Monday

I want to tell you guys about one of the best, handiest little tools that I have as a teacher: the mute button. I have the ability to completely mute any student at any time and for however long I think it's necessary. It's pretty great. And, hey, it's something I'm actually supposed to do in order to maintain a productive learning environment. Company policy.

Let me share what happened in one of my classes yesterday, and you'll see how helpful the mute button is. Part of the lesson had me leading the kids in a game of BINGO. Now the interesting thing about BINGO is that the kids absolutely love it...it's one of their favorite activities...but they also get the most upset when they don't win. Case in point, yesterday I had a little girl burst into noisy, angry tears. I immediately muted her, said, "It's okay! Maybe we'll play again later if we have time!" and moved forward like nothing happened. I kept my eye on her, though, and as soon as she pulled herself together (about two minutes later) I unmuted her. Easy.

I had another situation in a different class where a mom was sitting just off camera, loudly translating everything I said into Chinese for her son. She wasn't doing the child any favors at all, because this is supposed to be an immersion program, and it works well if you let it,  but whatever. That's her choice. I just wasn't going to let it distract the rest of the students, so...voila. Muted.

PS: When they're muted they can still hear me and the rest of the class, so for them nothing's changed. In fact, they don't even know usually.

Totally different topic: Yesterday afternoon a friend of Baylee's and her mom stopped over unexpectedly and stayed for several hours. I was a good hostess for about two of those hours, then I'd had enough. Mike and I made excuses, ducked out (leaving the guests with Baylee), got dinner, and then sat on a park bench by the Puget Sound until we figured they were gone. lol It felt like playing hooky. We're totally planning on doing it again if we ever need to escape, except next time we're bringing ice cream.

Here's a picture I got while we were there.

Sunday

It's about 6:30 in the morning, and I'm sitting here eating fried rice. My eating schedule is totally messed up. I don't eat before teaching in the morning, but afterward I'm always really hungry for dinner-type foods, so I eat things like spaghetti as the sun comes up.

A  little while ago I finished my last class of the week, making 28 classes altogether! I'm proud of that, but I also have to admit that it was too much. I was tired all the time, and I even ended up canceling my French class twice. (I'd never done that before.) The goal of the week was just survival. In order to make things more realistic moving forward I changed my availability from 29 slots to 20. We'll see how that goes.

And here's a totally obnoxious video I made this morning. *grin*

In other family news, Drew finally got his driver's license. He didn't care about it for years,  choosing instead to take public transportation, but about a month or so ago he changed his mind. He studied a bit, then went in and passed the written section. Then the other day he practiced driving for literally less than an hour with Mike and went in and passed the driving section. [huge eye roll on that one] Honestly, I can't believe he did that. His exact words were, "It's fine, Mom. I'm gonna wing it." And he did. And it worked.

The other big news is that the lead singer of TMA, the band Baylee's in, quit. It's awkward, because of how it all went down (There were some bad feelings.) and because the lead singer was the one who started the band in the first place, but...shrug. It is what it is. Now the rest of the band has to decide if they want to continue with a new singer or disband.

Wednesday

My second full day as a ESL teacher is in the books! Here are a couple weird, fun things that happened today:

• The company asks the students to use English names while they're in class, so the kids will often choose names from American pop culture. I see a lot of girls calling themselves Elsa (from the Disney movie Frozen), for instance. Every once in awhile, though, students (especially the really young ones) will choose any old random English word they happen to know. Case in point, today I had a kid named Banana in my class. Yep. And I had to call him that the whole time, too. Mike said that he woke up and could hear me on the other side of the closet door saying, "Good job, Banana!"  LOL
• Speaking of closets, the sheer number of hours I spent in there this morning is kinda crazy. If somebody would've told me last year, "Hey, Sue, you're going to go into your bedroom closet at 4:15 in the morning, and you won't come back out again until 10am," I never would've believed them. But that's what happened today.  I taught three back-to-back classes, then I did my French homework, then I prepped for teaching English tomorrow, and finally I had my French class. That's a lot of time to be in a very small room with a bunch of hanging clothes.

And this is probably me being insufferable, but I'm so proud of the parent feedback I got today for one of the classes I taught!

It was a level 5 lesson on what it means to be healthy and unhealthy, and all the kids in there were super enthusiastic and smart. I had so much fun with them. It's gratifying that something I really like doing is also appreciated by the customer.

Tuesday

I taught my first three classes as a full teacher this morning! It went well, despite the fact that I didn't sleep AT ALL the night before, because I'm a weirdo with a hyper mind. I finally stopped trying at 1:30am and just got out of bed and got ready for the day. Then I started teaching at 4:20am. Let's see...

• My first class was a level 5 with only one little girl in it, and she was adorable and really good at English. In fact, she went through the lesson quickly, so I spent the last 10 minutes or so asking her lots of questions in order to give her more speaking practice. 
• My second class was a level 1, and it was filled with young kids. They were all eager to learn, and I had fun with them. Oh, something kinda cute happened when I was doing a "free talk" exercise with this group. I asked them, "What does your father look like?" and they answered using words that we learned in class today. They said things like, "He is tall. He is strong." Then, since they were doing so well, I asked what their mother looks like. They said stuff like, "She is short. She is thin." Then I added, "What color hair does she have?" The cute thing is that I could hear their moms in the background suddenly getting interested. They started talking in Chinese to the kids, and then the kids said, "She has black hair!" 
• My third class was a little tough. It was a level 4 with all boys who were around 10 or 11 years old. They didn't have the wide-eyed excitement of the younger crowd, but they participated and we got the job done, so that's fine.

The weirdest part of everything was being completely done with my work day before the sun was fully up. I did end up getting some sleep, though. Immediately after my last class I washed off my make-up, put my pajamas back on, fell into bed, and slept for 4 1/2 hours.

By the way, this is what the kids see when they first enter the classroom. Do you see that cartoon face on the blackboard next to me? That's actually invisible to the students, but I know it's where I can put a student if I want him to talk in front of the whole class. I use it when I'm having him introduce himself at the very beginning, and then I use it again a few different times through the class to give kids individual practice. For the most part, though, they work as a group and I'm the only person up front.

Monday

I thought I'd take a second to explain a couple things about my new job that I think are interesting.

The first is that the company I work for runs like a well-oiled machine, and nowhere is that more evident than in what happens in the first five minutes before class even starts. I told you guys that I'm supposed to be in the classroom five minutes early, right? Well, there are very specific reasons for that:

1. So that I can introduce myself to the students.
2. So that they can introduce themselves to me and the other students. To make that happen I have them appear, one at a time, in the front of the room, then I ask them a few simple questions like, "What's your name? How old are you? What's your favorite color? Do you play a sport?"
3. While they're introducing themselves I'm secretly checking their sound and video quality. If there's a problem with either then there are steps I have to take to make them right.
4. I'm also pre-assessing their ability to understand and speak English. That way when the class actually starts I can adjust my teaching style accordingly.
5. With whatever time is left of the five minutes I lead the kids in an easy game of Let's Make a List or Guess What I'm Drawing or whatever. This makes them comfortable with me.

The second interesting thing is how well the program works to teach English. There are 12 levels with 60 lessons in each level. Of course, when students are on level 1 they speak little or no English. The lessons are simple and involve a lot of facial expressions, hand motions, and props on my part. By level 2, though, the kids can understand and speak in simple sentences. By level 5 they're somewhat conversational. And by the upper levels, 10-12, they're pretty much fluent. It's kind of amazing. 

Tomorrow I'm teaching a level 5 class, then a level 1, then a level 4, all right in a row, and I'm wondering how difficult the transitions are going to be for me. I guess I'll find out.

PS: I've already prepped for those three classes. You can see that for levels 5 and 4 (on the ends) my props are (hopefully) somewhat cool and not babyish. They're pictures from online of foods and animals. For level 1 (in the middle) I'm using my puppet and some flashcards.

Sunday

Yesterday Mike and I went to Len and Monique's house for a barbecue, a board game, and a campfire, and it was a great time with wonderful, down-to-earth people. Here are some pics:

They have a beautiful backyard, because Len put a lot of work into it over the last year.

And they made a delicious meal!

After we ate we played a game called Settlers of Catan for hours. I LOVED it. (And I won, which doesn't hurt.) Basically, you have to build roads, settlements, and cities along different plots of land, all the while buying, selling, and trading resources until somebody has ten "victory points," which are obtained in different ways.

After the game we went back outside for a campfire. Mike and I were in charge of s'more ingredients, and I thought it would be fun to involve different kinds of chocolate.

In other news, I got my work schedule for this week, my first week as a bonafide teacher with the company. I opened up 29 slots (i.e. classes) of availability, and they filled 28 of them. It's going to be a trial by fire, apparently. (All the green slots starting on the 30th are actually next week and don't count yet.)

As you can see the classes are back to back, which in theory means I'll have 10 minutes between each of them, but in practice means I'll have 5 minutes, because they want us in the classroom 5 minutes early. It's not much time, that's for sure. I guess I can get a quick drink of water and maybe use the bathroom, but that's it. Mike told me that I should make it easy on myself and wear adult diapers. LOL



PS: That reminds me of the time my whole extended family on my mom's side was at my cousin's house for a holiday. My brother and his wife were about to head back to their own house, but they were doing some construction in their only bathroom, making it unusable, so Becca (my brother's wife) decided she'd better make use of my cousin's bathroom while she still had the chance. My brother, thinking it would be awhile before they had access to a toilet again, called after her, "Push hard and wipe deep!"

PPS: They're not married anymore.

Friday

Ahem. I decided to start the blog back up again. Yeah, yeah, I know; I'm a flake. If it helps, I truly did mean to quit blogging forever. That was my honest-to-goodness plan. It's just that...well...I missed it! So I'm back. And, man, a ton has happened since last I wrote.

1. I finished the TEFL course and got my certificate.

2. A month or so ago I did quite a bit of research, looking at several different online companies that hire people to teach English as a foreign language. I found around 10 of them, and of those I decided my favorite was a place called Qkids. That's why, about a week and a half ago, I started the process of trying to get hired there.

Not gonna lie, it was kind of grueling.

• First I had to send in an application, but along with that I had to attach a resumé, my computer specs, and a 2-minute video introducing myself and reading a short children's story into the camera. (You'd think the video would be the hard part, but I did that in one take. It was the resumé that took forever.)
• Then I waited, and a day or so later I heard back from them. They said they were interested in me, and they gave me a bunch of stuff about their platform and their philosophy to study. Then I was invited to do what they call "Demo Interview 1." For that I met an interviewer in a (virtual) classroom and demonstrated my ability to work all the bells and whistles that go with the company's technology. (There are markers, a text board, a highlighter, a spotlight, ways to completely control every student's sound and video, ways to award them, etc.) She also had me teach a little bit, just to get a feel for my style. At the end she told me I would be moving forward to "Demo Interview 2." 
• For that I was given some curriculum and told to be ready to teach it to a different interviewer in two day's time. I studied and practiced the heck out of it, and finally the time came. I taught it to the interviewer who, by the way, acted like a child. Like, she did a kid's voice and everything. She also made mistakes and pretended to be a bit naughty here and there, just to see what I would do about it. I handled it and it went well, and I was scheduled to move onto the next step: teaching "Trial Classes." Those are real classes with real kids, but they're recorded and watched by the interviewer afterward.
• I did two of those, one on Tuesday and one on Wednesday, and they went pretty well. I messed up a couple things...like I went a bit overtime, especially in the first one...but it didn't seem to be a big deal. The company understands that there's a learning curve. 
• Long story short, after all that I got hired! I'm so excited and happy and grateful. Now I'm someone who teaches English as a foreign language to Chinese children between 4-12 years old.  The kids are pretty darn adorable and fun, and I think I'm really going to enjoy my time with them.

Here are a few pictures I took along the way this week:

Mike and I spent quite a bit of time this past weekend setting up a quiet workspace for me in our bedroom closet. It's weird, I know, but it works.

Here's a puppet I bought as a prop to help me teach.

This was me at the crack of dawn on the morning of my 2nd trial class. I looked good, but from the waist down I was wearing pajamas.

3. In completely other news, I finished level A2.1 in my French school! To that end I spent yesterday and today doing assessments in speaking (yesterday) and writing (today) to see if I'm ready to move on to A2.2. I'm proud of myself, because I killed the speaking one. I talked with my teacher for an hour about my family, my job, and my hobbies, and I made myself understood. I even made her laugh a few times. I didn't do quite as well on the writing one, though. I mean, I did okay, but there were mistakes in my work that I'm probably too far along to still be making. For instance, I've been told over and over that I need to make my adjectives match my nouns in gender and number, but I still forget literally every time. Oh well. The truth is I just don't care that much about writing in French.  It's weird, because I'm usually such a pleaser, but in this one way I don't mind looking dumb.

4. And here are a few misc. pics from lately.

Au Revoir

It's time to shut this blog down. I don't have the desire to write here that I once did, making it feel more like a chore and an obligation than an outlet. I've loved sharing my life and family here for all these years, and I thank you so very much for reading. And, hey, 13 years! Not a bad run.

(It's funny. I walked away from homeschooling without a backwards glance, but this one's gonna hurt a bit.)