Sleeping Beauty

I am working in two classrooms at the girls’ school, like I did at the boys’ school. One classroom in particular is similar to entering Disney’s Magic Kingdom for the first time—everyone finds their inner three-year-old. The teacher is about five feet ten inches tall and has long blonde hair with a perfect complexion and the shiniest smile and prettiest sense of style this town might ever see. She honestly looks like Sleeping Beauty. Also, she carries herself with such grace and care that everything she says sounds like the words of a queen. The girls in her class quite obviously love coming to school everyday because they are treated like princesses and called things such as “my pet” and told that they are a “star.” I even got called a ‘star’ for gluing pages into a scrapbook…I didn’t know quite how to take that.
The whole thing is quite overwhelming with the perfect-ness of it all. I quite like working in both of the classrooms, but the other class is less Magic Kingdom and more Punky Brewster. It’s quirky and cool and more real. The teacher is maybe twenty years older than Sleeping Beauty, but she reminds me of Courtney Cox’s character on Friends mixed with my mom. I shall call her Momica. (Just made that one up and I’m not sure anyone will ever appreciate the name as much as I do.)
Academic Moment: One aspect of the teaching that I really like about the Irish school system is the individualized reading schedule to which the students adhere. For instance, everyone gets different book(s) nightly before they go home and the books are swapped or rotated the next day. The books are all typed on a master list of titles and reading levels. Then the date on which they were toted home is recorded for each student’s individual list for record-keeping. The students also read their books individually to a teacher’s assistant or the teacher herself and practice vocabulary words with their own set of mini-flashcards. The flashcards provide a good way for parents to easily get involved with their child’s learning and for the child to practice high frequency words on her own.