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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

An impossible task?

It took about 15 minutes my first day of teaching to get an, "i love you miss Tiffany" from a first grader.  it took a week to get an "i love you" from a second grader and a month to get one from a third grader.  im wondering if a year is long enough to capture the affection of a 6th grader.  I'm not sure.

It's interesting to see the changes in how people contain their affections.  I've been interested in this phenomena since working with a pschizophrenic homeless man while at hospice a couple years ago.  It was amazing to work with him because he experienced kindness for the first time at hospice and he was overflowing with love and happiness and acted like a 2 year old unable to contain his excitement.  But you aren't reading this to discover my social experiment interests :)

I had a great weekend in Guatemala visiting friends.  So nice to be able to visit them for a weekend!  We had fun and I got to visit Antigua (one of my favorite cities. . . You should google it).

I still don't have a car.  There's a new one we're looking at and a friend is calling tonight to see if it is still available.  It's a 2000 civic which will be quite a smooth transition since my last 2 cars were civics.  Hopefully this will work out.  There's a lot of good things that will happen when I get a car, the best being that I can drive to the school in the morning and not have to get up at 5:30 am to get my shower time to ride with the family I'm staying with.  Yes, it will be nice not to be sleep deprived.

Friday, September 13, 2013

Oops

Apparently, I've already failed at updating my blog and am in need of reminders and encouragement to do so! (But perhaps it was quite foolish to advertise that that is effective)

Well, in the last 3 weeks I've been very busy becoming an expert teacher!  Ok, so maybe adequate is a better description.  I think I'm more nervous about the tests I'm giving next week than the kids. I'm about to find out just how bad I've been at teaching them!  It actually shouldn't be that bad.  I just get to teach the fun part of English. They have another class to learn grammer and my job is to increase their vocabulary and encourage them to speak and use it.  So I am selfishly filling the classes with games and songs I enjoy and changing them to pretend it is educational.

 Last weekend i moved to the home ill be at for the year.  It will be a great spot.  It's close to the church and school, will have room for my car and is complete with a lovely family I've been friends with for a few years.  And I don't think I've had a mosquito bite in the home all week!

My Spanish is still pathetic, but I'm working on it.  I think I'm going to end up with either another civic or a Kia.  I'm also going to start counseling soon with some clients who speak English and in another week or two I'm going to visit an orphanage and see about counseling kids there.

I think that's it.

I'm going to go and get my laundry that's drying outside to make sure it doesn't get rained on now.