sickA-sensei's USB key had been missing for a few days, and she asked us to keep an eye out for it. I joked that we have a saying, "It's always in the last place you look." She thought for a second, and then she got it. She found the USB key a few minutes later, at the bottom of her bag. "Thank you so much!" she exulted. "It's in my bag, and that is the last place I looked!"
I had Life class with the First Years seventh period. Kill me with a hammer. Erasers flying, Japanese speaking, pencil cases falling - it was a mess. One girl even wrapped up some paper into a makeshift miniature noisemaker and tweeted it incessantly until I caught on.
To be fair to them, they weren't interested in what I was trying to get them to do, and I started off in an arcane fashion. I tried to get kids to read aloud from the handout for the rest of the class, and it was a disaster - in the two seconds it took for me to glance down and help a student with a word, there'd be ruckus all over the place. It was like being the Little Dutch Boy with his thumb stuck in the hole in the dam.
I got a plurality of the class working, somehow, but by then it was 3:00.
I felt like a disgrace to teaching. Aside from the fact that it was a learning experience for me, the whole thing was a waste of time all around - there were about a million things that the students and their teacher would rather have been doing.
Such is work.
