Yesterday morning I went on the bus route (or root as it’s called). I like doing so provided that I slept enough the night before. It requires getting up around 5:30 and I’m not sure I could deal with the early morning kids if I were under slept. Anyways, it’s great seeing where all of the kids live and all the different areas.
The school day started with marking more exams! I thought it was over, but I guess it was just the start. Kids in class 4 and 7 (both kids I’m staging with—Jovin and Rebecca—are in those classes, respectively) are now having to take national exams. For them this means staying 2 hours extra everyday and adding Saturday to the much dreaded week. I couldn’t imagine having a 1 day weekend in middle school, I think I would’ve dropped out! For some teachers, me included, this means staying extra hours as well and getting home quite late. More on that later, what I was trying to say is this: The students in class 4 and 7 have national exams in 9 months, so they will be practicing all year long by taking frequent, school administered, exercise exams. So I have that to look forward to! But yesterday was actually great. Once I finished with the exam marking (which took a couple hours), I went to review it in class with students and then taught a bit of a lesson.
The rest of my day at school (from 2:00 until 5:30—yes, 5:30, remember the remedial class thing?) was spent individually placing keyboard stickers over Chinese printed keys on the new laptops the computer lab got. This task was extremely trivial and required no thinking at all, so I was able to listen to some music and a podcast! The computer room has a speaker (so they can play recorded readings of books) and I was able to jam out!
After remedial classes ended, all the kids were taken home on a new bus route. Boy was this fun! It took well over an hour and a half to figure out the new root for the remedial kids and it might have had something to do with the kids having to direct the driver to their houses (and decide among themselves the best—not necessarily most efficient) way to map us. Seeing the new areas was great and definitely the most exciting part of my day!
After getting home past 7, I was pretty burnt. I practiced guitar for a while until dinner. After that I went right to bed. Well, not right to bed; I showered, worked on a project, read, and then passed out.