"Don't smile until Christmas."
It is best to be strict with kids until the holiday break in December. You can always get nicer; you can't get meaner. I have trouble doing this, but I'm around teachers who have high expectations of their students. This includes pushing in chairs, lining up quietly, and other things you remember from elementary school. To put it aptly, my boyfriend said, "Do you mean that some of the mean teachers I had in school were doing it on purpose??" Yes.
"It is a zillion degrees in this room, but Japan has made me mighty."
The last hot weeks of the summer have coincided with school this week, and it gets to the mid 80s inside our room. To cope, we turn off the florescent lights, spray the children with water (like cats) and give them ice cubes after recess. We also melt a lot and get less done. Japanese public schools out in Bumbleberry, Japan (aka: Ine-cho, see White Chocolate Geisha Blog) have neither central heating nor cooling; in the summer all of the windows are simply opened, and in the winter kerosene stoves are hauled into the classrooms. It is brutal. Japanese weather conditions have trained me for Seattle extremities, and I find 83ยบ afternoons to be "balmy," not "god awful." Similarly, ice cold mornings in the rooms during which the temperatures hover around the mid 50s, I simply see as "refreshing and cool," and adjust my undersweater™ and long-johns.
Kids say weird $&*@!
"When I grow up, I want to be a teacher, a librarian, a principal, or a billionaire or a landlord and own a big piece of land."I am trying to think of a good analogy for this week, and am coming up short. I suppose the first week of school is like a student film; you really assume it's all going to come together at some point and make sense, but then, suddenly, it's over.
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