Deskwarming/Winter Camp

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It's been awhile since I have written and updated this blog. I apologize. I have been pretty lazy recently and have been working on finalizing my English winter camp that I had to do for winter break. The kids officially finished school and classes the Friday before New Year's so ever since then I have been planning a winter camp and making final revisions. They basically gave me no instructions. All I knew was it was going to be 5 days for a couple hours a day and I can do whatever I want. Pretty specific. So the first day of Winter Camp finally arrived and I had no idea what was going on. The teacher that took the order for my supplies was nowhere to be seen, there was no heat in the English zone, I had no idea how many kids were going to be there, and they changed the hours on me. So we all went to lunch at a local restaurant and came back to find that we would be in one of the classrooms where the heat was supposed to work, which it didn't.

The first day was an utter disaster. I had 20 kids, no one really wanted to do anything besides talk to their friends and play on their phones. No one would listen and I would have to constantly tell them to be quiet. We started at noon and at 2pm I had run out of things to do so I sent them home. They were overjoyed that they got out early and ran to the nearest PC room to play computer games. I was just happy that I survived the day only to realize that my plan for the next 4 days were not going to work out well and I had a lot of work to do.

I analyzed the information I had and what worked from the day and what didn't. Then I set to work modifying all the previous work I had done to make it better for the kids and for my sanity. I won't go into depth about this because it isn't too exciting and I don't really want to relive winter camp again. But basically the first thing I did was to take away their cell phones which helped out tremendously! Then I threw in some more games that required some movement and thinking and then of course a couple Youtube videos and that seemed to be the formula that worked best in the long run.

Overall it was really hard to get the class to listen and behave without a co teacher there to yell at them when they were getting loud but it was really good for me to just be in the classroom having to enforce the rules and make sure the kids weren't talking in the back. When your co teacher is there, they just take care of that you just teach but this time it was all me for everything. It was a great learning experience and I think this hell week will help me with teaching next semester. It also gave me valuable tips for when summer camp comes around for what to do and what no to do.

Now that Winter camp is over there is nothing else to do but sit around. The kids left at the end of December and won't come back until the first or second week in February where they will come back for a week of classes and then they have graduation and then go home for the remainder of the month. So technically, I don't officially start teaching until March. The teachers here call it 'deskwarming.' Basically you sit around all day and watch Youtube videos, movies, read, sleep, eat, surf the internet, Facebook. It gets really boring, really fast. For our contract we have to be here to earn our pay. But there is truly no point in being here. 3/4 the teacher's aren't here either. I've been here for 5 hours today and I'm already beyond bored. Thankfully I have a list of things that I would like to accomplish in my downtime. That and I have been doing a lot of research on the Philippines. I will be heading there with a couple friends on Friday for a 12 day vacation for some island hopping, beaches, and jungles. Needless to say that I am extremely excited to get out of this cold weather and to someplace where your officewear is simply a bathing suit and sunglasses! I will have to share with you guys a blog or two about the Philippines when I get back into town (if I ever come back!).

Pretty soon I will have some more interesting blogs for you guys. I need to go on some more interesting adventures to spice the blog up!

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