Week 1 Down

Well, week one is down and things are going well. It's been quite a week. Monday I have most of the day off - as non contact time (or prep time as we'd call it). I spent much of the day organizing things like crazy. Tuesday's not so bad either and one of my classes got cancelled as the students were writing a language test. The result was I hadn't seen the year 6 class until Wednesday. This was a bit weird as it was a week until I actually taught them the first time.

The kids in this school are great. The hardest thing is getting them to calm down and not talk during class. This sure beats kids calling me a fucking cunt, throwing things, and storming out of class!

I took the year 4's out to their first football (soccer) match Saturday morning. They're 8 years old and have just come up from the primary school to be in the secondary school with the big kids. Secondary in my school goes from age 8 - 12...basically grades 3 - 7. That was an absolute blast. It was so fun to watch these little guys playing football. They're really quite good. The private school system is sport mad and these kids can play and are in really good shape.

The week went well. There are a few things I'm struggling with at the moment. The first is Drama actually. The Drama section is ridiculously short. I have 2 classes of Drama but it's only for half an hour once a week with each. Both classes are really wild and unfocused. They're hard to control and I end up spending half the classes struggling to get them on task. I started doing some silent mirroring work with them to get them calm, focused, and connecting to one another but it didn't work that well. The kids keep asking me if they can do acting stuff. Now I'm scratching my head wondering if I should change what I was going to do or just keep doing in so that they go through the process and see some value in it. I think I might get them to do some scenes and do the stuff that's a bit outside the box a bit later down the road.

I started smoking again and then quit again. Unbelievable really. I quit 5 years ago. Don't ask why. It doesn't make much sense. Basically I had a few drags at parties over the last year and it slowly caught up with me just like I knew it would. Anyway, I haven't had a cigarette for 8 days and I'm feeling ok. So far so good. Gen almost killed me. :)

I'm also working on developing a one man show with German David - a director friend of mine. We call him German David because there are 3 David's. German David, Italian David, and Canadian David (me). We're in the brainstorming phase right now. We'll see how it goes!




All in all things are looking good.