Caveat: Stasis

Lately I've been feeling burned out.  I know what you're thinking:  I just started this job!  No… I'm burned out on change.  Traveling almost continuously for 8 months, living out of a suitcase.  The stress of finding the new job.  The complications around my housing situation once I started my new job.  Those things have me feeling  burned out.

So my solution to that is to go into a sort of near-hibernation mode for a while.  For a weekend.  I didn't do much this weekend.  The farthest I traveled was the grocery store.  I still feel exhausted on Monday morning.  But I think I'm a little less "burned out," hopefully.

I need to solve a problem with my first grade after school class:  it's too big (20-something kids) and they're too unfocased (with too low-level English) for my regular song-and-dance strategy to work.  I need new strategies to keep these kids' attention.  I'm really opposed as a matter of principle to using the giant TV/computer monitor… as a rare, native-speaker resource in this school, it seems like a terrible use of "me" to be sitting there pushing a button on a computer.  And I've always been skeptical of the effectiveness of technology-driven language lessons – especially with children.

On the other hand, I had the best class I've had in ages with my sixth grade after school class.  We did something a bit like mad-libs, they would randomly make up nouns, places, verbs, characters… then they had to tell little stories about them.   Being sixth graders, the nouns included things like toilets and trashcans and dog poop, and the characters were mostly each other or cartoon characters… but they had a lot of fun, making up little disconnected stories.  We're working on "how to make a narrative."

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