15/06/11: Study Hall Miseries

The way school works here, there are students who have classes in the morning and others who have their classes in the afternoon. For the girls in the orphanage this means that those with afternoon classes have a morning study hall (and vice versa) supervised by an older girl or a mission volunteer. Ronnie usually oversees the morning one but today he had to unload a truck and asked me to man it for him… it was pretty awful. I had no idea what the rules were supposed to be nor would I have even been able to enforce them with my fumbling Portuguese. And as an only recently graduated high school student, I know very well what a substitute teacher means; it was no surprise how the girls took advantage of me, talking loudly and leaving in droves to “go to the bathroom” (and often not coming back).
I suppose the bright side to the ordeal was that I was able to help some girls with their math homework. The stuff they had to do was ridiculously complicated and tedious though, with a conversion chart between grams and kilograms and about 12 different other something-grams. It just seems pointless to throw something like this at students who are still struggling with basic algebra and multiplication – why confuse them with all this other stuff and make them want to quit altogether?
I also got asked to monitor the afternoon study hall. This time, girls didn’t even bother asking to go to the bathroom, they just left. Meanwhile the little ones were supposed to be coloring but of course there weren’t enough coloring books or pencils.
I guess the worst thing about all of it was it made the idea of teaching music absolutely daunting. How am I supposed to teach if I can’t even manage a two hour study hall?