35: the # of staples I was allowed to use to staple the exams for my first class on Monday morning
45 + 49: the # of exams I had to give on Monday morning
Part of my excitement about being a teacher was admittedly/definitely linked to the exam portion of the school year. Not because I liked the idea of inflicting pain on the students by giving them an exam but because I actually liked the idea of creating the exam. Maybe that's weird of me. Maybe what I actually liked about the idea of being on the teacher side of Exam Week was that I started reminiscing about that post-Exam feeling of relief. Finishing an exam and handing it in always filled me with some sense of accomplishment (sometimes masking an awareness/dread about my performance on the exam) but the satiation with my own intellectual abilities was quickly overcome by the much more adrenaline-pumping realization that I WAS FREE!!!!! The Exam Weeks of my Middle/High School years were always deeply tied to that sense of freedom and relief experienced after an exam. For those hours immediately following the handing-in of an exam, I was seriously at ease (and usually treated myself to an overpriced Ciao Bella gelato). This relief? This freedom? Yeah, it absolutely and totally disappears when you're on the Teacher Side of Exam Week. As in it is utterly destroyed and reversed and the post-handing-in-of-the-exam feeling I was met with during Anuban's Exam Week was definitely not of the "Now I get to have a $7 cup of raspberry gelato!" variety.
A little bit less than 450 is the total number of exams I ended up grading in about 2 days. It was terrible. Namely because that's just a whole lot of sameness to be looking at for hours on end, but also because there's nothing quite as depressing as looking through a student's exam and seeing blankness or (sometimes an even worse feeling/realization about one's own abilities) the words of the questions' instructions copied down into the blanks. I should say, though, that that exam o' blankness happened about once in each of my nine classes which is, I think, pretty good considering my (admittedly very low) expectations of the performance on the exams. To refer to the statistical jargon of my psych studies, the data (ie exam scores) were normally distributed. Which is actually really great news and something that I'm proud of myself for accomplishing. But, at the same time, I should acknowledge that a fair amount of that middle-range grade percentile cheated. As in literally copied off one another's exams even while I stood over them and switched them around and made people sit outside or on the floor. Exam Week was an interesting experience, to say the least.
The week after Exam Week was my last week of teaching at Anuban so I used the last bits of class time to take some pictures of the students, all of whom were extremely excited about being in pictures and being around a digital camera that afforded them the opportunity to see themselves on the camera.
Still Life: Classroom
And here are some other random shots taken during my last week(s) at Anuban.
These briefcases-as-backpacks were the best part of mornings at school. Seriously hilarious/awesome.
No shoes allowed in classrooms, unless you're the teacher. (Which is good because I don't tend to want to be shoeless anywhere unless I have to be.)
Those large aluminum vats are usually filled with water and those trays are the kids' lunch trays. Sometimes there are huge tubs filled with ice and jack fruit and a black jell-o type thing that is supposedly incredibly healthy but tastes like a locker room so...your choice.
Schoolyard, Thai style.
Sometimes I really feel like colors in Thailand are just kicked up a notch, as Emeril would say.
As of early February, I was assigned to teach the kindergartners at Genius. They are adorable (as you will see in the pictures below) but also hands down the most energy-demanding-and-draining set of people with whom I've ever interacted. Ever.
Balloons for learning about colors and counting...and fun.
Some of the kids at Anuban, namely those who understood what I was talking about when I started rambling about going back to America in two weeks and miming being on a plane, made me going away cards...the best of which I want to share because they give me that Warm & Fuzzy feeling.
Genies are always great ways to show someone how much they meant to you...
And just because I only have about a week left in Thailand and maybe one more blog post (don't get too upset, o blog readers), I will end this post with a picture of the sky and a picture of the Holy Trinity (see last post for clarification).
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