School:
We have been so busy at school. Remedials have started after school and also our extra curricular activities. I am in charge of the P3 and P4 Journalism CCA (that is what they call their extra curricular activities). We are helping the upper primary group (P5 and P6) submit materials for the school newspaper. The first week of CCA, I had my kids for about 15 minutes before I had to drop them off with Book Club before going to an insurance meeting that was canceled. TIJ my friends. For remedials, I have two students that I am supposed to give extra support to in English. Week 1 of remedials: both absent. Week 2: one present. Week 3: one present, and then he disappeared...You can see how well this has been going for me. The kids do not like remedials at all. They would rather run off with their friends and play, and then lie about it to your face. That is what the one student did to me during week 3. I was not happy with him and he knew it.
Meetings galore! Every Wednesday we have our weekly staff meeting where the principal and the vice principal update us on things that are going on in the school, or things that we should know. Haha, sounds funny to say that they tell us things we need to know, because around here, they don't tell you a lot of things that you should know. Some of these things are: how to mark your topical tests, how to submit the marks, that you have to enter them online, etc. Good thing that I have very kind co-workers that will answer all of my questions :) On Friday of this week, we also had a Science Workshop. I wasn't expecting much, but it really wasn't much. A lady got up in front of us talking about how we need to engage our students during Science lessons and follow the Five E's (which I learned in college) for our lesson planning. She did not do any of that! She was not very engaging at all. She stood up there and read her PowerPoint notes to us, which we had right in front of us. The most exciting thing of the day that happened was watching someone try to manipulate a piece of paper that was laying over the crack of two tables to see how many rupiah coins they could fit on the paper before it fell...haha. We also had to go on Saturday early in the morning until about 4:30 pm. What a long day, and so much for sleeping in. Actually, sleeping in doesn't really exist anymore. I try to go to bed early on the weekends and wake up early in the mornings. Mom, I am just like you!! Haha.
I thought my P4 students were getting better, but they definitely are not. They still drive me up the wall and make my days stressful. It is a little better because I am able to get through material with them, but there are still those five students that do not listen and distract everyone else in my classroom. I have had to send a few to the principal (P) or vice principal (VP). It still does not seem to help. They feel sorry at the time, but they go right back to doing what they were doing before. I have three boys in my classroom that fight all of the time, and no matter where I put them in the classroom, they still talk to each other from across the room. It's ridiculous. I received the following pictures from the teacher that uses my classroom after school. I was not happy to see this. I do not have them for the last period of the day. The health education teacher does, and they were working on a project. This is the mess that my kids leave almost every day without me knowing. The poor cleaners that come to my room at night. I did not know any of this, because when I get to the classroom in the mornings, someone has already been there to clean it up. I am so disappointed. I have talked to them about this before, because I have never seen such a messy classroom. I don't know if they were not given time to clean up by that teacher or what?!
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| My messy classroom! So ashamed :( |
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| One more step to the garbage can... |
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| Books and papers all over the floor and desks |
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| Trash on top of the Air-Con!?! What? |
It seems like it is always something with my kids. "Miss! I forgot my book", "Miss! I didn't do my homework", "Miss! He pushed me", etc. One of my students had to go home, because her and another student were goofing around out in the hallway before class. The other girl pushed her and she fell and hit her head on the corner of a desk. I was not there at this time, and the students are not supervised during this time. They are expected to sit in two lines (1 boys and 1 girls line) outside of their classroom and wait for their teacher to get to the classroom. Well, I have fixed this a bit. The line that is ready when I come up the stairs gets to go in first. I usually have to keep the boys, and I keep them until they are ready and quiet. I give the girls directions as they walk into the classroom and thank them for being ready to enter the classroom.
The mornings have gotten soooo much better when I get to the classroom. The kids used to be up out of their seats, talking with their friends, playing with their pens and rulers (they shoot them at each other across the desks), etc. When I come in now, they are in their seats, for the most part, reading silently like they are supposed to. Most of them do have the hang of unpacking their suitcase and putting it in the back of the classroom. These kids use suitcases for their backpacks! I have one student in my class that actually uses a backpack. I call it their luggage. Their backpacks are so heavy that their nannies, drivers or parents carry them up the stairs for them! WHAT?! TIJ... That is all I can say. I have never seen so many parents and nannies in the school. It doesn't really phase me anymore, but at first I was like, "What is going on?" Some of the students' parents come to the school and sit there all day long!! They even go to the canteen (lunchroom) and prepare their child's lunch for them.
I don't really talk much about my P3 students, but I teach Science to them. They are a pretty good group. Most times they are much better than my P4 students. I have one student in my class that just cracks me up. I think he may have ADD. He says the craziest things also. My roommate, Amber, also teaches the same class for English and she says the same things about him. He just cracks us up. Apparently he super glued his fingers together in her class while working on a cut and paste project. HAHA. I was not a bit surprised and it only took me one guess when she asked me who I thought it was.
Free Time:
Ha, what is that?? I feel like I haven't had much free time lately, but I have done quite a few things in the past couple of weeks since I have blogged last that I can talk about. Let's see...where to begin.
I went shopping a couple of weekends ago with the girls from the KJ (Kebon Jeruk) campus and Amber. I went to a place called Mangga Dua, which translates to be Two Mangoes. This mall is about five floors of electronics! I have never seen anything like it before. You have to bargain with them to get a fair/cheap price. It's like a black market of electronics! Haha. We went to Grand Indonesia. It is a very nice, huge, mall that is kind of far from our place, but the best place to meet up with people. It costs us about $5 to get there by taksi. We did some shopping at Forever 21, and we all walked away with some new clothes.
All of us girls and the guys went out for a birthday party that night at a place called Viti. It is in PIK City (Pantai Indah Kapuk City) near where we live. It was a great time. We had food and some "beverages" of course. It was the first time that I have actually met some of the secondary teachers! I didn't know anyone at first. It is so strange to me that the secondary people work at the same school as us, and we never see them. Even outside of school, we seem to do our own thing. I hope that we are able to get together more often like we did that night. One of the ladies from the KJ campus took me to a small Outlet Store right next door to where the birthday party was. There were clothes there from AE, Express, Adidas, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Aero, etc. They were SO cheap. I got a pair of shorts for about 60 000 rupiah (about $6).
The following weekend, I did nothing but work! I sat down on Friday night after school and got all of my marking done. I have been doing a really good job of keeping up on that, so I don't have so much of it to do all at once. I just need to get better about handing it back to the kids. I feel like it is such a task, because it takes up time during class. Anyway, not sure why I got off track talking about school...Back to my social life. I took a trip to Mangga Dua on Saturday so that Amber and I could get our router to set up our Internet. We checked around at a few different places for the one that we were looking for, but they kept on telling us that they were discontinued! :S TIJ...We ended up going with a different one, and luckily it works. The Internet company had told us which one we should purchase. Ha, they even told us to go to Mangga Dua, because we would get a better deal. We had a couple of friends with us: Eduardo, one primary co-worker who is actually from Milwaukee, WI, and also a secondary teacher (Ryan). He is from the Philippines. He cracks me up! We decided to all get dinner at a place called Hoka Hoka Bento. It is a Japanese restaurant and they have pretty decent food. Then it was back to marking...Of course Sunday consisted of sleeping in and working.
I don't remember where this fits in, but Amber and I decided to go to Hard Rock Cafe one weekend, because no one else had any plans. We were so glad that we went! We had some good food and an interesting adventure after dinner. While we were eating, a group of three guys sat down at a table kind of close to ours. They were all clearly speaking English and they did not look like they were from Indonesia at all. We couldn't believe it and we were excited to hear other people speaking English. After we were done eating, we went into the gift shop and were looking at the shirts. The three guys walked in, and we actually stopped them and asked where they were from. They ended up being from Holland, England and Australia! They invited us to go bowling with them. Right away, the movie "Taken" popped into my head, and I wasn't sure what to think. I guess you won't understand that if you haven't seen the movie, but let's just say, a girl gets kidnapped, because she was friendly with a stranger. Amber and I figured what was it going to hurt? We were in public. So we decided to go bowling. We didn't actually bowl, but we sat down and talked with them. They were really nice guys. The one from England was much more talkative than the other two. They kind of just did their own thing. After they were done with their game, they were going to see the Dark Knight Rises. They invited us, but we never met up with them at the movies. Oh well. It was a fun night and I am glad that we got out and met some other people. Not that we will ever see them again.
This weekend consisted of the Science workshop on Friday night and all day Saturday. After the workshop I got on the bus with the KJ people and headed to Royal Mediterania to hang out with my friends. We ended up getting dinner at a sushi restaurant, and watching The Dark Knight Rises. Still just as good the second time :) After the movie, we stopped at a bar outside of the mall area and had a drink before turning for the night. I caught a cab home to Apartemen Mitra Bahari and went to bed. Today is a completely lazy day. I have no lesson plans to turn in this week, but I should probably start marking my students' papers so that I am not behind.
Well, I think I have updated you all on pretty much everything that has been going on in my life here in Jakarta. The city is still the same, although I am changing a lot. I have been learning new words and phrases that I really need to start learning. I really want to learn the language so that I can communicate better with people. I will update you more on the people in the city in my next post. I think I should stop for now before this turns into a book!
Bali in 3 days :) Yay!
I went shopping a couple of weekends ago with the girls from the KJ (Kebon Jeruk) campus and Amber. I went to a place called Mangga Dua, which translates to be Two Mangoes. This mall is about five floors of electronics! I have never seen anything like it before. You have to bargain with them to get a fair/cheap price. It's like a black market of electronics! Haha. We went to Grand Indonesia. It is a very nice, huge, mall that is kind of far from our place, but the best place to meet up with people. It costs us about $5 to get there by taksi. We did some shopping at Forever 21, and we all walked away with some new clothes.
All of us girls and the guys went out for a birthday party that night at a place called Viti. It is in PIK City (Pantai Indah Kapuk City) near where we live. It was a great time. We had food and some "beverages" of course. It was the first time that I have actually met some of the secondary teachers! I didn't know anyone at first. It is so strange to me that the secondary people work at the same school as us, and we never see them. Even outside of school, we seem to do our own thing. I hope that we are able to get together more often like we did that night. One of the ladies from the KJ campus took me to a small Outlet Store right next door to where the birthday party was. There were clothes there from AE, Express, Adidas, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Aero, etc. They were SO cheap. I got a pair of shorts for about 60 000 rupiah (about $6).
The following weekend, I did nothing but work! I sat down on Friday night after school and got all of my marking done. I have been doing a really good job of keeping up on that, so I don't have so much of it to do all at once. I just need to get better about handing it back to the kids. I feel like it is such a task, because it takes up time during class. Anyway, not sure why I got off track talking about school...Back to my social life. I took a trip to Mangga Dua on Saturday so that Amber and I could get our router to set up our Internet. We checked around at a few different places for the one that we were looking for, but they kept on telling us that they were discontinued! :S TIJ...We ended up going with a different one, and luckily it works. The Internet company had told us which one we should purchase. Ha, they even told us to go to Mangga Dua, because we would get a better deal. We had a couple of friends with us: Eduardo, one primary co-worker who is actually from Milwaukee, WI, and also a secondary teacher (Ryan). He is from the Philippines. He cracks me up! We decided to all get dinner at a place called Hoka Hoka Bento. It is a Japanese restaurant and they have pretty decent food. Then it was back to marking...Of course Sunday consisted of sleeping in and working.
I don't remember where this fits in, but Amber and I decided to go to Hard Rock Cafe one weekend, because no one else had any plans. We were so glad that we went! We had some good food and an interesting adventure after dinner. While we were eating, a group of three guys sat down at a table kind of close to ours. They were all clearly speaking English and they did not look like they were from Indonesia at all. We couldn't believe it and we were excited to hear other people speaking English. After we were done eating, we went into the gift shop and were looking at the shirts. The three guys walked in, and we actually stopped them and asked where they were from. They ended up being from Holland, England and Australia! They invited us to go bowling with them. Right away, the movie "Taken" popped into my head, and I wasn't sure what to think. I guess you won't understand that if you haven't seen the movie, but let's just say, a girl gets kidnapped, because she was friendly with a stranger. Amber and I figured what was it going to hurt? We were in public. So we decided to go bowling. We didn't actually bowl, but we sat down and talked with them. They were really nice guys. The one from England was much more talkative than the other two. They kind of just did their own thing. After they were done with their game, they were going to see the Dark Knight Rises. They invited us, but we never met up with them at the movies. Oh well. It was a fun night and I am glad that we got out and met some other people. Not that we will ever see them again.
This weekend consisted of the Science workshop on Friday night and all day Saturday. After the workshop I got on the bus with the KJ people and headed to Royal Mediterania to hang out with my friends. We ended up getting dinner at a sushi restaurant, and watching The Dark Knight Rises. Still just as good the second time :) After the movie, we stopped at a bar outside of the mall area and had a drink before turning for the night. I caught a cab home to Apartemen Mitra Bahari and went to bed. Today is a completely lazy day. I have no lesson plans to turn in this week, but I should probably start marking my students' papers so that I am not behind.
Well, I think I have updated you all on pretty much everything that has been going on in my life here in Jakarta. The city is still the same, although I am changing a lot. I have been learning new words and phrases that I really need to start learning. I really want to learn the language so that I can communicate better with people. I will update you more on the people in the city in my next post. I think I should stop for now before this turns into a book!
Bali in 3 days :) Yay!
