Teacher Meaghan Smells Like Spit (The Whys and Wherefores of this Calamity)

Hippo class!

A Typical Day:

1. -          Wake up way too early. Shower, find something to eat. Walk to school, try to smile rather than scowl at people I pass en route.
   
2. -          I lead morning exercises, which alternates between singing songs (Both Shoo Fly and songs about Jesus are featured) and playing games depending on the day. Playing games with 3 year olds… is hard.
   
3. -          I have a half an hour break in which I recover from screaming Red Light Green Light.
   
4. -          Then I do kindergarten classes, which generally involves hearing “TEACHER MEAGHAN” and “TEACHER, YOU LOOK!” quite a lot. It also involves a surprising amount of drool, actually – between kids pretending to be monsters and gumming away at my arms, and just the general act of being near kids, I come out damp, irritated and smelling like Kindy spit.
   
5. -          I go home for lunch for two hours, which normally consists of me eating tons of pineapple fried rice and getting it everywhere. This is usually when I call people. When I know I’ll be using the webcam to speak to people, I tend to get something more interesting to eat.
   
6. -          Go back to school for Koala and Kangaroo class! I teach very small classes – my biggest is 6 students, though this is not the norm for the school. In said small classes, it is easy to get most of the work done, so I spend a lot of time playing education-oriented games like… hangman. Naturally, this is always when my boss walks by.
   
7. -          Koala class is the exception, because it is sort of the “haha, you have to teach them” class. Why so much hatred? They are in a level 4 class, but speak level 2ish English. Some of them don’t actually know their letters. There are four of them, but it’s like herding cats because they don’t 100% know what you are saying, and their parents are too cheap to buy their ADD meds. The classroom stink like feet and unwashed child, and of all the Taiwanese legs I have seen, these are the most mosquito bitten. This all being said, I still like Koala class, unless I’m crabby or they’re being psychotic. Frustrating, yes, but they still sort of like me so mostly do what I say.
   
8. -          At 5:00, I go downstairs and the ESL kids go home. At 5:05 (exactly – we were always late before, so our boss helpfully supplied an alarm clock) we walk back upstairs and do some more of the older level classes. I teach L5, L6 and L11. L6 is funny – they write sentences about vampires and get really into story telling, even if they do get so freakin’ excited that they climb all over the desks. L5 is quiet and obedient… which is sort of boring. L11 is capable of sitting in their seats, but also are pretty funny. One of the kids names is Nemo. His brother in another class is Battery…
   
9. -          At 6:05, I either go home (via the Thai restaurant… I need to branch out) or I go downstairs and do lesson plans for the next day.  This entails writing worksheets (usually featuring sentences about the kids, or how beautiful teacher Meaghan is) or making up ghost stories (Kangaroo class is sort of obsessed).
   
10. -          I play around on the computer until 9:00, when the roof is suitably vacant, then I run up and down 12 flights of stairs (once if there are people out, more if there are not) and then fuck around on the roof for a half an hour or so.
    
11. -          Then I go to bed. I spent about 10 minutes batting at my legs before I convince myself my skin is crawling and no, that is not a cockroach, and then I finally fall asleep… and wake up to do it all again.
    

I thought about giving this some sappy title, like "but it's all worth it!"

I'm going with "this is the biggest of the drooligans" instead.