August 12, 2010

Today was a pretty good day despite like the crappiest field trip ever. It was really interesting. We left for the field trip at the normal time, which was like 8:45. Unfortunately, unlike every other week, this one I was in Yokohama rather than Tokyo or something. The trip to get there only took like 45 mins. It was kind of unfortunate, because one of the best part of field trip days is the bus ride in basic silence while the kids are watching a movie. Oh well. At least it wasn’t like an 8 minute bus ride or anything like the kinders had. So we got there around like nine thirty or a little before. Unfortunately the amusement park, Cosmo World, didn’t open til 11. Definitely think they should have thought that one out a little bit more. I think that the center doesn’t always think through everything before they planned the field trip. So we ended up eating snack in this like mall thing. After we finally got to the park we were going around, and our fricken kids were too small to ride literally like everything. Even the log ride here. So we ended up going to this like mirror maze thing. Bad idea. The kids ended up like getting ahead of me and lost, and then some of them were freaking out and crying. Plus, our tickets we had were only good for a certain amount of rides and so they took some of them away. It was just weird. Then we went to this carousel, but it started raining when we got there. Like really hard. They wouldn’t let us take the kids to go souvenier shopping anywhere so our kids were whining, and then we had to wait around for the busses to come for like 20 mins. It was just like bad. I was so incredibly cold. We got back to the center around like threeish, so we had an hour to kill time before closing time. I found out that one of my kids was autistic and we were never informed. Karin, who was new this week, has something that I can’t pronounce, but basically it is that she has autistic tendencies and needed to be spoken to more gently and stuff. Of course they could have fricken told us that at the beginning of the week!!!! Anyways, I guess we found out because her dad called concerned because I had hurt her feelings the day before when I yelled at her. I was thinking back and couldn’t even think of what the incident could have been. So I pulled her aside and apologized for hurting her feelings and asked her what she thought had happened. It was something like we were all at swimming getting lined up and I had raised my voice to get all the kids in line. Apparently she had an ant on her bag and she is really scared of bugs and it made her sad that I was “yelling” at her while she was afraid. Of course it was me out of all the counselors that this happened to, when my comments on my evaluations always have to do with not being harsh and vocal enough. Lol. I’m actually glad that it ended up being me and not someone who actually yells or something and is more intimidating or this poor little girl might have liked crapped her pants or something. After that she was my buddy for the day and she wanted to hold my hand and talk with me. That was really sweet. I just felt sad for scaring the poor girl when I know I’m like the least angry/yelly person here at camp lol. Oh, another cool thing that happened during camp was that I played connect four with some of the kids. The best was playing it with Ryu. That kid like legit beat me four times in a row. I just couldn’t figure out how to beat him. I don’t know how the heck he did it, but like everytime I tried my hardest and he just had like four different lines that he could win and he would trap me. I don’t know how that happened. He is six!!!! Really good day. I am going to miss my Niki. Today when we were first walking to the center he sticks his head out of the door and yells, “Ms. Jasnim, I Thoooooouuuuuught it was your last day” really loudly. It was fricken hilarious the way he said it because the word thought was dragged out for like an hour. Lauren and I were basically on the floor laughing. Awesome.