In Which Daniel, Having Eaten Three Tuna Melts and Working on his Third Hoegaarden, Reflects on his Experiences as a Teacher Thus Far

First let me say this: the tuna melts alone would have been sufficient reason to marry [NAME REDACTED TO MAKE IT MORE DIFFICULT FOR STUDENTS TO STUMBLE UPON THIS BLOG BY GOOGLING MY WIFE'S NAME]. As it was, I don't think I ever had one of her tuna melts before we were married, so it turned out to be just icing on the cake after all.

It's Friday evening, a quarter to eight; it will probably be well after eight by the time I post this. Leslie and I have finished supper. I washed enough bowls and spoons for both of us to have ice cream; it turned out we didn't have much left, so Leslie finished it off. She's watching Amélie as we both sit in the living room. I'm glad it's the weekend.

We've now been teaching for two weeks. I'd like to think I'm beginning to get the hang of it. Certainly, I haven't had any moments as awkward as the time on the first day when I ran out of things to do a good fifteen minutes before social studies class ended and told my class, "well...I don't have anything for you to do...so you can sit quietly in your desks until the bell rings...actually...you might as well be working...uhh...answer questions 1-3 on page 12." That was the low point so far. Although I don't think any of my creative writing students were too impressed with my idea of going through the first page or so of "The Landlady" by Roald Dahl, with all the paragraph separations taken out, to try and decide what would have made good paragraph divisions. I'm learning, I guess.

The secret of teaching, if I understand my mentor Nathan correctly, is not to run out of things to do. That does seem to be a hard part about it for me. My tendency towards disorganization is another Achilles' heel (can one have more than one Achilles' heel?). Another one (now I have three heels, apparently, all of them vulnerable to attack from Trojan archers) is my tendency not to explain minor (or major) details that are obvious to me, but not necessarily to anyone else, certainly not to eighth graders who do not have English as their first language.

I have been a little distressed so far by the number of kids who don't turn their homework in. I think it's partially my tendency to project myself onto my students: when three or four of my students don't turn their homework in, I get to wondering if I didn't make it clear enough that it was to be turned in. The fact that I have all the same kids each day, but have some of them for English Language Arts and some for social studies on an alternating basis, doesn't exactly help me keep things straight, either. I'm sure things will improve as the year goes on, I get more into the rhythm, I get more things in my gradebook, and missing a single homework assignment isn't quite so fatal for a student's grade in my class.

In English Language Arts, we've been reading "Flowers for Algernon" this past week. In social studies, we've been studying the basics of geography. I gave them their first project, which was to create their own country, draw a map of it, and answer questions about it based on the Five Themes of Geography. This drew a wide range of responses, from the disappointingly mundane to the wildly imaginative; one young man created an underwater country in a post-global-warming future world, inhabited by one hundred forty million mermaids, half of whom are scientists and half of whom are engineers. Grading those projects will be my main task this weekend.

Leslie, of course, is thriving; she's so good at anything she puts her hand to, and is really a born teacher. I think I'm improving too. Both of us are getting more and more used to living in Korea. But I don't know if either of us could do this for the rest of our lives! (Well...Leslie probably could. But I don't know about me!)