hey all,
The last two days have gone pretty well. But first, the week in recap. This whole week I've been given out evaluation tests to my new PM students. They showed that we need a lot more work on vocabulary, and that reading comprehension is mostly not there. But at least I've got a picture of where my students are now.
My AM class has gone better and better. There was one young boy (three years old), who was very disruptive and I finally had enough and asked him to leave the room. It is one thing to act bored, disrespectful, and make noises and distract other students. It is another to do it after being asked not, then told not to, and to still persist after being punished (made to stand or go to the corner) for it. I sense that there are sibling issues involved. His older brother is the compliant one, so to distinguish himself, he turns himself into the rebel.
So he is gone. We've moved him to a lower level class, where hopefully he can be a star and help the other students instead of disrupting because the level is over his head. But my students are by no means angels with him gone. However, I've been reading through The Teach Like a Champion Field Guide, which covers a bunch of techniques for establishing classroom routines, setting high expectations and communicating them, and for maintaining students' attention and behavior. So every day I scroll through it on my Android during my morning commute, and I pick a few techniques to focus on for the day.
Friday went really smoothly, mostly because of those techniques.
On a separate note, I also went to the dentist. He just jumped right in and started drilling three or four teeth after I explained that I was having some pain on the back teeth. He explained that my crowns were probably bashing into each other while chewing, or while grinding my teeth in my sleep (something my previous dentist also mentioned). He he started rounding and smoothing the edges of them. I think, however, that one of the crowns will have to be replaced. This is the crown that came out while I was in Amsterdam. It has been gradually losing its porcelain coating, and now on the top it is mostly metal showing.
That's all for now.
Cheers,
