Please don't run with chopsticks!

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First of all, I apologise for any typos in this entry, I’ve stayed up writing Toy Story 4, the amazing play that my class are going to perform on Friday and planning tomorrow’s event, which will hopefully run like clockwork.



Today I have so much to write and rant about that I’m not quite sure were to begin! At 8.40 am team 2 said hi to Billy our bus driver (I still find it bizarre that our bus driver has the same name as my dog). Rosa had an announcement to make: during the afternoon we must not let the children use scissors! It turns out that yesterday evening, one of the parents had sent a photo to the school director because their child<span> had tried to give himself a cheap haircut which had resulted in a nice bald patch right in the centre at the front of his head!



At the school (if you can even call it that) I learnt from yesterday’s mistakes and improved upon my seating arrangement. My form group arrived one by one and I improvised and taught them my favourite song from primary school to keep them entertained whilst they waited for their remaining classmates.



Damian arrived, the class pointed out that he had had a haircut, I later found out that the other boy who had cut a bald patch in his hair had been Damian’s twin and the boys had both been given a “Mackay spre-varsity style” haircut to try and hide the twins bald patch and to keep the twins looking identical!



During my drama class, I made my first fatal error of the day: two boys in my class were trying to sit in the same chair, I said “so who’s going to be the bigger man and move to a chair over here?” Unfortunately, one of the boys was rather on the chubby side and thus my comment resulted in the other boy pointing at the fat boy and shouting “she said the bigger man has to move, haha, you’ve got to move.” This ended in the whole class giggling at the poor boy. Feeling terrible about this situation, I ended up spending the next ten minutes teaching them English phrases that couldn’t be taken literally such as “raining cats and dogs” and “who’s going to be the bigger man?” and explaining what they actually meant.



My next lesson was about the zoo, first I had to teach Francis’ angelic class, we sang “we’re all going to the zoo tomorrow” which they loved! I think my only mistake in this lesson was accidently teaching them the word “hump”. I was trying to elicit the word “camel” and said “it has a hump” at which point they all started repeating “hump, hump, hump” at the top of their voices!



Now it was time to teach Mareeka’s class and, after meeting them for the first time yesterday, I was genuinely terrified waiting for them to arrive. What a turn around! I thought that, being the cool kids that they are, they might laugh at my lesson on the zoo, but despite grumbling when I first explained the activity, they all really got into it and were even making up their own verses.



Now for lunchtime – what a nightmare! After Rosa’s request for us to be able to eat lunch alone had fallen on deaf ears, we made a huddle in the centre of the room to protect ourselves from the children (obviously this is an exaggeration but the noise levels were quite ridiculous!) If I’m being completely honest, I felt sorry for the kids at this point; they had an hour for lunch and after they had finished eating they had to spend the remaining time cooped up in a hall with no form of entertainment. I felt even worse when the organiser announced that anyone caught running around in the hall would be sent home and not allowed to attend for the rest of the week.



We decided to change tactics today and start the afternoon with a quiet activity to try and calm the little monsters down! My class seemed to enjoy “English whispers,” although I didn’t quite understand why they found the phrases “the man is fat” and “the man is thin” so hilarious.



The afternoon event was bridge building; we had an hour to build the strongest, most beautiful bridge. One of my troublemakers volunteered to be “head designer” and I decided I’d give him the opportunity to prove to me he wasn’t an annoying little brat! For the first time all week, he really got involved and showed some enthusiasm and seemed genuinely upset when we didn’t win. Not that I’m competitive or anything but I was proud of them for winning full marks for beauty! It’s very sweet when a child that you’ve barely known for two days draws a poster entitled “Abi’s star bridge” and I think are bridge was genuinely beautiful (even if one of my “design team” had inadvertently drawn the gay pride flag and insisted on sticking it right in the middle of the bridge.)



Finally it was home time, the woman who was running the camp was shouting down the microphone to no avail, presuming that she was shouting for them to be quiet, we took it upon ourselves to quieten them down only to realise that she was actually shouting a child’s name and she proceeded to do this one at<span> time for 120 students – it was such an awful system!



Sometimes I think I care too much; I felt genuinely angry at the organisation when I found a child trying to eat from a box of pasta which had been sat open for the past three hours in the warm room – as much as they can be irritating, I didn’t want them to get food poisoning and I just felt as if the establishment really weren’t doing their job.<span> Furthermore, I was slightly infuriated to find out that the two women were running this complete as a business venture and making money when they were doing absolutely nothing to help and relying on us volunteers.

So that’s enough of a rant on that one! On the bus we all exchanged stories from the day and I leave you with my favourite extremely harsh but hilarious account of the kids ganging up on a teacher. One of the children asked “Mr Francis, are you a man or a woman?” another piped up, “ well he has hair like a girl and speaks like a girl.” At which point another interrupted and pointed at his armpits, “no, there’s water there, he must be a man, he sweats like a man.” Poor Franny.

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