Week 3

Week 3 of school went by faster than any school week ever has for me. I could hardly believe it when Thursday came around and it was our last day of the week already. I think most of this is due to the fact that I kept myself and my students more busy this week, and I was also busier outside of school as well.

Sunday and Monday were definitely a step backward for both my 1st and 2nd graders. By the end of the 2nd week, things felt very under control and we were able to be productive and get things done. I expected to be able to build off that success during this 3rd week, but was unpleasantly surprised by the fact that students were a little bit more wild and weren't staying as focused as I had hoped. I did my very best to not take this personally and remember that there are a lot of factors that affect children's behavior that I have no control over, so that as long as I am consistent in doing my job things should be fine in the long run. Instead of trying to overhaul my classroom management strategies because of a less-than-desirable few days (a mistake I made quite a few times last year), I stuck to what I had been doing and the rest of the week was smooth sailing.

As a whole, my 2nd graders are beginning to understand me a lot better. Not only have we established some routines, but also I have been trying to use the same body language and visual aids each time I say something. I really don't know whether they're understanding my words or my actions, but they're doing what I want them to do and acting how I want them to act and I think as long as I keep doing this, they'll keep learning the spoken communication piece of the puzzle in due time. One thing that has been a bit of a frustration for me is that in teaching math, so much depends on the students recognizing the numbers and their names. Since Arabic language users use a different set of number symbols and of course number names, we have spent a majority of time just learning the English numbers 1-20 these past few weeks. If these students had never had an English class before, I would totally understand and be okay with this. However, since they supposedly had English instruction last year and were supposed to know their numbers to 100, this has been a bit disappointing. I think the students have been getting a little frustrated by this as well, since I know they are capable of learning 2nd grade math concepts. I guess that's the name of the game in this business though.

As for my 1st graders, we made huge behavioral strides in week 3. On Wednesday and Thursday, they were just as good as my 2nd graders (something I though I wouldn't see until at least November or December to be honest), and even some of the Arabic teachers were surprised to see how under control and calm everything was going in there when they walked by. We didn't make a ton of progress academically this week--we're still hashing away at color names, numbers 1-10, and learning our ABCs--but I figure not a lot of learning can happen until things get settled down anyway.

Outside of school, I have been in full swing with my running. I ran at least 4 miles every day, even despite my football injury (keep reading), and I did it all with pain-free ankles and knees (which hasn't happened since before I left college). I was even able to run 17 miles on Friday morning, and if it weren't for the heat bearing down on me (it was 90 degrees by the time my run was over with), I feel like I could've run farther! I am excited to build off that great week and do a lot of good running in this upcoming week.

Also this past week, my flag football team had our first game on Wednesday night. I wasn't really sure what to expect as far as the pace or physicality of the games, but it turned out to be much faster and physical than I would've guessed with the team we played first. Many of them were American from what I gathered, and they were a pretty rough bunch. Though we weren't supposed to do any real blocking or tackling (because it's flag football), I was blocked from behind/pushed down twice while running my route our first time up on offense. Since we only had 1 ref, they got away with it. On defense, I figured I would take the higher road and try to make plays on the ball instead of tackle their players. At the end of their 1st possession, they had a 4th-and-goal situation. It turned out to be a pass to the guy I was covering, and I ended up diving into the air to tip the ball away from him (even though it was tempting and would've been a lot easier to just drill him as the ball was hitting his hands). I ended up breaking up the pass, but also ended up landing on the ground ribs-first, then somebody else from their team landed on top of me. I couldn't catch my breath for the rest of the game because it hurt to take in deep breaths, not to mention we only had enough players so that only 1 person didn't have to play both offense and defense to whole game. I went home and iced my ribs for a while, which helped, but I couldn't really sleep that night due to the pain. The next day, I went on a run (don't ask me why) and got a sharp pain in my ribs every time I took a step (don't ask me why I didn't stop). During that whole ordeal, I got the feeling that maybe I had a broken rib or something so I went to the hospital for an x-ray. Upon examining the images, we determined that I had no broken ribs, but probably had a few bruised ones and that most of the muscles in between the ribs were probably bruised as well. The doctor told me to take it easy for a while, at which point I laughed at her (on the inside).

Finally, there was an Middle Eastern film festival in town this past week and I was able to go see a few documentaries that I rather enjoyed. The first was called Shock Doctrine (based on a book by the same name), which was basically about how America has exploited different disasters of all kinds all around the globe over the past 50 years to implement free-market ventures that earned lots of money for American companies while completely neglecting (and sometimes even ruining) the lives of the people there. It was a little dry, but very interesting. The 2nd movie I saw was Michael Moore's new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, which provided a pretty humorous summary from the blue collar perspective on how our economy found itself in the state it is currently in and what it has done to the lower and working classes. I would highly recommend this film.

Good afternoon from Abu Dhabi,

Matt