First Week of School!!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10:
Today was our first day of school and what an easy day it was! Because I'm a "special", meaning I teach 6th grade ESL (Language Arts) and Spanish I and II, I don't have a homeroom. Today, was mainly spent with your homeroom teaching touring the school, retrieving books from the library, reviewing the Parent/Student Handbook, and the like.

For me, I was able to finish setting up my room all morning and I finally met with the 6th grade Language Arts classes at 12:00 pm. There are three classes, but I'll only have a total of 12 students in my ESL class. The class is designed for students who have difficulty with English, so during the mainstream Language Arts class, they come up to my room for a modified course.

I also had a 45-minute Spanish II class in the afternoon. I have a whopping 5 students and they're all juniors and seniors, so I anticipate being able to do a lot of fun activities! We spent the period getting to know one another and briefly introducing what to expect.

It was an extremely easy day, I'm actually excited to work with the kids more. I would get pretty bored with this lax of a schedule, but for day one it was nice :)

THURSDAY, AUGUST 11:
This morning Leah and I missed the Sky Train by about 30 seconds! So, we hopped in a cab to drive us to the On Nut station where the school bus picks us up. Well, due to our lack of Thai, the driver turned just before the station thinking that we wanted to go to On Nut ROAD! NO! He stopped, but it was too late and because he didn't know how to get to our school on the outskirts, we had to jump into another cab who then drove us to school. But, we made it :)

I was able to meet all 10 of my Spanish 1 students today. They are very nice and range from freshmen to one lonely senior, Lee, who I can already tell is a character. He asked me if he could get back to me on selecting his Spanish name because it required further discussion with his girlfriend! Very funny kid. I gave him the okay and he'll fill me in on Monday, as tomorrow is already a holiday, the Queen's birthday. Not bad, getting a holiday already during the first week of school :)

It was another easy day, as my ESL kids didn't come to class...not sure why their 6th grade teacher kept them, but I guess I'll meet them on Monday. You just go with the flow around here. I don't even have a class list for my Spanish classes yet and I was unable to pick up my Spanish 2 teacher edition textbooks, so I'm not sure what we'll be covering, but hopefully I'll find that out during week 2 of school. I've taught Spanish 2 before and it's all typically similar, so no worries. Both of the international schools I've taught at run this way, but at least TCIS has an excuse, all of the administrators are new, so they're just learning the ropes and finding out how things work, as well.

So far, so good! The teachers have arranged a Happy Hour in our neighborhood of Thong Lo after school today, so that should be fun to check out. Leah and I haven't gone out since we got here. We've been too tired and Leah doesn't drink...of course, I'm not a big fan of socializing either - haha! Some of you are wondering what they've done with the old Shelly :):)