First Bingo Night

Last night was the big PTA Bingo Night at school. It is a HUGE deal and the whole community comes out. It's $6 for a ticket and then you can win fancy prizes like ipads, plane tickets, big gift certificates. In between bingo games, they would call out things like "first 5 kids wearing a blue shirt to the back table win a prize" and all the little kids would sprint to the table, pushing and shoving each other...it was quite dangerous. I didn't stay long because it was a little overwhelming, I just wanted to say hello to some of my students and it was so strange to see them not wearing their uniforms. I didn't win anything but in the time I was there, they only played a few games.

So this last week was a long one with lots of tension between teachers and intense meetings with people getting upset with each other. The 5th grade team consists of me, another american who is new this year, another 1st year teacher that is salvadorian and 3 salvadorians that have been teaching here for at least 5 years. Everyone is very opinionated and thinks that things should be done a certain way so I just choose to keep my mouth shut most of the time. However, this week I just couldn't take it.

We have to give semester exams in December....yes, cumulative semester exams to 5th GRADERS!! It's a little ridiculous if you ask me but I'm just going with the flow. So we were trying to get the study guides ready for the students and talk about what the exams are going to be. Well, the writing exam is that the students are given a prompt and they have to write a paper from beginning to end. They have to brainstorm, make an outline, edit,revise and then publish. So no one told me or the other new teachers that this was what the exam was going to be like so we have only done one assignment that we have taken through the whole process. One of the other salvadorian teachers has done 3-4 papers through the whole process so her students will obviously do better than ours! Same with math, we all agreed to give the same math tests at the end of each topic and then at the meeting the other day, she told us that she has been giving a different test. WHAT? We all decided to give the same one! Grrr

Everything with my class and my students is going very well it's just challenging in our teacher meetings at times. This weekend is going to be very relaxing. It's the first weekend in a long time that i have NOTHING planned and I can't wait. I have some work to get done but I plan on just laying by the pool and sitting around doing nothing, can't wait. Less then 5 weeks and i'll be home!! Hope everyone has a great weekend. Miss you all!