I-to-I day nine: Bored

Sunday 27^th February 2011

MP3 track of the day: Suite two - Band of Brothers

Weather: Hot and sticky

I awoke not feeling great, my cold still had a grip on me. After a shower I did start to feel human again and I made my way to meet the other two for breakfast and then off to the Killing Fields. On my way downstairs I met Sandy (one of the girls going to the killing fields with me today). She was completely white and I knew something wasn't right; she told me that she had a temperature of 102, she had been ill during the night and that she felt as though she was burning up. She asked me to take her to one of the other volunteer's rooms and call Kim-lee (our organizer) for help. I took her up to the third floor to Helen's room. I then went back downstairs and asked the receptionist to phone Kim-lee as instructed. I sat down, ate breakfast, and waited for Kim-lee to turn up.

Once here Kim-lee went up to see Sandy and decided to immediately take her to a travel clinic. With Sandy went the another girl, who was going to go to the Killing Fields with me today. I wished her well. I decided that, as I was now the only one out of the group still able to visit the fields, I would postpone the visit rearranging it for next weekend. I went to the tuk-tuk driver and explained the situation; he was okay.

I came back in and got on with my work. First of all the usual surfing the web took place (with a look to see which nation is uprising today) before getting onto some lesson planning. I had pretty much covered all of unit eight last week; I checked the syllabus in the back of the text book to see that there was only two areas left to cover:

• Asking, and describing, what someone else was doing

• body parts

The latter was easy, 'head, shoulders, knees and toes' would be involved with a drawing of a human on the whiteboard. I would drill the individual body parts listed within the text book. Asking and describing what someone else was doing would require further thought. My end goal was to get two students to talk about another student within the class, for example:

Student A - Hello (name of student B). Where's (name of student C)?

Student B - (He's / She's) at the park.

Student A – What's (he / she) doing?

Student B – (He's / She's) flying a kite.

But how to get there? Within the conversation there were locations (park, home, school etc) and activities (flying a kite, watching T.V., reading etc), these would need drilling as well as pairing together. Once this was done then maybe, using myself as an example, get the students to make up where, and what, 'teacher' was doing. Finally I would get the students to work in three's rotating Student A, B and C's roles. If that didn't work then I would just have to change the locations and activities myself and get the students to work as a class. I put all the above into a lesson plan pretty sure that a) it would be fun, b) they would understand and c) this would take up the entire lesson. This would leave me 'body parts' for Tuesday which I'm sure wouldn't take up two hours … umm some thinking was needed for the rest of Tuesdays lesson. With unit eight completed I would need to test the students to make sure that they have understood. I already had the test that I had produced for Friday (and never used) and so I added the above two aspects and got it ready for printing and photocopying. The project has no facilities that I can use and so I will have to print the tests out using my own money. Each test was five pages long (not much content on each page, however loads of pictures and a word search) and with thirteen students it was less than 100 pages. I hoped that I could get the whole lot printed for less than $3.

With my lesson planning done, my internet surfing finished there was very little for me to do. I put my computer away, heading across town again and read my book. I'm still reading about the start of the Pol Pot regime however the focus has moved to the atrocities within the rural, and border, areas. The book is extremely informative but quite a difficult read. After a while I couldn't take any more information and so I headed back to my guesthouse for a shower, a change and a relax.

At 7pm I went for something to eat at 'Jacobs', a restaurant that had been recommend to me by many of the volunteer's. Afterwards I headed to my room to watch T.V. Before getting an early night. So the weekend hasn't been than exciting, however it was just what I needed. I was now ready to get back to teaching my students.

Toodle Pip!