Today was a day of behavior management. Since Mel is the
executive teacher for our department, she is called into classes when there are
excessive behavior problems. So we spent the morning with a class of year 8’s
in mandarin Chinese. It’s amazing to watch Mel go into a class that she doesn’t
know but be able to implement her authority and gain their respect. It’s also
amazing to see what some positive reinforcement does for both students and
teachers. She even gave me a chance to show what I knew by asking me to sit and
talk with a student who was refusing to come into the classroom. Unfortunately
I wasn’t successful with getting him in but the chat we had did give Mel and I
some insight into what the situation is and how it might be fixed. On top of
this, while we were trying to help in this room, several other teachers were
coming in because they needed Mel’s help as well. Suffice to say, it was a busy
morning.
Luckily our afternoon was an easy one. We had our usual Link
class where I helped a student write a poem about a monster that lives in her
closet who is afraid of the dark and then we watched Despicable Me with our
Year 9 class. I’ll admit though, I wasn’t paying much attention because I was
fairly wrapped up in a book. See, next term Mel is teaching Destroying Avalon by Kate McCaffrey and
she asked me to make a vocabulary list for her based on words from the book and
the list of the 100 most commonly misspelled words. So I started scanning the
book for significant words and then I started to read it and then I was
obsessed and read the entire thing the rest of the day. It’s really good! It’s
about a girl who moves to a new city and begins being cyber-bullied and how she
deals with it and how it affects her family and her friends. I would recommend
it to anyone who likes YA novels. It’s based in Australia so some of the
language is a little different but I think it adds to it.
Now, let’s play a game. It was Wednesday so what does that mean? Pizza
and uni night! Today was a little special though because it was our last
seminar on a Wednesday actually on campus. So to commemorate, I finally caved
and bought myself a $10 jug. I’m not much of a beer person though so I went
with jolly miller hard apple cider. Sooo good! And traditional ham pizza to go
with. Needless to say, I was a happy girl going into seminar. And I was even happier to find out that it was going to be a work night, which meant that I got to go home earlier since all my work is done! So after a quick debriefing,
a few of us got to head home and I was happily in bed before 9.
