First Day of School

My alarm went off at 6am, and in a few minutes the water for my coffee was heating. I pushed off on "Sweet-n'-smooth" (my bike) at around 7 just as the sun was about to rise. The ride over to the school is a short 8 min ride and very pleasant early in the morning.

School starts at 8am, and getting there at 7 I expected things to be a buzz of activity. Instead, all I found was the 'lunch lady' there parked in her car outside a locked gate. We waited around for a while until Mrs. Bailey drove up and let us through with her key.

I got set up, and started to meet my students as they began to drift in. One new mother kept telling me how bad her son was at math, and I kept ignoring her.


School started at 8am with most of the 10 seats filled. I launched into little welcome lecture...talked about myself a little...talked about the goals for the year...talked about their responsibilities, etc. I tried to treat them like adults with the hope they would act like it. It only half worked. They were very well behaved and very serious during class. But the fact that they were all 12 years old kept popping out.








Here's my class!



They had to take this government test today to assess where they are at now, and then they will take it again at the end of the year and see how much they've improved. So today I didn't have to prepare much...just pass out the test and sit back for a couple hours.

Then they had to have their pictures taken for the year book and IDs. That took a good hour and a half.

To top things off, during the last hour of class, there was a power outage. In about 5 minutes after the lights when out, the sticky heat started to pour in. Soon I was sweating and had to loosen my tie. Kelly came in and said, "Mr. Moore welcome to the Bahamas!" and then just laughed as I panted in the heat.

So out of the whole day, I really only taught for about 2 hours. We started into The Call of the Wild, and I assigned the first chapter as homework. I have to do a oral portion of the government test tomorrow. Should be kind of boring for the kids, and tedious for me...but it's just one of those hoops you've got to jump through.

I didn't leave school until about 5pm. There was a huge tropical downpour right when I wanted to head home. Kelly offered to drive me home and leave my bike at school. It was raining so hard that by the time I got from the car to my front door and jumped inside, I was literally drenched to the bone.

For some reason I had no real lesson prep to do tonight, so I rested, took a short nap, and went on a run over to Paradise Island to get a little dose of American culture.

The last adventure of the day was finding my first cockroach. I was so excited, I took a picture of it...and then promptly killed it.