hello, ESL 2nd graders, this is evaporation.

I'm sitting at the Language Center office at 5:30 pm, after working since 8:00 am, to blog, plan tomorrow's lessons, and write evaluations of the ones I taught today. I'll stay until 7:30, when the ISS students are putting on a talent show/dinner for a group of British students visiting from our sister school in London. I am totally drained - I really can't remember ever putting in so many hours at work in one day, ever - but am also feeling accomplished and just plain good (although that could be the coffee talking).

Side note, in case you were feeling sorry for me: It also helps that this is not my normal schedule. Usually by now I'd be at the gym - or "Jim" as the sign indicates - and then relaxing for the evening. One long day each week isn't too bad.

Anyway, I taught four 40-minute class periods today, which I have learned feel incredibly short and energetic when I have a solid lesson plan, and drag on for hours when I haven't planned adequately. Among these 4 classes were two POI ("Point of Inquiry") courses - dreaded by the international teachers both because they demand an inordinate amount of lesson planning and evaluation and because the topics are often quite abstract and difficult to teach.

My Year 5 class is simple and fun. We are currently learning about festivals, and we covered Diwali today, which was cool because it required me to do some research/learning also. My Year 2 class, on the other hand, is learning about the water cycle and its role in weather patterns. Yes, evaporation-condensation-precipitation... Difficult concepts to convey to students with just a year of English behind them. However, I can't pity myself, as it gets far worse; the Year 1 students who are just learning to write their own names have as an available topic "Finite Resources and Infinite Demands."

"Rain" and "clouds" and "river" and "sea/ocean" were all easy enough to illustrate, and I decided that was good enough for Year 2 students - too many "-ation" words would overwhelm them. But I reserved an entire class period for "evaporation" which I decided was a pretty important, although complex, term. I illustrated the concept through two experiments:

1. Yesterday I started class by pouring water on my shirt, and asked what would happen. Then, after spending the hour brainstorming where we can find water and going over vocabulary, I went and got my T-shirt from the window, miraculously dry (thank you, Nike Dryfit) to get the students thinking about where water goes.
2. Today we measured 300 ml of water and put it over a burner. (I am loving the amazing classroom resources available here!) Then we watched as the steam curled up off the water and the water level dropped. With a little prompting I got the students to guess that the heat from the fire acted like the sun on my T-shirt, to make the water go "into the air." They were super excited, both because they figured out the missing piece of the water cycle and because they learned their longest word yet (e-v-a-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n, with v-e-g-e-t-a-b-l-e-s as a close second). Likewise, I was super excited because I felt like a real teacher; also because the head of the ISS watched me teach and said he would use my idea for teaching the water cycle in the future.

My Year 2 students doing eye exercises (photographed secretly from the inside of my bag)