Day 378

Wednesday December 30

One of my teeth started hurting last night. I didn't have any pain medicine in my apt so I kept waking up at different times in the night. I think I might have a cavity. I'll go to the dentist soon (after I get paid!). I went to the pharmacy today and got some pain medicine.

Tomorrow I'm going to the American Embassy to renew my passport. I have to get up early so I'll have time to go. They are only open on new years eve from 8:30am till 12:30pm.

My first class was good. I started out class by having the boys write their spelling words 3 times each so it would be fresh on their mind before the test. Then we took the test. The new student is doing great. He made a perfect score on his test. The other student made a 20. I just don't know what to do to help that student. I go over the words numerous times. He just cant ever remember how to spell them. Today we learned a new set of words. They did good on all of the activities in class.

My 2nd class was good. Today we were taking a writing test. All of the students were asking me for help on the test. So I'd help one and then 2 or 3 would call me at the same time. I couldn't remember who called me first so I just helped them randomly. They did a good job.They loved one of the questions on the test. It was a question about proper nouns. They had to find the proper noun and change it to make it correct. (it was in lowercase letters so they had to make sure it was capitalized.) The question was "valerie is my teacher." They all made a comment about that. haha. One of the boys kept telling me I was a kind teacher.

My 3rd class was good. We had a writing test. They did okay. The boy made an 84 and the girl made 68. Then we read a selection from the newspaper called "English Letters". I gave them some questions to answer about what they read. Then we had free time and they played hangman.

My last class wasn't on their best behavior today. I made them work all the way up till class ended. Today we were doing the newspaper class. We talked about The Maldives, Solna Centrum Metro, A group like Girls Generation in China, and Toronto. They were asking for a game. They have to be good to get a game. They weren't listening, they were getting out of their seats, throwing things at each other,they weren't reading along as a class. They still kept asking for a game. I told them the whole class has to be good to get a game. There were a few people who were ruining it for everyone. One kid asked me if I was angry. I said yeah. I was a little. Then another kid said I should cry. I'm not going to cry over their bad behavior. Then another student said I could go home and cry. haha.

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve. I don't have any plans. There was an event I would like to go to, but its just too cold to be standing outside waiting for the new year and I'd be afraid I wouldn't be able to get the subway home. Some of the subways stop running around midnight.