DAY SEVEN

I spent the morning observing a 9^th grade math class.  Since I am planning to try to certify myself in the fall, I carried along the 9^th grade math book I am studying from right now.  The teacher, a young lady whose mother teaches Russian here in the same school, was having the students draw circles and tangent lines on the board discussing with the class the relationships between the angles formed by the different interactions between line and circle.

While she was speaking with the class, she came back and leafed through my book, eventually calling out problems from my book for the students to write and solve on the board.  They solved each equation in short order, impressing me greatly.  One of the students who spoke some English explained that this was math they had in 8^th grade.  They were surprised to hear that the book was for 9^th grade in the US.  The math they were doing was what we study in 10^th grade.

The electricity was knocked out early in the day, so the workshop on integrating technology in the classroom that I had planned to deliver today wouldn’t work.  Also, a huge storm blew in a half hour before I was going to start, so only four teachers from other schools ended up making it, having come on a crowded marshuka or mini-bus.  I changed the topic to teaching writing, and we all sat around my small laptop glowing in the dark room as thunder rumbled outside the tall windows and I expounded on methods for integrating curriculum into writing activities for English.

Once done, I told the teachers that any good workshop worth its mettle in the US had snacks and refreshments, and since we didn’t have any there, I invited them all to the restaurant across the street.  Under inadequate umbrellas, we waded through the gathering puddles to the restaurant and feasted on Georgian cuisine and home-made red wine in the dark, laughing and sharing the vicissitudes of being a teacher.