More Tutoring

I'm getting pretty annoyed with the tutoring program I'm working with in Dimona. It's not nearly as organized as it should be. Yesterday I was told I would be teaching math and ended up teaching English. Today I thought we would be doing group building activities and we ended up teaching math. It's very unprofessional and prevents us from actually preparing for the lessons. It's not like I need to prepare a lot for the lessons - they're pretty basic, especially English - but it would be nice to have some idea of what I am going to be teaching before I get to the school, especially since I don't have so much experience teaching.

So today I was helping students with Algebra. Great idea. Get Matt to help kids with math. I haven't done algebra in a while, but thankfully I remember it. It was very discouraging to sit down with kids in the 9th grade who took out their calculators to do such simple math. But it was even more discouraging when the main teacher told me that they were allowed to use them. I yelled at him and told him that if they don't know what 5x6 is without a calculator, they won't learn anything. But apparently there are very low expectations of these kids. They don't come from the best home situations and the fact that they are still in school seems to be the main achievement here. I'm just glad I was able to keep my student focused while his classmates ran around, spilled ink on the floor and while one of them actually tried to light his desk on fire (or at least just melt it a little).

Now in addition to this group on Mondays and my class from the other day, I'm supposed to tutor some of these kids in English. I wouldn't mind it so much, but I'm just not sure when I'm supposed to fit this all in, especially now that my classes are ending and I'm supposed to be focusing on my research papers. Oh well. It'll all work out in the end.