Thursday and Friday, Oct 1 and 2

Thursday
Today was a good day; I had a good attitude about the day, it went smoothly and I had a good amount of planning time so I finished everything I needed to get done during the day. Towards the end of the day though, Mr. Calderon came to bring me the progress report sheets to fill out… tomorrow. For the progress reports, we do them every 2 weeks for the past 2 weeks grades. So I have to calculate the grades for 25 students for about 6 subjects each; additionally I’m supposed to do that for my Bible classes as well. Since I haven’t set up an Excel sheet on my computer for this yet, I have to do it all by hand. So that was what my Thursday night consisted of: filling out my progress reports. I stayed up quite late and Fridays are my busiest days, too. So it should be a fun day tomorrow.

Friday
I was tired from the night before and didn’t have time to prepare for my Bible classes. The Bible classes turned out okay; I just prefer to be prepared instead of teaching straight from the book. It was Vivian’s birthday on Friday so her parents had asked if they could come to have a birthday party and they would bring food for lunch and cake. So of course we said yes! Her parents came at lunch and we had the party in our classroom. It was a good experience to have with all the kids. The cake we had was by far the best I’ve had here so far haha. But we all sand Happy Birthday to her, the English and Spanish version. I handed out the progress reports to everyone and after I had done that some of the kids were like, “Miss, Leonela is crying.” And sure enough one of my girls was crying because her grade in Reading was low. I felt so bad for her because I didn’t know how big of a deal it was with her parents. Some parents are very involved and get mad if their kids fall below a certain grade in their subjects. I told her I can help her in help class, but she also needs to study and do some extra stuff to get better. I think that helped a little bit, but I still felt bad because there really wasn’t anything I could do at that moment for her except be compassionate. My kids also have to bring back the progress reports signed. One of my boys, Marquito, was like, “Miss, my mom can’t sign it.” So I asked him if his dad could and he was like, “My dad’s dead and my mom is in Tegucigalpa.” I was taken aback by this because I didn’t know what was going on in his family and I still don’t know details. But my heart went out to him in that moment and I told him to have his sister sign it then. Marquito is one of boys I have to keep telling to sit down, be quiet, take this out, what did I say, etc. So although he’s one of my ‘naughty’ ones, I have a little bit more of a soft spot for him. Ana’s birthday was going to be Sunday so all the teachers had a celebration for with cake and stuff after school. Laura Beth and I rode to town with Froni because she was up at the school and went to Guancascos for internet. We came up with Luis and Gustavo, which Gustavo likes Sarah, so it worked out well for both of them. But on the way up we had some moto trouble so we ended up waiting an additional 20 minutes or so for them to fix it. It was a little annoying because they had already been late in picking us up, but we eventually got it working again and got home.