Wednesday and Thursday, February 17 & 18

Wednesday
Pretty good day; I did the chapel message for 5th, 6th grade and Nivelacion (our ESL class) on the tower of Babel, which went as well as it could. I felt like it related with the ESL kids (at least what they could understand of it) because it talked about how God changed the languages. Leonela and Adolfo had been giving me attitude all day and I was getting very frustrated with it and finally took them in the hallway to find out the reason for the disrespect. We talked it out and got things figured out, but it was just hard. Later that day Adolfo told me he’d change his attitude, which made me really happy he wanted to come to me and tell me that. It was redeeming for me. I love my kids, but sometimes I just don’t know how I’m doing with instilling respect and discipline while still keeping open those friendly lines of communication.

Thursday
Good day…my kids were good and listened pretty well which always makes things go smoother and I had tutorias after school to review prepositions for language. There was a boys futbol game (teachers vs. students) that I wanted to see and the kids did too, so I promised them if we could work well for 30 minutes, I would let out early so we could see the game; they worked well so we went to see the end of the game, which the teachers won. Afterwards, the teachers and administrators played another team of the men who work construction at our school. That game was more intense and the administration/teachers lost, but they had already been playing for an hour at higher elevation than some of them were used to; they were so tired and beat up! We walked up after the game and made and ate dinner, which we invited Kirsty and her brother Matthew who’s visiting, to eat with us.

We had progress reports due tomorrow, so I spent much of my time doing that as well as learning the difference between matter, mass, weight and gravity. I have to teach my kids this tomorrow in science and I definitely can’t teach them something I don’t understand clearly! I looked up some more information on the internet and my housemates gave me some really good examples, so I understand it now! I feel somewhat stupid that I had trouble understanding the difference between matter, mass and weight, but it’s not something I’ve studied lately in college or high school for that matter. Hopefully I can communicate it alright tomorrow!