Thelnie Blogs

Kids These Days

Working is schools has been reeeeeally fun, reeeally busy…and leaves no time for myself with the schedule I have now. Here are two highlights.

I was in one class and I worked more closely with a group of boisterous boys on their math questions. Keeping them on track was a little tough, but it wasn’t too bad. At some point, they started asking me questions about myself. These are middle schoolers.

Kid1: So, where are you from? What are you?

Me: My nationality is Taiwanese. It’s like Chinese, but a little bit different.

Kid1: Oh….(3 minutes later)…Hey Thelnie, in Taiwan, do they wear like, all those rings on their necks and stretch it really long and stuff?

Me: (Remembering Ripley’s Believe-it-or-Not!) no….I think that’s Africa…

Kid1: Hey, if you’re gay, do you wear an earring on a certain side or something?

Me: @_@ uhhh…(what the heck do I say)…I have no idea.

Kid2: OMG some people, they…they like…have huuuuge piercings in their ears, like…the earring is THIS big!!

Me: oh…they stretch it out slowly, they don’t get pierced that big…that would be like punching your ear with a hole puncher..that would be painful.

Kid2: ewwwwwwwwwwww

Then at the end of the class, the teacher had me introduce myself…just as I was about to talk and waiting for kids to quiet down…one kid from the group said “She’s the cool one!”……!! Right in front of the other tutor that was there with me. > < How nice and unsubtle. I’ve always had an affinity with kids…but I guess the moral of the story here is to answer questions as best as you can without disregarding or belittling them.

In my high school, we were doing tutorials which follow a very specific amount of questions and steps, and I was telling the teacher that I noticed that the kids weren’t writing down what they learned..and just wrote “I didn’t learn anything”…which is troubling because there’s no point to be in this class if you aren’t learning. So the teacher told me to address this to the class directly, to give me more credit….which is just about the first time I’ve ever talked to a full class by myself with their attention on me about something important…so that was scary. But I think I did well. General stuff like……well I’m not going to say what I said….but at the end of my speech, the kids all clapped for me and the teacher was like “!! how come you guys never clap for me??” haha.

Over all, I think I’m doing okay. I have just one more school I haven’t gone to, and then I’ll have been familiar with them all.

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