I'm definitely new at this.

I've learned a few important lessons after my second full week of teaching here:

1. Things that work for one class do NOT work for other classes.
2. Even if I'm having the worst day ever, ONE CHILD will be able to make me feel better :).

Lesson 1. This week in 2 of my classes I had students create dialogues and then present them in front of the class. With my first class, I made the mistake of telling them they didn't have to do the assignment if they didn't want to and that if they chose this path, they would receive a zero for it. The thing is, things like that work in the US, but not in Guatemala. Students here don't really think of grades. All they want is to keep moving on in school, but they don't care HOW they move on, or how well they do (most of them anyway.) That being said, this was an awful idea. Regardless, after 15 minutes of sitting there staring at me and arguing with me over the assigments, all of my students eventually decided to present...and did pretty well :). Meanwhile, my older kids LOVED this assignment and jumped right in! I'm looking forward to their presentations on Monday!

Lesson 2. Yesterday I was having the worst day ever. I thought I had lost a whole bunch of stuff (long story but I eventually got it back...), my first class was terrible, I misplaced a whole stack of papers that I had copied and which were ready for class, and I was ridiculously tired. But then I went to my third class. They are the ones that terrified me from the get-go who are only about 5 years younger than me. In this class, each of the students has a journal where they write messages to me. The messages are completely private between myself and the student, and then I write back to them the next day. They have part of class to translate what I said and then respond back. It's a great way for the kids to practice writing with a native English speaker and it's one of my favorite activities in all my classes. Yesterday, after all the stressful things I had going on, I came back to the English room to read my students journals. One of my students had written a really nice journal entry and at the bottom had written "Oh, and I love you too."

I really like it here :)