it's never too early

Sometimes there are days in the classroom when the lesson fails miserably and with that comes all the distractions and loopiness and there is nothing I can do to bring it all back to something meaningful unless the meaningfulness is in the fact that sometimes things don’t work and you have to go with it.

We continued our lessons on how to understand the line graph and there is a lot of vocabulary they need to learn there like fluctuations and increasing rapidly and so forth, and today I gave them a difficult paragraph that showed the employment trends of a fictitious city called Alia (my first mistake, fictitious cities are irrelevant) with blank spaces where they had to write comparative or contrastive words to complete the sentences.  At the beginning of the paragraph I showed them to look at the parts of the sentence before and after an empty space to determine what kind of word they had to use and the first sentence was okay and it went downhill after that.  One of my best students sits in the front and said, ‘Teacher this is so boring’,  kid be thankful you want to be a nurse, and then as if the exercise was a cue to dissent a student started to cough loudly.  And then another started to cough loudly and that is all it took to derail 22 girls and four boys. 

I pretty much guided them through the paragraph, which means I hand fed them the answers, if I let them do it alone they wouldn’t have done it.  If I assigned it as homework, they would have teamed up and copied answers, right or wrong with no clue to the meaning.  So I finished that and pushed on to the next exercise which I thought was relatively easier.  They had a graph which showed immigrants from India, West Indies and Pakistan moving to the UK over the course of 30 years.  A student asked where the West Indies were.  In the Caribbean, ya know, Cuba?  Haiti? And there were blank stares and they were pulling out their smart aleck phones dissing the class, dissing me, dissing themselves so I drew Florida on the board and underneath it Cuba and to the right little islands and one boy looked at the happily finished Frank the Floridian and he started laughing uncontrollably after I looked at him and he looked at me and we knew what this looked like then the three other boys started laughing and I quickly erased the unintentional phallacy and I did not look at the girls so they weren’t drawn into the “what is this” theater so I assigned the class a writing assignment, “the changing population of animals and humans in Canada” and dismissed them forty minutes early. 

And I came home and wrote my letter of resignation.  I also completed a medical form for the peace corps.  Twenty seven months somewhere doing something for somebody who appreciates the effort would be welcome. 

The internet returned which means I have to gently back out of any interest I thought I had for leaving this litter box early.  What?  Don’t you want to leave early, I would if I could, but under the right circumstances and this is not the right circumstance.  The end of the semester coincides with the end of Ramadhan and the hottest, really, the hottest time of the year will punish me so I am not looking forward to the exit and yet to leave early for this place, Kandahar, if it were Paris, if it were Bali, if it were Rome, if it were Toledo, Ohio there’d be no delay.  And I put a lot of work into the application for Kandahar but they want someone in June and it doesn’t feel right so I have to decline.  If they can’t find someone by the time I am outta here, well ok. But by then I hope something else will have surfaced. 

The evening is warm, the fan swirls hot air.  Is eight thirty too early to call it a night?  When you live alone in a city with no social life it is never too early to call it a night.