I'm officially an afterschool program leader now.

So today was my first day with the kids there. This is how things went down...

i was totally unprepared for the elementary school program. we had no idea how many kids would show up for the first day or how many would speak any english so i didn't know what i'd be able to do with them. the first half hr was chaos with kids running everywhere in the main room and getting themselves into trouble while we waited to see who else would show up. we finally decided to sit them down for snack and that took like 10 minutes even though there was probably only 30-35 kids total. they were just out of control. after that we split up and i brought my kids to the gym. at this point i only had like 8 or 9 but it took me like 5 mins just to get them to sit on the floor and tell me their names...only 2 of which are names i've heard before. since they had too much energy, i decided to just let them run around a bit, thinking i'd get a game together later....bad idea. the only thing they wanted to do the entire time was run around with what used to be a soccer net and drag each other around on it like a sled until it completely fell apart and there were clumps of dust all over the floor which they had swept up. but they were having fun and getting out their energy so i let them go crazy. then we had reading time and i had no idea what reading levels any of them were at so i decided to just let them grab books off the shelf and look through them. i forgot to mention that they all like to speak their native language to each other...which is completely foreign to me...burundi maybe? or burmese? i get confused. so they're just chatting and being relatively good at first but halfway through a bunch of girls decide they want to watch a movie and i tell them we don't have time and that its reading day and they could care less what i say and continue to pull all the movies off the shelf. afterwards, when it was time to clean up, a former jesuit volunteer who now works there had come in and we both tried to get them to clean up the books that were all over the room and they completely ignored us and refused to put anything away. one girl finally put all of them away so that we could leave the room. i felt completely helpless b/c not even this girl who had worked here before could control them.

after that madness, the teen program was a super huge piece of cake. i found out i don't really ever have to plan anything b/c their program pretty much just involves coming and hanging out and me making sure they don't do anything crazy. and only 5 of them showed up b/c it was the first night. i played ping pong for a half hr then helped a girl with a huge review sheet of everything she had learned in algebra the previous yr and then got to leave a half hr early b/c they all went home. i think that whole program is gonna be pretty chill except when i freak out about having to teach those APPS classes. but i don't have to worry about that yet so whatever. so basically even though the little kids were insane it was a relatively unstressful day b/c they all were pretty cute and i expected them to be crazy anyways. my goal is just to come up with some type of "punishment" system where they lose privileges and to actually go over rules and stuff with them if i can ever get them to sit still for more than 2 minutes. other than that, i'm psyched for work to continue.

that's all for now folks...