The past three days have been a blur. I have so much information and news to get you caught up on my trip so far. I have finally arrived in Plymouth. It took two trains, two buses and a taxi to get me here but it was well worth the trip. Plymouth is an absolutely beautiful town. It's much bigger than I expected. It has two universities, Marjon (mine) and University of Plymouth, so the crowd is young and fun! Plymouth is on the coast of England so the sights aren't so bad either. Once I met up with my group in London, we all started on the 7 hour adventure to Plymouth. It took all day Sunday to get to Plymouth so I mainly caught up on a novel I've been reading (Alleigant). We arrived at Marjon at around 11pm and they quickly showed us to our dorms so we could get some sleep. The dorms are definitely not five star hotels. You can tell that they are old and well lived in. I have one dorm mate. We have our own rooms and bathroom. We only share a kitchen. I can't complain. After a GREAT night of sleep, we had to be up and ready for our first meeting with the university at 9am. Our first day consisted of a tour of the university, a safety meeting, instructions on how to use the library and computer systems and lunch with our head teachers. I was placed at Mary Deans Primary School. It's located in a tiny village called Tamaltion Foelet. Our head teacher explained that the school originally opened in 1720 and he has original copies of a behavior book from when the school first opened. I haven't seen it yet but he promised to show me a copy. The school isn't in its original building but it's still a really old tiny building. Mary Deans only has thirteen teachers for preschool through grade 6 (evaluate to our 5th grade). The day flew past. A few of the students invited us to watch a rugby game that night. It was the big rivarly game between Marjon and University of Plymouth. Everyone assured that it would be a good time and I was not let down. The crowd was wild and the game was intense. It was my first experience at a rugby game and afterwards I really wished it was more popular in the states. The game even included a few steakers at half time. We thought it was crazy that they didn't get arrested for public nudity but the cops just seemed to laugh. We headed home as winners! The next morning we woke up and headed to Mary Deans on the 8:30 bus. Little did we know we would be taking a two hour tour of Plymouth. We got ourselves so lost and we were incredibly late for our first day. Luckily, the head teacher was very understanding and laughed about our wacky bus experience. We didn't begin working in our classroom until 10:30. When I arrived my class was working on mathematics. They were making something called "spinners". The directions were to trace an octagon. Use a protractor to measure it at 42 degrees into eight equal pieces and then color each section and label it with shapes. They then used this spinners to write probability questions. So they would say "what is the probability of me landing on a red circle?" They kept all of this work in a math notebook. At the end of the lesson the teacher asked the students to either put a smiley face, straight face or sad face on the top of their page. She uses this to check understanding and see who thinks they need extra help. I looked through the math notebooks and I noticed that the teachers leaves notes for the students in their notebooks. The notes ranged from "let's work through this together" to "you need to write more clearly". Then something realllllly strange happened. The whole school had a 15 minute tea break. The kids played outside and one staff member watches them and all the teachers go get tea and have a mental break. After tea break we worked on geography. The students also had a geography notebook that they had all kinds of resources stapled in it. They were working on mountain formations and map skills. After another hour we break for an hour lunch. In this time the students could eat at anytime within the hour and also use it as a recess time. The school has "lunch ladies" come and supervise this hour break so the teachers can use that time to plan or grade or just relax. I noticed that many of the teachers used it for school clubs or play rehearsal. Once a week the school gives the teacher the rest of the day after lunch to plan and that was today for my teacher. Once she left the kids went to French class and Religon. I was blown away by the amount of time the teachers were given for planning and classroom grading. I assumed that Mary Deans was private Christian school because of the religion class and they also pray during school hours but that's not the case. It is a public state school. Combining religion In schools is a very normal thing here. As you can tell June, I've had a very busy two days and I'm still exhausted and jet lagged. I am going to head to bed now. I'll post again tomorrow.
Xoxo,
Susannah
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