Baby elephants and homeless rap stars

Last night Kristin and I were at the new TCBY sitting outside and were approached by a homeless man asking for money to stay at a shelter. He was stuttering pretty badly and was not too convincing that that's really what he wanted money for. He asked us if we were Christians and we said yes, and he said something about loving Jesus-- and then all of a sudden he busted into this 3 minute long rap song about Jesus without stuttering at all... keeping a beat on his own chest. It was cool and also kind of bizarre. We still didn't give him any money (because I told him I had a friend who could come pick him up and pay for his night at the shelter and he immediately decided he didn't actually want to go there). His name was Sidney.

In other news, I had my first real solo teaching experience today! It wasn't anything big, just leading a class read-aloud and comprehension lesson during our enrichment period today... but I did it by myself (and totally unprepared)! So that was cool. I didn't feel like it went that well, because the girls didn't participate a lot, but my mentor told me later that she thought I had done a really good job. We read a story about orphaned baby elephants being raised by human caretakers in Kenya... for an article in a science magazine published by Weekly Reader, there was a lot of really hard vocab. So we didn't even make it all the way through the story because we stopped after about every other sentence to talk about what the words meant... but I guess in retrospect the girls really did seem to have a lot more understanding once we parsed out some of the language.

I also had my first experience of having to hold firm ground and not back down to whiny, argumentative students-- I gave two girls an "official" (meaning written in the discipline binder) warning for playing around in the bathroom, and they both loudly complained and swore to high heaven that it wasn't them. I had seen their mouths moving in the bathroom with my own two eyes, so I held my teacher look and voice strong and told them I was sorry, but so be it. Man, deep down I am such a softie/wimp! I came really close to giving in to them and saying never mind... but I'm glad I didn't.

Also, one of my male students (who I only teach Tuesdays & Thursdays) stuck his head in our classroom this morning to say hi to me-- remembered my name and pronounced it right! Little bright spot in the day.