Day 23 (Nov 30 Thu)

I was to facilitate the CRC meeting this morning and I kinda screwed up because I had assumed (very, very bad habit here) that all the materials were already present and I just had to go up and do my job. I'm not sure why I didn't even check it over on Tuesday and just gone with the flow, or rather, my flow but it was a bad choice. I had to bail myself out somehow. Christine was great at helping me suggest we do something else and I am so thankful I managed to think on the spot and change the agenda 5minutes before the meeting started. Gosh, that was really terrible of me but it went well. Some of the teachers brought up stuff that we had initially found only the Harvard interns talking amongst ourselves and we were glad that came off. Couple of people encouraged me and said that it was a job well done but I was too ashamed to even acknowledge what happened.

Anyway, I got back to class pretty early today. Had a period break before 312 came in. I wasn't sure if I still hadn't gotten their respect as a co-teacher in class but the noise level went way too high. I tried to talk to each table individually and asked the students to cooperate but well, before that came to pass, Karen, who was fuming mad, had photocopied the school rules and got the whole class to copy all the rules out 5times. That reminded me of how we had to copy our homework 10times whenever we forgotten it or when we misbehaved (which wasn't often.) The class went silent - it was interesting how these students who were so noisy 3minutes ago could be capable of putting their heads down and seriously doing their work. I wonder if my teachers would grade the handwriting of the copied homework or handed them back for re-dos if it turned out real bad. In my mind, I wasn't sure if I should feel happy that they were punished or sad that I couldn't control the class by myself.

The rest of the class went ok. We collected their homework since we didn't have time to go over and I helped Karen mark while she was going over the school rules and later, the rules of the game the students were going to play. Some of them still had problems with angles - I wasn't sure where they were coming from because the questions seemed pretty straightforward. The last question Karen asked before she dismissed them was "Is a rectangle a square?" and "Is a square a rectangle?" - These questions got the class hyped up once again, trying to argue what they thought. I came up with the analogy that 'vans are cars' but 'cars aren't vans'. =)