Today, September 2nd, is National Day. On this day in 1945 Vietnam, led by Uncle Ho (they really do call him that) declared independence from France. We know this because a.) wikipedia and b.) for the last week, we've been seeing Vietnamese flags crop up in every conceivable space (including but not limited to every taxi cab, telephone pole, and in neon lights on the buildings downtown). The other clue that something was afoot, we got our first day off! We're pretty sure there will be parades and fireworks later, but right now all is quiet and peaceful and we're enjoying our lovely break from school by writing a blog post about it. Work life balance...pretty sure we've achieved it. Since we're not sure about the legality/morality of including photos of our kids on the blog, we've replaced all pictures of students with the cat.
Were we teaching right now, we'd be smack dab in the middle of our fourth week. Time has gone by incredibly fast and, of course, unbelievably slowly (especially when put in the context of our two year contract). To talk about our school life, lets start with the basics. School begins at 8:40 and ends at 3:40. All teachers are expected to stay until 4, but by 4:15 the custodians are shutting things up and you're hard pressed to find anyone in the building. We have block scheduling, so we get our classes for 1hr. and 20 minutes every other day. Out of the 4 periods offered, we teach either 2 or 3 blocks. which means we get plenty of prep time that we badly need. Matt teaches 3 classes of 9th grade English, 1 class of 11th grade English, and 1 set of AP English. It is a true testament to the drive and intelligence of our students that the students in his AP class are considered the slackers. (IB is apparently what all the cool, non-dummy kids do).
Leah teaches 4 sets of World History and 1 set of Human Geography (the description of this course is still emerging, but what it mostly seems to be is skill building and the multitude of ways in which human beings are ruining our world). Incidentally, because there is no curriculum (or clear content standards) we get a lot of freedom with what and how we teach.
In the year we took off, we forgot how truly strange and wonderful kiddos can be. All the students we teach are between 14 and 18 years old, and still very much in the process of defining themselves and how they fit into the world. Everyone assured us that our students would be the best part of our job, and truly it seems like they are. Their palpable respect for authority and deep fear of failure (we've already had a lot of student-initiated meetings about classroom progress) means that we spend a lot less time herding cats and a lot more time on learning. Of course there are noticeable exceptions to the rule, but for the most part it's great. The only downside is they're not too fond of ambiguity. This meant Leah's first unit, which basically asked "is there a Truth in history?", ended up really stressing a few kids out. Also, we love them so we end up talking about them all the time which we really need to stop doing if we're going to have any sanity left.
In other fascinating news, here's some photos from our favorite park. Every time we've been there it's been filled with people taking wedding/engagement photos. I think last time we went, we counted 12 different couples.
Also, a monkey:
