But enough about politics. School has been most of my life this week. I am very short on sleep right now, so I’m not sure exactly how much detail I am going to go into, but here’s a summary of how things are going, in general and by class. In general, I really do not have enough time to finish the unit that Philip and I planned and that I have been assembling, because we have only three days of class next week, due to a day off after the election and May Day. After that I have one full week. In that time I want to finish reading a short story, have a day for the kids to brainstorm about their own stories, have a rough draft due, have time for peer reading and editing, and have a final draft due, of course, getting it all graded before I leave on the tenth! Uff da! By the way, I taught New Jersey and New York “Uff da” today. That was exciting for me. It was a very appropriate word for the day, as well, because the administration changed all of our schedules today, which means we start on a new class plan tomorrow. Due to our early dismissal for the election, I have only two of my sections tomorrow, and the two that I have are already ahead in the story we are reading. I can’t imagine why they can’t wait until next week to change, but oh well. I know we’ll figure out a way to make things work.
New York is a really fun class, though I could say that about each section. This class is fun because we are able to do more activities, since the kids speak better English and are just more advanced academically. We are always going to move faster in that class than we do in the others, which I was reminded of today when I had them do independent reading of one section and had a lot of kids get done early, then told them to keep reading. At least a few of them are done with the story that could very well take the other sections another week.
New Jersey is next in the order of average test scores and such, and the character of the class is very different from that of New York. These kids are very entertaining, and are probably a little bit more talkative than New York. It is also a class that for some reason has given me a lot of trouble with names. There are just a few kids in my sections that look like each other, and many name duplicates, particularly Joselyn’s, Carlos’s and Maria José’s. Please, if any Ecuatorianos are reading this, do not use any of these names for your future children. Their future teachers will thank you! I believe I have four of each.
North Carolina, well… I like them. They are the most difficult class for me, by far. Their English is not that good, but worse than that, about three out of thirty-five of them get the idea of listening to the teacher during class. That definitely makes for an overwhelming time. Mr. Dixon and I keep trying to think of ways that we can get them to listen better, but it’s hard. We gave them a seating chart today, and I did readings today as a “reader’s theatre,” meaning that we had a reading chair up front where the reader needed to sit. It worked the same way as popcorn reading except that there was more pressure and encouragement to read clearly and loudly, and it was a little easier for the other students to listen. A few of the kids got really annoyed by how hard it was to get anyone to listen to them, which may have give them a touch of empathy for me. I can hope!
New Mexico is the class in which I have four or five students that categorically do not speak English. Mr. Dixon and I are figuring out gradually who these people are, but today I found out for sure that nearly all of them transferred to Colegio Americano from different schools, which was encouraging. That means that some of them are hoping to improve in their English, unlike the handful of boys that appear to be content to stay in the lowest class for the rest of high school. New Mexico is a much easier class to manage than North Carolina, however, both because it is a smaller class and because we have more shy kids. You know those keychains that say “I smile because I have no idea what is going on?” One of the boys in New Mexico smiles a huge grin every time he sees me, and though he may be a friendly child in general, part of the reason he smiles is because he literally “has (almost) no idea what is going on.” At least it’s not as bad as the situation that Brad, the philosophy teacher, is in right now: he has a Chinese student in a class who does not speak English or Spanish. Imagine going to a bilingual school where all the classes are taught in your respective second and third languages!
As I said before, I still don’t know how we’re going to cram the unit into the eight school days I’ll have left after tomorrow, so I guess that brainstorming is one of my many tasks for the weekend. I really do enjoy my students, and can promise that many pictures will be forthcoming before I say goodbye to them. Mr. Dixon told me yesterday that he just knew they were all going to be so sad when I left that they would start hating him, but I don’t think he’s got anything to worry about. I’m really enjoying working with Philip. The last few days have been really fun, despite challenges of discipline and time. We’ve been grading tests the last few days, and both of us have made some pretty ridiculous mistakes. This morning I was double-checking a stack that he had finished last night, and I found one that 100% at the top. I was excited about that, but I felt like I should check it, and when I asked Philip we both noticed that he had actually marked three matching questions wrong. After reading through the rest of the test, I changed the grade. The reason that I checked it in the first place was actually because Philip had given it a twenty out of twenty… and the test was out of eighteen.
I did not do a lot besides school this week, but I had a fun Sunday. I went to Israel, the Baptist church, again, and I met a girl named Ana. We started chatting as we waited for the early service to get out and let us in, and we found out that we were both native English speakers, she from England, though I can’t remember from which part, and I from the States. She is working with disadvantaged children down here, though I didn’t figure out exactly where. We sat with each other during the service, and it was nice to have someone else who did not always know exactly what was going on. This church sometimes asks for responses from the congregation, and sometimes we did not understand exactly what we were supposed to do, but I think we understood all the important stuff. The service was once again a blessing to me. Since it was my second Sunday there, I recognized a few of the songs, which always feels good. I also realized later that day that one of the songs was a translation of the Delirious song “History Maker.” It’s funny that it took me that long to figure it out, since the tune sounded kind of familiar and the message was almost the same, even if some of it was changed in the translation. The message of the skits was about “Guarding your heart,” and the pastor preached from II Chronicles 7:14--“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from Heaven, and will forgive their sin, and heal their land.” I did not catch any talk about the election, but that might have been on people’s minds as they thought about how God is looking at their land right now. One of the other skits really touched me a lot, and I think God was definitely speaking to me through it. I had seen the skit before, which was actually a mime. At Intervarsity’s winter retreat some students performed it, I think students from UMD. It is a typical youth group mime of a girl who gets to know Jesus and starts dancing with Him, but then gets distracted and pulled away by the things of the world, and it is set to “Everything,” a song by Lifehouse. As I said a while ago, I really have been feeling a bit dry spiritually, though it’s hard to put my finger on the feeling. Watching the skit again just affirmed God’s role as Lord of my life once again, and made me think about how worthless all the little distractions are in my life. He is everything!
The other fun thing that I did was I went for supper at a friend’s apartment. Chikako is one of the girls that I met at the pizza party with Philip’s Spanish school, and we exchanged numbers after that night, or I should say I got her number because I did not remember mine! I finally got around to calling her last week, and we had my first full phone conversation in Spanish, which was interesting. I get really nervous trying to speak Spanish over the phone, and I don’t even like talking on the phone in English that much, especially to a person I barely know. But we got things set up and decided that I would go to her place for supper on Sunday night. Chikako is from Japan, and she and her husband, Toru, have only been in Guayaquil since January. She is twenty-nine, while he is probably about the same age, and I found out that they will be celebrating their first anniversary in May. I really enjoyed visiting with them, casi solamente en español, but since I knew that they speak pretty good English I could not resisting caving into English every once in a while. My Spanish suits me well for small talk or for intellectual conversations (yesterday I argued with a random guy on the street about whether English grammar was more complicated than that of Spanish or not), but when I want to have a deeper conversation with people and get to know them better, I get stuck. Toru showed me pictures of their wedding while Chikako cooked, and then we had a yummy dinner of Japaneseish cuisine. It was fun to get to know them, and I hope I can see them one more time. It is fascinating to be able to communicate with someone from entirely different culture in a common language, though I’m pretty sure that they both speak English much better than I speak Spanish! As far as Japanese goes, ummm, probably would never happen for me.
Pray for Ecuador. Some of the people here are very anxious about the election. Some think their country is sliding toward dictatorship, while others are very worried about the economy and about currency, which Correa has vowed to change from the dollar to the sucre, which would understandably complicate many lives.
Keep praying for my friend Ian, too, who is going through his second round of Hodgkins, and is not doing as well as he had hoped. They have been looking at doing a stem cell transplant, but the last round of tests showed that he’s not ready for that yet, and that they need to go with not Plan A (the transplant), not Plan B (another round of chemo before transplant), but the less desirable Plan C (treat with antibiotics and antifungals for one month before anything happens, and make me really really sad, as Ian says on his caringbridge site). Pray that he would be given fresh hope, as he is very disappointed right now. Ask that God would help him to keep trusting!
Also pray for my students, the ornery ones and the sweet ones alike (though the vast majority of them are in between). Keep praying that I would teach them to the best of my ability and that I would improve my skills, particularly in classroom management! Every day with that North Carolina class is an experiment, but I guess that’s teaching for you, anyway.
Things are great, and I thank God that His mercies are new every morning. Speaking of which, it’s almost midnight, so I really need to close for now! Just a few weeks left! Love, chao, Christina
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