Term 2

Term 2 at Fairfield High School began today, although tired and exhausted from a restless night's sleep after engaging in the epic "battle of the flies", Micaela and I made the journey to Peterchurch as if we had been doing it for years. The day began with the cheery smiles of Year 7 students who were very eager to share their exploits of their week off.

My confidence was at a fever pitch with my Year 11 as we began a unit on writing to argue, persuade and advise. This is one of the areas where I feel my talents shine: teaching HOW to write and the process of writing - so I eagerly embraced the opportunity to do my homework on this portion of the GCSE exam and had the task firmly in grasp with powerpoints and lesson plans to get the students prepared for this piece of writing. Overall, I was quite pleased with the progression of the days lessons on this topic.

My Year 9 group was bright eyed and eager to advance with their newspaper unit and we had a great lesson on the use of emotive language in articles, and headlines today. They are eagerly anticipating organizing themselves into groups to create their own newspapers.

I was introduced to a new group of Year 10 students as each set group rotated to a different teacher to study a different piece of literature. This is a bit different than the US system, where students remain with the same teacher all year long and we teach multiple pieces of literature to the same year group over the course of the year. This group of students, all six of them, were quite delightful, inquisitive and very sweet. Although I can see that teaching a small group of six may have as many challenges, albeit different, as teaching the former group of 37 students posed, it is a challenge I will embrace enthusiastically. Repeating a unit on Great Expectations with this smaller group of students will need to be done a bit differently; but I am looking forward to getting to know these young people.

Year 7 students began a unit on poetry in which they will put together an "anthology" and Year 8 students will begin the same thing tomorrow, except different focus and different poetry.

Overall, term 2 began on a good foot. It is hard to believe that we are half way through our exchange experience and will be home by Christmas. BBC Radio One played Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas" tonight as I was driving home... are they rushing it? Odd to be in England and hearing the first Christmas tune of the season and its not even Thanksgiving yet... oh wait...they don't celebrate that one here do they??? Never fear, there will be a few Brits who discover the tradition of the Thanksgiving Feast this year!