Day 14 at St. Florence: Can I Borrow a Feeling?

a lot has happened since the school day ended, so i cannot rightly remember much about the day itself.

it was just one of those normal days, slogging through the schedule, doing menial tasks, eating lunch and listening to them talk about the season finales for Grey's Anatomy and ER. no one brought up the finale of The Office (which was SOO many flavours of emotional that i need to watch it again to parse through it all) so i didn't get to gush and natter like i wanted to. last hour of the day was spent supervising a boatload of children on the playground. we had like 3 classes out there, with classes from the neighbouring school rotating on and off. i didn't even know which kids belonged to which school. extended playground time, unfortunately, causes latent emotions to boil over, and we had lots of crying and yelling because of hurt feelings. i think i might be too sarcastic to take a child's emotional pain seriously. i remember what it was like back then; you feel everything three-fold, be it pain or happiness. i think it's a proportion thing; the smaller body of a child does not dilute and diffuse the physiological responses brought on by emotions quite as much as an adult-sized person would.

i think i just coasted through today. i didn't really have the mental or emotional energy to really put myself out there. i am now sick so i think i'm being told to refuel and slow down.

shinny hockey helped to clear my mind a bit, and allowed me to try out the new senior stick i bought. less back pain now that i have something longer; less rattly hands now that i have something stronger. it is with a bit of sadness that i retire my trusty Jofa. i take this to be a metaphor for myself. there are still certain mental/emotional tools or reactions that i've relied on since i was young, but they are no longer adequate. i need to spend at least as much time and care on upgrading those aspects of myself as i did on choosing this new stick.

it just occurred to me that i've been serving (churchwise) since Fall 2000. i think it is nigh time for a Sabbatical. i've done a lot of growing in those years, but not really in the departments where it counts (spiritual walk, devotions, God-centric worship). i also conveniently have some soul-searching i'd like to get started on.

Day 13 at St. Florence: Satisfaction

the students here are subjected to biannual testing in their aptitude for spelling. 32 common words are dictated, with a demonstrative sentence, and they are to spell it. i think the same list will be used for grade 2 as well. they take the test at the beginning of the year and again around Feb/March to track improvement. this year, the second round of the spelling test fell on today (well after Feb/March, we realize, but we do not care). the words were fairly simple, but phonetically tricky (good, soon, pretty, would, train etc.), so the test measured experience with words more than anything.

at the beginning of the year, a majority of the scores were 0 - 9, with three outliers hitting 16, 21 and 22 out of 32 respectively. the little cute boy (who licks himself) got 0 in October, and scored a 21 this time around. he talked throughout the test and supplied sentences at times ("would... would you like to kiss me?"). improvements like that were across the board. the kid who scored 16 the first time scored 31 today, only mispelling the final word pretty as 'pritty'. nerd girl (of pee-pee foot fame, was away again, so she did not play -- i assume she would know how to spell pretty). the girl who scored 22 actually transferred to another school the day before i first arrived. juding by the scores i've seen and the tones of veneration i hear when teachers and students speak of her, she must've really been something special.

putting those two scores side-by-side and seeing the huge leaps of improvement really make all the yelling and haranguing worthwhile.

Day 12 at St. Florence: Put on the Spot

this day was all about flying by the seat of my pants -- slow flying mind you, as i was verging on zombie again by 1:30.

the day started out, interestingly enough, where it left off the day before. nerd girl was absent (for the first time EVAR, so i'm told). we surmised it must have been an issue with getting peed on, a therapy session perhaps. her little brother in kindergarten was absent as well, but i found out about that a little later.

i was sent down to the office to ascertain the reason for nerd girl's absence. in the process of returning i was stopped by the kindergarten teacher, who reminds me a lot of someone who now lives in China, to take attendance for her class because a kid got hurt in the morning. the kids were neatly arrayed in a circle with their name cards on the ground or in their hands, sitting quietly, completely unsupervised until i got there. my, they were well-trained. taking their attendance was pretty fun; i only mangled three names. here is where i found out nerd girl's brother was also absent. they were both sick, according to later reports.
this wasn't the first time i'd been stopped to watch her class; yesterday, a kid got whapped in the head with a clock (not a real one) -- literally "clocked in the head" (kindergarten teacher and friend in the motherland pun alike), so i had to watch her kids as she fetched ice.

i got back to the grade 1s to find them in the middle of a probability lesson, concerning dice: which would occur more often when rolling two dice, doubles or non-doubles? well over their heads, i'm sure. my teacher introduced them to the dice and to the concept of doubles, then promptly handed off to me to explain which one showed up the most often. fortunately, my math did not completely fail me, though my chalkboard management skills did, as my list of possibilities (1|1,2,3,4,5,6...) verged on gross. i'm pretty sure no one got it, but we still had a high old time counting to 36. i have to learn to speak to the kids, not to the chalkboard. they start crawling all over each other once you turn your back. one tiny little boy, who is very, very cute in looks and mannerism and even voice, does the weirdest thing when he thinks no one is watching. when he raises his arm to answer a question, sometimes he'll lick his arm (like a cat). later i saw him licking his knee. these weren't little nips and dabs, they were long, langourous licks (like a cat). it cracked me and the other volunteer up.

yes, the other volunteer was in today. when little kids see a guy and a girl in the same setting more than once, they automatically assume romance is, or should be, in the air. i was prepared for this, due to years of Day Care. so Little Cute Girl asked me if i liked her, and if i would ask her out, etc. she seems way more concerned about my personal life than i am.

me - "do YOU like her?"
LCG - "yeah, but not like that!"
me - "i like her the same way."
LCG - "ooh."

and when one asks, everyone within earshot will ask too. ignore them and they won't pursue it further, because their attention spans are not that long.

Day 11 at St. Florence: Simple Pleasures

this post comes from my mom's computer, via Opera Portable. if you have a usb drive, i highly recommend finding a portable version of a web browser just in case your computer blows a tire (like mine seems to have) and requires a reformat. this one has all the features of a full Opera install, but doesn't leave any trace on the computer you use, has options for multiple profiles and is packed with all the speed inherent to the Opera browsing experience. i don't like browsing on the configurations of other people's browsers (it is usually the standard set up or overtweaked); it's like using their toilets.

anyways, about today. today was much better than yesterday, due to slighty more sleep and slightly less allergies and a few adventures to speak of.

i stuck around in teh staff room at lunchtime today because i was feeling better; as a result i am now privy to some really neurotic moments in the lives of the teachers i work with. it's like watching friends, and every character is a meld of Rachel and Monica. someone woke up last week to a mouse falling from her ceiling onto her shoulder, so she is mildly traumatized, traumatizing other mouse-haters by extension. mouse stories evolved to rat, raccoon, rabbit, cat, fox, coyote stories. i like animals.

i worked witht he special ed kids this afternoon so i missed out on some excellent excitement while the grade 1s went out to play while my teacher did more shotput tryouts. Fancy Dancer tried out and swept away the competition with a trial distance of over 12 m with a 4 kg shot. my teacher thinks he's on steroids; i think he's a robot. the other fun time i missed was pyro-boy deciding on a whim that he needed to pee, so he let it fly off the top of the slide and it hit the nerdiest, most legalistic girl in the class on the foot. she tattled. the girl who is absolutely in love with pyro-boy told off nerd girl for getting her beau into trouble, so nerd girl got really upset and threw a fit. my teacher whapped me with her clipboard later for laughing at her and abandoning her at such a crucial juncture.

while all this was going down, i made a paper airplane and helped some kids with their homework on interplanetary objects while finishing the day's crossword.

throughout the day i tried to make note of the simple things that i appreciate and enjoy (much like Amelie). i've taken a shine to watering the little plants we jiffy potted on Friday; watching the soil soak up water is rather sublime. one has already sprouted and i stared at it for a good 2 minutes just amazed at life. i potted some extra jiffy pots with soil but they have no seeds and receive no water. they are my control group. they are also there just in case God wants to pull off a flashier miracle.

Day 10 at St. Florence: Taking a Dip in Post Quality

this morning was the pits. i woke up rather sore. allergies were acting up in class. the window was open and the weather was cold. i could have fallen asleep on my feet due to last night's late dinner and Boggle-fest. walking down the hall i actually thought to myself, "someone is having a case of the mondays," before i mentally slapped myself for quoting someone annoying from Office Space.

i zombied through the first half of the day before taking a cat nap in the corner of the room after eating lunch to get me past 3:30. the last half hour of the day was spent doing shotput tryouts, which was decent fun. hefting the 4kg shot around the school woke me up a bit.