My First Week OVER (how many more to go?)

My first week teaching at ICA is over and needless to say, I am a little exhausted! It wasn't even a full week (we only had classes on Thursday, Friday, and half day of Saturday like usual) but it taught me a lot already.

The first big mistake I made was underestimating my students, which I can't believe I did because I've been told not to do that by countless education professors. I sort of fell into the mindset of "they can't speak English very well, so it's going to be very hard to communicate" thus I thought their math skills were going to be equally lacking. Wrong.

Truth is it IS a little challenging to communicate, there are definitely times when I ask a question and no one has any idea what I'm asking of them, but math is the universal language. My first few days of class I was totally underprepared and didn't plan enough because I thought it would take way longer for them to get through the material they did. As I said, even though the English was shaky at times (and by that I mean about half the time at least) they knew exactly what they were talking about when it came to the mathematics at hand.

So today is Sunday, my one totally free day all week, and I need to spend it all lesson planning because now I know a little better how to handle my classes. I definitely have also learned what to expect out of them which will make planning much easier.

Tomorrow is Monday which is a downer because it's the beginning of my first full week of five and a half days of teaching, but I'm also going to make it rain tomorrow because it's payday! And since I don't have a Taiwanese bank account set up for me yet, I'll be getting roughly $90,000 in cash tomorrow! I'm rich! (Ok, so it is going to be Taiwanese dollars, not U.S., but it's still going to be awesome having that many bills in my hands all at once...you can expect a picture of it tomorrow)

I'm off to lesson plan my day away!