Keeping my head above water.

I have literally 400 pictures from the snow festival. Since i'm only doing 1 every 2 days, I wont be able to get through them all. Here is another.

Work is getting better. For a quick minute this week I thought about quitting. Throwing in the towel and giving up. There was this girl who came for one day during the trial lesson, Hannah, who cried the first day. A month later, this past Monday, she came back to have another go. On the way down to the gym I lost her. I lost a kid.

I got all the students together, I thought Christine (co-teacher) had Hannah because she was taking a while to put on her shoes, and I took the rest of the kids down. When Christine came down, we realized no Hannah and went on a frantic search and rescue mission. She was gone.

We found out, like 10 minutes later, that she walked all by her self to her other school and just started crying. Needless to say, her parents were pissed and opted to pull her out of our school.

At the same time, the rest of my kids were going nucking futs. Running all over the place, not paying attention. I considered conceding myself as a bad kindergarten teacher and maybe trying to find an adult job or elementary school job. Something easier to handle.

I talked with Alex though, who has been doing this for a year now, and she gave me some tips. I've started laying down the law now and it's worked a lot better:

If someone does something bad, they say, "i'm sorry teacher"
If they want to talk they say, "excuse me teacher"
If they need to go to the bathroom they say, "Excuse me teacher, may I go to the bathroom?"

How did I get them in line?
Stickers.

Stickers man! Stickers!

Thats where the money's at. It's working for now, and i've got them under control, but just barely. Hopefully, it'll work for 11 more months.