School Day

Today was an unusual day at school. We are preparing for the athletics competition tomorrow, and apparently the man in charge dropped the ball a bit. This means that all day about 10 out of 12 teachers were at one of the two fields in town, half of them setting up for tomorrow and the other half making students practice and teaching technique. So most classes were left unattended, and all of them had students missing.
I started out trying to teach, taking advantage of the open classes to take small groups to the library to teach them how to use it. In math class since there were only 9 students, I taught them blackjack, which they loved. I made everyone who was present take their quiz and then we had some “mental math” competitions, which were scary because these kids couldn’t do 26-7 or 6x4 in their head.
After break I was asked to help on the practice field but proved inept enough that another teacher took over. I’m not inept because I don’t know how to have them run, but apparently ‘any way you think is good’ (which is what I was told) was, in fact, not correct. As a side note, I have decided the teacher who took over for me is going to be my friend. She is a temporary teacher (don’t ask questions, I have no idea why…) but she is young, friendly, and good with the kids.
I went back and spent the afternoon holding informal classes using math games, talking about places on a globe, and getting scorched standing in the middle of a field to watch long jump practice. Mostly, the day was complete chaos. It took a while to get over the fact that now, instead of just losing one day of classes I had prepared (tomorrow) I was losing two, but as soon as I accepted it, today became an opportunity to have fun and get to know some of my students better. And to make them do simple math. ☺