I don’t know if it is the heat, I’m not sure if it’s a hangover from the holidays, I’m fairly certain it isn’t that the children don’t understand, BUT there is a lack of a sense of urgency. Lessons are starting five minutes late, students are going for water and spending time at “the water cooler”, and if someone goes to the restroom – they’ve gone for hours. When work is being set, it’s not been settled to quickly. When notes are put on the board, they are being copied effectively. There is no sense of urgency. No sense of a desire to do. Normally, the sixth grade hit the ground running. We have four months to go before the entrance exams for Junior High, four months to fine tune and prepare. At the moment, it feels like we have four years – and even then, they won’t be a problem. I’m going to accept it is the heat. I’m going to assume that once it starts to cool off, or once everyone has built up some sort of resistance to the heat, then everything will be back to normal. However, they may be some harsh words spoken in class tomorrow – let’s call it a wake-up-call.
Not a great start to the morning: not ready when the second bell went for morning line up; one homework diary “lost”, one not signed; two homeworks not done, one homework was the wrong page (later there were three Spanish homeworks not done); multiplication tables not remembered. An hour’s maths lesson disappeared, and when it came time for P.E. we had only covered half of the planned lesson. The English lesson was lost entirely to doing some more maths, and then copying the geography from yesterday’s lesson – thank goodness for the SmartBoard and its ability to save all my lessons. The end of recess was a disaster. The thirty minutes that I had left to teach after recess, became 20, and so we read three paragraphs of the story “Old Yeller”. The students finished with history – in which they needed an extra five minutes because they hadn’t completed their work – and then yoga.
There are 
two bits of good news.
The first is that things have started growing. The picture shows some tiny radishes starting to sprout. Also, in the classrooms, the sunflowers are starting to appear – some are already a centimetre or two tall. (It is at this point that I will make two observations; (1) I did take pictures but my camera failed me, sorry; (2) my sunflowers haven’t grown at all!!) The watering cans were not totally successful, they don’t reach the last row of radishes. However, with a steady hand, they work very well in the classroom.
The second bit of good news is there has been a change of heart – I am now allowed to publish videos and photographs of all the children in the sixth grade. Yipee! So, here’s a video of the routine at morning line up. Every morning, Professor Rodolfo leads the school through a series of breathing exercises and physical exercise. This is a video I took of some of the morning’s session. I say “some” because I stopped recording before the jumping-jacks, and I missed filming the breathing exercises. I’ll try to catch them tomorrow, but I won’t make any promises.
