Back to school, back to school...

Here is a pic. of all of us at AJS (birthday kids in tie dye front and center)

I have officially survived my first week teaching! I have 2 sections of 8th graders (here they are called novenos) and one section of 9th graders (decimos). Starting this week Celso and I are splitting the sections so we can work with the kids in smaller classes which will be a big help because there is such a range of abilities and comfort levels with speaking English. We will be teaching history to the decimos and English, lit. and grammar, to the novenos. The first couple weeks will definitely be an adjustment (prep. work is not the most fun in the world, duh). We also assigned an absurdly difficult story to the noveos before we had a chance to gauge their reading comprehension levels and one of the kids told me ¨you´re a nice person but my class has a terror of you.¨ Aside from that things are going well and the kids are a lot of fun to work with. I am definitely going to have to seek out other outlets to practice my Spanish though- our classes at Mundo are all English immersion and the other teachers treat us a little like outsiders because we are the new uncool kids who have yet to learn the language. It´s great fun talking to little kids on the school bus because my grammar doesn´t bother them at all- they just keep climbing all over me and blowing bubbles in my face. Needless to say the bus is awesome.

I am also going to start teaching adult classes this Tuesday. My boss has a pretty awesome mullet and knows lots of English swear words so I think things will work out just fine. The classes are at the John Drury School (same place we have Semillas in the afternoons, 2 blocks from our house) and from what I´ve gathered it´s a pretty strange place- it´s a tech. school that never exactly opened. The guards, who struggle at doing their job of opening the doors (I have jumped the fence before) usually let Capitan and Principessa, killer attack dobermans, wander around with the small children and periodically they bring a goat as well? All standards for ¨normal¨ must be adjusted here which has actually been a pretty refreshing process- it keeps things interesting.

Aside from teaching we have been meeting some people in the neighborhood, being fed some delicious food, and learning some vegetarian cooking of our own (any recipes appreciated, the meat here can be a little sketch so we just have to be careful about where we but it). I believe we were fed some questionable parts of an ox´s body for lunch last week at Mundo but I´d rather not think about it.

Yesterday was spent baking bananna bread for our 150 closest friends for a church fundraiser where we had to, get this, perform a dance to Rock Around the Clock (not a joke and, yes, I warned them about my dancing). It was a ball. I will have to find the video.