Still In the Dark

Just got out of school for the day (it's 1:44pm here), and the new volunteer, Jackie, and I are sitting in Mokador coffee shop to escape the sauna that is our house. We are still without power, which is causing quite a problem as we still can't go to the bathroom, shower, or use the fans, the combined result of which makes our house unliveable. I don't know what the holdup is, here, electricity people. "Thai-time" must be it. Curse thai-time.

School today was really fun. We gave the kids a little test today to review some of the vocab we taught them in the last couple weeks before Robbie and Maggie give them the real test next week. We wrote things like "1. Boy, blue shirt, black pants, hat, shoes" on the board, and they had to draw a picture of what was described. We ran into slight issue in the 4th grade class when the table of girls wanted to draw girls instead of a boy, but they did it alright once we told them #2 was a girl.

Of course Bee, in 5th grade, was way above the curve, as usual, and wanted to make up her own description for #4. So we let her do it, and she made a really good one: "girl, purple dress, red slippers, green socks, orange glasses." It was a hard one to come up with, and she did a great job. It's kind of funny to me how proud we have become of the students when they surprise us like that. What felt really weird was that we marked/graded their work today. They all brought us their notebooks as they finished each assignment, and we graded them with a check or check-plus (nearly everyone got a check-plus if they tried at all), and it felt strange to do that. I guess I'd better get used to it.

The boys in the 5th grade class finished early and somehow began match after match of arm-wrestling with Robbie, who obviously destroyed them all. They had a lot of fun, though, and once beaten in arm-wrestling, moved on to be beaten in thumb-wrestling by Maggie. I think we've created the new sport-du-jour: I'm sure we'll be seeing them doing it all the time now!