Midyear and Canada Day

I haven't forgotten about the blog, but there hasn't been much of note and I'm determined not to fill this site with rambling day-by-day stuff. That being said, I'll tell you some rambling week-by-week stuff! We just finished midyear exams at the school. My kids (I always call them "my kids" which makes the other teachers laugh, but for some reason it comes out of my mouth more naturally that "my students"; I think because I'm still getting used to the idea that I'm a teacher), did fairly well. Not stellar (well a few did stellar), but because of the way it's all set up, their midyear mark just determines if they can sit the final and has no role whatsoever in their actual final mark.

So with that in mind, they all scored high enough to sit the final if they choose to, and we've still got two more terms to prepare for that. Essay writing was the hardest for most of them, which is no surprise considering English is a second language. I remember French being tough, and I don't think I had to write a bunch of essays on historical topics in my grade 10 and 11 French exams. The most frustrating part is that it's really cultural in Tonga to "save face," and avoid being embarrassed. As a result, I have to work extra hard to get the kids to come forward with questions, because they'd rather not know that risk being embarrassed showing that they don't know.

Canada Day is next week (I'll beat you all to it by 18 hours!), and I've prepared a "lecture" (no note taking required) for my students. The Simpsons joke, "It took the children 40 minutes to locate Canada on the map" is probably an all too frightening reality in my classroom. As previously mentioned, people assume if I'm not from the United States and I say I'm from further north, I must be Norwegian. My "not boring parts of Canadian history" Canada Day class includes French explorers who thought they had discovered China, or at least thought a great lake was the Pacific ocean, the war of 1812, and the Summit Series. I mention hockey enough in class that I thought it would be fun to throw that in, especially for the class where we're studying the Cold War. Keeping in mind that I have just 45min, I decided to forgo a lot of other certainly not boring highlights like Vimy Ridge and Juno beach and focus on some more "fun" events. Remembering my favourite Heritage Minutes helped a lot! So if you do nothing else on Canada Day, be sure to take comfort in the fact that I taught a bunch of island kids, who seemingly never heard of Canada before I showed up at their school, my own skewed and glossed over version of our history!