Make Me Sway

Away on honeymoon with my teaching career.

In a total 180 from my first day, I find myself facing the weekend ungratefully...

This is what I started to write at the end of last week. Little did I know that there would be no need to miss my students over the weekend because it would fly by and school would start again before I knew it. Mondays are my most intense days - I teach 4 different subjects and to mostly younger kids, ie lots of lesson planning and grappling with squirmy little minds - so today I crashed for a 4-hour nap immediately upon arriving home. The most exhausting was my 5-year-old class for Singing, where their two supervisors and I tried to organize a simple dance routine to their selected performance number "I like to move it move it". I'm crossing my fingers that their animal costumes will turn out better than the dance routine and we can just wing it on stage. Only half of the class will play a game or dance at any given time, but when I don't have to accomplish something with them, I love just singing and dancing. They are sooo hilarious - doing the Macarena or singing "I like to move it move it" over and over while running or drawing or just generally wiggling.

In my other classes today we played Balderdash using mysterious pictures of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for my Going Green class, played rhyming games on relay teams and danced and sang with Michael Buble to "Sway" for my Let's Speak class, and played 2 truths and a lie plus endless random games to review good manners in my Social Skills classes. The hardest part about lesson planning for a summer camp is simply finding enough games to integrate into the topic and keep the kids engaged (because chaos will ensue as soon as I lose their interest in the lesson).

I've got a bunch of Going Green classes with older teenagers tomorrow, where I'm hoping to get a local perspective on the Zabbaleen issue. In Cairo there is a community of (very poor) people who have for decades collected and reused or recycled people's garbage for profit. It's estimated that 80% of what they collect gets reused or recycled, and only 20% goes to the landfill (granted they collect in wealthier communities). I'm sure the ratio will change now that the government slaughtered all their pigs with the illegitimate excuse of swine flu. None of the pigs had swine flu; many suspect it was just another government push to move them out of the city, maybe because their pigs and garbage are smelly and dirty, or maybe because they are Coptic Christian...just some theories I've heard. It's amazing how resourceful the Zabbaleen are, how essential to the overpopulated city (alongside private Western garbage companies that can't recycle nearly as much), yet how poor and unsanitary their lifestyles remain. All the work of sorting trash by hand means hepatitis and kids staying home from school to support their families. Fortunately a charity set up a trade school in the community where kids learn recycling techniques in addition to math, science, etc.

Looks like it's bedtime for the ol' teacher! I hope you're all making preparations for a riotous 4th of July so I can live vicariously through your celebrations. I may attend an expat cookout if I'm not at the summer camp field trip to the horse stables.