One of my students is, I feel, a typical example of any student in any teacher's classroom: the one that cannot sit still. Have you ever met/been one of these? It is driving me off the walls. I have all the materials set out for our lesson, and no matter how fun a game we are playing, she manages to pick up whatever is in front of her, say, a marker, and have more interest in that. But I feel like she is a case I can deal with. What I am having the most trouble with is being a personal confidant to my students. One girl confessed yesterday to being bullied by a boy in her class. She broke down in tears and told us she had been beaten up by him before, more than once, and is constantly harassed. But none of her other classmates are brave enough to stand up to him. She found the confidence with another supervisor to go and tell her teacher, so thank goodness the staff of the school know and I pray they are going to do something about it. School bullying has got to be stopped, please be on the look out for it in your local schools and pray for the children affected by it.
Another one of my students is another classic example: the one you think you will not get along with at all and then end up being the closest to. She has an extremely limited vocabulary, so we work on that every lesson, but when I first met her I just assumed she hated me because she didn't say anything. She had been at Springboard last year and had a different tutor, so I just assumed she was sad that her tutor was gone and now she was stuck with me, the American with a weird accent who makes bad jokes. But now every time I see her she greets me with a hug, and yesterday she gave me the two notes I have attached below. It was so sweet and made me feel like I'm actually making a difference!
On a completely different note, I have been able to see much more of London, and even got to go to Bath thanks to my wonderful friends back at St Olaf! I went for the Jane Austen Festival, and about died from happiness. Seriously, the only bad part of that day was that I didn't have a costume to wear.
Yesterday was another YAGM's birthday, Nathaniel, so he came to London and my housemate Klara and I took him out on the town. It was wonderful! We went to places we always wanted to go to but had never been to, like Covent Garden, and it was completely by accident. We found an outdoor market and one stall was selling mulled wine. The owner came up to us and we started chatting, he was very nice and a fountain of food knowledge (so many more places to go try now) and after he found out we were full time volunteers in England he gave us free mulled wine! It was amazing and smelled like Christmas. Since we didn't have a map, we just walked around aimlessly after that. It was perfect. And we found where to get half price theatre tickets. Score!
I hope everyone is doing well, and if you're ever in London, or anywhere near it, let me know! I love visitors!
Peace-
Erin
Pictures one of my students drew me :)
Also, why we need to teach them literacy.
