First of all: my mother tells me that all the photos of the ocean are a parking lot. I really can't get beyond the Savoy's parking lot on that side of town: the neighborhood below is a little rough. I'll take some proper photos from Hobie Beach soon.
Anyway. Friday. Again we start with an assembly. Thankfully if I sit in the back I can get a little work done during the assembly instead of being vaguely confused for the whole time. It's hard to stay focused when half of the assembly is in Afrikaans and the switches between languages occur mid-sentence.
After that, I followed the department head to her first-hour class and read The Other Side of Truth with Grade 9's. She had some grades she needed to enter, and I'd already taught the novel several times, so it worked out just fine. We read and the students got some characters notes written so they wouldn't forget who was who (this novel has a lot of characters). For my troubles I got an Aero bar later! It's pretty tasty.
After that I went to sit with another English teacher who was working with a social studies group that was learning about climatology and meteorology. Actually worked out quite well, since I had to explain what sleet was. The students seemed pretty entranced by it until I told them how awful it was. Dad, I also told your thundersnow story. They were scared.
After a short break I went to see an upper-level English class--Matric students, if I remember right.
(Matrics, my American friends, are Grade 12's. This is the year that they "matriculate" from school, so Grade 12 is almost always called Matric, emphasis on the second syllable. Some students can matriculate with partial university credit, but it depends on how many distinctions you earn and in what subjects you earn them. It's kind of like getting college credit for senior-level courses in America, but you don't have to take the dual credit classes, you just score into credit through regular courseloads. As far as I know.)
They were reading Hamlet, which I somehow still haven't read, so I spent a lot of the time trying to figure out my schedule for the next week/finalizing my observation log from the last two weeks. Since I'm not really allowed to teach Matrics (teachers understandably want a tighter control over them), I didn't expect to do anything to begin with. However, I did notice that they're a good deal more laid-back than the other students of the same age band. The difference in maturity is pretty striking, and I'm not sure how they got that way. Maybe it's the group itself? Maybe the Matric title is so significant to them that they behave better on average? Not sure.
My last class of the day was another lower-grade English class. I read with the students from another one of the novels that I'm more familiar with and then I performed office work for the rest of the day. At some point I got to do filing in the main academic office--the amount of entitled parents who write in is kind of striking. The secretary and I commiserated about it for a little bit.
Not much else to be said. It's starting to show that the students in the play are exhausted (unfortunately I keep seeing them in the office with sicknesses and sore throats), but they're pushing through to closing night. I'm proud of them. Thankfully on Saturday they get some extra time to relax before their last two shows.
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