11/21/12-It's Hard To Stay Mad At Kids

My SS1 girls have been around for about 2 weeks now. My workload has increased to a legit full load of classes.......Peace Corps actually expected me to work?!?! Lol! WTF!?!

During most of Term1, I only taught all streams of SS3 once a week and would substitute all over the place so I never had that regular interaction with the same set of students. So here I am now, the core math teacher for SS1, all streams: art, commercial, semi-science, and pure science.

I have my good and my bad days with them. For the most part, I think I'm fairly strict but the girls seem to like me regardless, lol. I get really frustrated at times when I just feel like I'm talking to a room full of dead carcasses. It's hard but I know it's only because they are results from the rote teaching method.

My SS1 girls range anywhere from 14-18, the annoying defiant teenage stage, but it's hard to hate them, haha! I've grown to really love the girls at OLGSS. Everyday, I always hear a girl yell out, "Ms. Paskal!!!", waving their hand frantically at me, lol. I have them call me Ms. Paskal b/c Pascual was too difficult to pronounce. It's really cute, it's like, wow, these are MY girls. And now that I see my SS1 girls 4 times a week, I can see how the favorites start forming. They're not always necessarily the smartest ones either. This one girl Rebecca, she tells people that she loves me, asks me to be her mother at least once a day and when I'm teaching in the next classroom over she peeks in for god knows what reason, lol. Today, her class had a ghost teacher so she even snuck into my class even though I JUST taught her the previous period. I'm like, what in heck are you doing you crazy girl, get out if my class!!! Lol.

Rebecca is just one of the many stories. In the end, these girls are still just kids and they mean well. Sometimes I want to wring their necks when they act like crazy caged animals or silent dead cows, but they're kids......I love'em. Probably, the same goes with them. They seem to really love me even though I can be an überbitch most of the days, haha.

The principal is going to have me follow these girls to SS2 so I will be them for the next 2 years. I'm excited to really get to know these girls and hopefully I'll be able to teach them some Math too, lol.