Thursday, September 8, 2011

A few words before my siesta

I took the busses by myself to the elementary school for the first time by myself this morning and I made it alive! Class went well. The teacher came today (her 94 year old mother fell and hit her head and had to go to the hospital last Friday, so I feel kind of bad for complaining about her missing class.) I did my 2 hour English lesson in the morning, then they had recess. For the rest of the morning, a student from one of the universities in Lima came to do a lesson for her practicum. 
The poor girl. About 5 minutes into it, I could read her thoughts "I just spent 4 years studying so that I could deal with this for the rest of my career?" I think something inside her died today. Just kidding, she was pretty good with them. Better than me, that's for sure! (Although, when she came in and the teacher announced why she was here, one of the kids looked at me and said "Don't worry senorita, you're still the winner because you speak English"). 
It's just very hard to keep the attention of the whole class, so as Nichole said today, it's surprising that they can learn as much as they do. Raising your hand to speak isn't really a thing here. They just shout at you. If you tell them to raise their hand, they shout at you with their hand in the air. It's hard to keep them all sitting down in their desk, too, and if you get more than a 10 second block of silence (by silence, I mean they're talking low enough so that I don't have to shout for them to hear me) it's a miracle. 
So props to all the teachers here. I know I couldn't do it. 

After school I went to the university for my meeting with Michelle, one of the ISA directors. It's just a check-in to make sure everything's going well with school and the family and everything. Of course I told her everything is going awesome because I really have nothing to complain about!

Since I got up at 6:30 this morning, have to get up at 6:30 again tomorrow morning, and am going out to Help! again tonight, I'm thinking it's time for an afternoon nap.

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