walk in,

So I managed to score myself a job working as a Teaching Assistant in a primary school lately, but don’t be fooled, it doesn’t involve as much teaching as the title suggests. In fact, the teaching is more of a “Hey, we’re short of staff today, do you mind doubling up as a relief teacher?” kinda deal. But hey, I ain’t complaining as long I’m getting a bit of cha-ching.

Day One:

Clocked in early with Mel at 0715 and settled into our little hole in the wall and filled in a set of forms apparently administratively initiating us into our jobs. The lady hustling around the room and who’s most familiar to us is a tiny softspoken little lady with a scared smile on her face every time we talk to her. So fill in the forms we did and waited around, twiddling our thumbs for a good 15 minutes before anything even happened.

Finally when teachers started introducing themselves did work begin to work its way into our little hole. However, the excitement was short lived cause we quickly finished it in less that half an hour, given our fabulous training as super-efficient councillors. LOL.

I was beckoned to the fifth floor to help with some macho-man work, delivering boxes of books to various classes and sorting those big storybooks (yes, you remember those don’t you?) all in work pants. Thank goodness for the help of two of my little sikh friends that happened to have three straight free periods. They make rather interesting company too, spinning impressive stories about their cousins bribing teachers with iPhones and owning an entire road in some part of Singapore.

Dropped back in on Mel before taking a lunch break. It’s kinda lame that we can’t go for lunch together, but by that time I was too sweaty and gross to really complain. Lunch was an insanely cheap affair for a sizeable portion of cai fan and deliciously sweet watermelon juice. =D

It was back to book sorting after lunch and nearly fell asleep doing it cause my brain was just tuning out. The lady with me decided we should go round to put up some posters on character education in the classrooms after which I retreated back into our nicely air-conditioned hole in the wall.

More thumb-twiddling ensued as we semi-rotted in our little hole until we were summoned to make copies of art materials for the kiddies. Haha. Mel was crowned ‘dumb shiz’ of the day for being blur, but we went home with test copies of the art materials, for our colouring pleasure.

Day Two:

Clocked in later today cause I was supposed to stay in later to help the kiddies with their after school program. The day started with  packing the mountain of art materials that we photocopied yesterday into packs. While packing, work started to flood in like an avalanche. Keying in pupils’ test scores for the OM, scanning answers for the Math HOD, counting the number of periods each teacher teaches for the VP (like what is up with that man?), laminating bug pictures for some random teacher and updating height and weight forms for the PE teacher.

Lamination was a big adventure. Our first time using the laminating machine didn’t go too well. The dumb shiz thingy decided to mess up our assignment by crinkling up the laminate and wrecking the pictures entirely. The two musketeers tried to remedy the situation by running it through the thing-a-majig again but it only made it worse. GREAT!!! Curse laminating machines.

After spending an eternity on the lamination all thanks to the dumb shiz machine, we went for lunch at 1330, all starving and grouchy. We were feeling shitty being on the bottom of the food chain and doing rather lame-o tasks, and decided to throw out the rule about not eating lunch together and commiserated over cheap canteen food.

Following lunch, I braved myself for the after school program with the kids. I ended up in a class room with about 15 P4 kids and was trying to get 4 of them through their comprehension worksheets. Man, they really don’t sit still, but I must admit that for a “not steady-pom-pi-pi teacher” like myself, I did pretty okay. Getting them to take turns reading the passage, explaining how to find answers in the passage to the questions, and more often than not answering the question ” ‘cher how you spell ____ ah?” They even had tea time after their work, with kids making cups of milo for everyone (it looked kinda icky btw) and settling down to it with a packet of biscuits each. They even get to take a shower if they want to. LOL. After some peaceful 10 minutes of silent reading, they adjourned outside for a relay race with the younger kids from the other class. By the time it was all over at 5, I could feel my ears heaving a sigh of relief away from the shouts and hoots of the kiddies.

Settling back into the little hole, I resorted to cutting up the laminated pictures to kill time before I was allowed to knock off. A friend (the one that helped score us the jobs) dropped by and offered me a lift home.

All in all, I pretty much enjoyed teaching the kiddy-winks after school today, and felt kinda good seeing the understanding wipe across their faces after I explained something. The kids aren’t all that they seem either, and it was pretty interesting getting to know a little more about a few of them. Yeah, the menial tasks aren’t exactly intellectually-stimulating, but they’re pretty okay I guess. I’m pretty easygoing I guess, but it remains to be seen how long I can continue before I pull out my hair strand by strand from boredom.

Stay tuned yo!