7/30/2014

This is the last week we're here.  I'm flying out on a red-eye on Saturday night-- should be back on Sunday afternoon.  I'm so stressed that I'm not even really having time to be sad.  Tomorrow we are presenting our class's final project to their parents. There's going to be a big assembly and all of the parents are supposed to be there. I'm worried because only about half of the students are finished with their projects as of today, and we've given them a lot of time to work on it. I feel responsible for them because I am their teacher and I will feel bad if it doesn't seem like they've learned a lot or if the students are not feeling good about the projects they are showing their parents.  I'm getting a lot of pressure from the director of the program and I've never taught anything and I've never even taken any classes on teaching and it's all a bit overwhelming right now.  

Anyways, my students are adorable, as always.  The city we're teaching in, Haina, is the third most polluted city in the world. Most of the people there have traces of lead poisoning, and it's not good.  A lot of the kids have family lives that are not that good.  For example, one my favorite girls told me that she has never met her Dad and she hasn't seen her mother for 5 years.  She lives with her grandparents with 5 of her siblings.  I just want to take them all home and hug them all of the time.  They're wonderful and smart and funny and very cute.


Here are some pictures of them.  I've got 24 students.

happy

I've just been very happy lately.  I love getting up in the morning, well rested and healthy, and going to teach my students.  I love working for something that I believe will have a positive impact on someone.  I like building up these kids' self-esteem and trying to bring out the creativity in them.  It's great. It's the middle of the Dominican summer and I don't have air conditioning.  I'm hot, sweaty, and kind of dirty, but I'm really happy.  

I woke up this morning at about 7:30 and went up to the rooftop of the apartment building to do yoga with some people who came on this trip with me.  We did sun salutations and a  bunch of fun poses.  It was really rejuvenating and refreshing.  We left for school around 11, and when we got there we started a game of basketball.  When the kids got out of class they came and joined us for a bit.  We had rice and beans for lunch, with pineapple and salad.  Our lesson was about circuits and we had the students build circuits using schematic drawings.  It was good and the students seemed to learn a lot and have some fun today.  

After school we all packed up and went to Torre del Sol, my old apartment building, to swim.  The Taylors sent down Savannah and Sarah to swim with us, and we all had a good time playing and swimming with them.  We definitely had more fun with them around than we would have had by ourselves. 

I'm tuckered out, and ready to go to sleep.  I've got yoga again tomorrow, and then lesson planning.   

7/1/2014

Today was a little stressful.  We started walking to Nacional the grocery store, then a lot of people from our group wanted to come with us.  We got almost there and I had been thinking it probably wasn't a good idea for about 7 white people to be walking home with groceries, so we just decided to walk back.  It was kind of stupid.

We started teaching today.  The school was kind of in disorder when we got there.  Some kids had showed up that morning that weren't supposed to, and the math teacher just hadn't shown up, so the classes were all mixed up.  We all had lunch really late, and then when we finally got to start our classes it was 3:10.  We were supposed to start at 1:30, so it was a little late.  School is supposed to end at 3:30, but Claudina, the woman in charge of the school, told us to go until 4:00.  The kids weren't too happy about that, but they were good and didn't complain too much.

It was a mess!  We weren't prepared for that, so we kind of had to do things on the fly.  Our experiments that we were trying to show the kids didn't work because of the humidity in the air and the lack of static electricity, so the kids seemed very unimpressed.  We're going to try out our experiments tonight to make sure they work before we let the kids do them.  It was kind of disappointing because we really want to do a good job.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better because we will be better prepared.