal with everything I say and would probably find weird loopholes (like the one time their Grandma accidentally left out the butter but made the best cookies ever, or something unlikely like that) or they would retort that no one bakes anything for such a long amount of time.

I guess I'll just stick with the snowball metaphor for now and reminisce on my snowman days for my poor snowless students ;-)

The night of the parents.

Tonight we had parent teacher conferences, which meant it was a half-day, so I had a lovely nap in the middle there. Just what I needed! The break-less time between August (start of school) and Thanksgiving is extremely taxing (and always the longest/craziest, from what I'm told).

So, parent teacher conferences went from 5-8pm and parents were limited to 10 minutes with each teacher. Before tonight, I thought that if certain helicopter parents showed up, I would have trouble keeping them under 10 minutes, but it actually was not a problem. Mostly it wasn't a problem because very few people showed up, but also 10 minutes is a fairly long time when talking about a student. Apparently there was nothing listed on the school website and no automated phone calls were made. And although all of the students were informed, they stop listening after they hear the words "half day".

With eighteen possible slots for parents, I had only seven filled. But it was good. I had some good feedback and two parents that really impressed me. They said they wanted to come just to personally thank me for taking an interest in their child and taking time to help him, which for me is just an obvious part of the job and I'm happy to do. But it's nice to be appreciated as a teacher in a society where it's becoming more and more common for the parents to side with students and blame everything on the teacher.

Now it's 9pm and my bedtime. Being at school so late just throws everything off for the next day, so tomorrow will probably be long and tiring. But I'm surviving and counting down the days to Thanksgiving, where I will have almost a whole relaxing week off to spend in Florida with my grandparents :-)