Teaching is a piece of cake!

I am not sure if I mentioned this before but every Tuesday and Thursday we have "Cake Day" during break in the teachers lounge. People sign up to bring treats and they provide coffee and everyone just gets chats and eats yummies. Well....today was my day! So last night, Jane and I found a recipe in the Barefoot Contessa cookbook, went to the grocery store, and went to work making cake. Two cakes actually (chocolate and coconut) since I couldn't decide which one I wanted to make, we cut each recipie in half. We had so much fun!! Martin was off playing basketball with some Young Life guys so we turned on some music and made a mess!! Turns out making cake from scratch is a lot more work than I thought...and that even when you cut a recipie in half it's still like making two cakes. (Kyle--whole game, whole sno cone, half game, whole sno cone...). I finally crawled in to bed around 12 with visions of cake dancing in my head.

However, I must admit that I looked like a little kid carrying a science project to school. It was everything I could do not to tell everyone "Look!! I made a cake!! Don't you wish you could have some...sorry...it's for cake day!" I even let my cake have it's own seat on the metro and on the bus...much to some people's dismay during morning rush hour.


The reward came around 10:30 this morning when everyone was raving about my yummy cake. I think I have a future in this.

School is very boring today. VERY boring. It's like "work on your own projects" day so I'm just sitting here....observing...which is code for BORED OUT OF MY MIND. But I did learn something today...the new Narnia movie was filmed in the Czech Republic! Cool huh?

I feel like the teachers here give their students lots of busywork...worksheets and silly assignments...which I HATE! It is actually one of my biggest teaching pet peeves. If what you are doing will not further the purpose of the objective, what the heck is the point. Ugh! As a student I need to have a reason for performing a task and why should I expect my students to think any differently. Fortunatly I am teaching a lesson on the theme and language of "To Kill a Mockingbird"....it will be interesting to see how the students perform in a discussion versus a worksheet workshop. When I have my own class, one of my goals is to write out the direct PURPOSE and OBJECTIVE for each lesson and make sure that the activities point to them. This sounds common sense but you would be surprised! While in my teaching methods classes I was always annoyed with objectives and stadards and this and that and blah blah blah...but it's all starting to make sense. Ok...I'm babbling on in teacher talk...enough of this!
Lunch time!!


I finally got over my fear of looking like a tourist and took some pictures of the school!!!....