an unexpected memorial day

We get the day off today. No, it was not planned. It has been raining A LOT here, so the national government said that all schools would be closed today because some of the roads are so bad. I forget that Honduras is like the size of Virginia, so for the whole country to be shut down is not as absurd as it sounds. Absurd or not, I'm happy about a day off. Unfortunately, my body doesn't let me sleep in even on days off so I woke up bright and early at 6! After trying to get to sleep for about 30 minutes, I called up Ramon and we went on an early morning hike up the mountain. For all the problems the rain has caused, there weren't any today. The sun is out, the birds are chirping, and the fresh rain scent is still in the air. The plants are so green and lively! We can see the river from some places up on the mountain so we just stood there for awhile and watched and listened to the roaring water. SO beautiful. Oh. Also, we found a dead snake that still looks perfectly alive that we strategically placed outside my house for all my roommates to find :) Fun right? :)

So, I'm back down in my house looking forward to a relaxing day. I watched "The Godfather" this weekend so today is looking like an excellent day to watch the second one!

awakening joy??? maybe a little bit???

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."
-Albert Einstein

Two weeks left of school. I am not in end-of-the-school year mode. I suppose that's a good thing because I think it's kind of keeping my kids out of it (cross my fingers!) I know I've said it before and I'll hopefully continue to say it but .... I love being a teacher. I guess I knew I would ... I've been trying to be a teacher since I was like 7. (luckily I had 6 'willing' pupils ... and look how smart they turned out! ;)) I feel pretty good about my year since it was my first year teaching but ... I'm definitely ready to try it again next year and see how much more creativity I can put into teaching. I have definitely learned why there are so many debates with teachers as far as 'teaching to the tests' go. I've struggled with that this last semester. My principals said we need to get through all the curriculum so I've been trying to do that, but because of that I feel like I am just pushing my kids from quiz to quiz and test to test without stopping to see if they really learn anything. So, to make sure they don't all fail, I give them study guides made straight from the test. I feel like that is not the kind of teacher I want to be, but I'm supposed to use the tests that come with the curriculum.... I taught adverbs this last unit and I still felt like the students struggled. It's so hard when I'm not teaching in their first language though. For example, we were reviewing for the test and the sentence was something like, "The dog got his leg caught by the fence on the nail." The directions were to find the misplaced prepositional phrase and put it in the spot that it would make sense. The correct sentence reads, "The dog got his leg caught on the nail by the fence." However, my students didn't know what a fence was or a nail which caused problems in them choosing this correct answer. AWESOME. Anyway, so I'm correcting those tests this weekend and we shall see how they do! These last couple weeks I've been a lot more creative with my teaching- as in doing dramas, projects, and mini quizzes every day. I'm not as pressured to finish things because I know I'm going to have everything done that I need to, so I'm using this time to experiment and see what really works and then maybe I can incorporate those things into more of my teaching next year.

Another thing I've noticed lately is how sixth grade affection manifests itself. It's called being annoying. :) Today I was sitting with Rachel and Tad at lunch and my girls walked by and took my keys and started walking away. I told them to give them back and they kept walking ... so then I told them if I didn't get my keys back I'd keep them in for recess on Monday and they said, OK sounds good! bye! .... baahhh. :) Tad and Rach said I should keep them in for recess but.... I knew they weren't really being mean, they were just wanting attention from their teacher cuz they like her! ;) The boys are constantly grabbing my arm and today one of my kids joked that he was going to trip me. I had a headache this week and told the kids so Mario (my class charmer) grabbed a container of marbles that I have in my classroom and shook them as loud as he could.... They love me! It really does make me laugh that that is the way they express love right now- with me, with each other, with the 8th grader that they like.... so in the midst of me being annoyed, I can pull myself out of the situation-whether it be a killer headache or my lunch break of catching up with my friends to realize that not only am I happy to be a teacher, but I think the students are happy to be MY students. It's a good feeling :)



NOTE: any blanket statements I may make about 6th graders in any of my blogs is not necessarily related to my 6th grade sister. or any of her friends. or any other 6th graders I know outside of school ;)

of mice and men

I watched the new Quentin Tarantino movie yesterday. Me mentioning it on the blog doesn't necessarily mean I'm endorsing it, although I did enjoy it (I'm afraid if I mention something on here, you might go rent it and be incredibly surprised :)) Anyway, the only reason I'm mentioning it now is because it relates to what I really want to blog about. The movie is about a group of people trying to kill Nazis during the war. The beginning scene has this whole speech about how people are scared of rats when they don't really have a reason to be. Squirrels could probably spread any of the diseases rats do, and they even kind of look like rats but for some reason we have conditioned ourselves since the Bubonic plague to be disgusted by rats and to not be disgusted by squirrels......

....... about 6 hours later. I realize that this entire speech could have me as the subject. I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep when I heard some moving around in some bags on my floor. Next to my bed, I have some stacked baskets, a suitcase in the corner and my laundry bag. I tried to listen to where the noise was coming from slash trying to convince myself that there wasn't any sound. ha. There was definitely a sound. I sat up in my bed and shone my super weak cell phone light in the corner to see if there was any movement. There wasn't. I stayed sitting up for a few minutes, didn't hear anything and laid back down again. Two minutes later.... more rustling. I do keep some snacky food in my baskets but it's stuff like crackers in individual wrappers and Jello in individual containers. Nothing that anyone should be able to smell and want to eat! I sat back up and shone my light again. Nothing moved, I was tired so I eventually laid back down. Once again, the movement continued. It was just about the most frustrating thing ever! I did this several more times- the up down up down deal, and finally decided to lie against my wall so if I got tired I wouldn't have to lie down all the way. About 7 minutes of waiting, and I saw it. Something long and skinny and mouselike dropped from the top basket to the floor. Awesome. So, I had a dilemma. (PS. I think I've been spelling dilemma wrong for my whole life. Spell check just informed me that it is not, in fact, dilemna. cool.) My dilemma was that there was definitely a mouse in my room, and I was definitely not going to be able to sleep imagining it crawling up my feet into my bed. But, it was also a really long way from my bed to the door on a floor that there could be a mouse scurrying around. I finally made the decision to dash across the floor and hope it didn't follow me! (Apparently all the noise and movement and lights did not bother my roommate, she slept right through everything and I decided it would not be the best choice to wake her up just to freak her out about a mouse :)) I successfully made it to the door, out and into the bed in our living room, which is where I stayed for the remainder of the night. It took me a little while to realize that my dog's tail thumping was not a mouse coming after me, but finally I was able to sleep! I have not found the mouse yet so.... we'll see. I don't know why I can manage knowing that there are spiders and scorpions; centipedes and cockroaches; and every type of ant imaginable in my room and that doesn't bother me quite so much as knowing that there is a mouse in the corner that is probably afraid of me and isn't going to touch me but..... it does. I was bothered. But I think I'll live :)

april showers bring may flowers

Wow, sorry I haven't blogged for like a month. I'm not really sure why not, I've been busy I guess.... we just had conferences for 3rd partial, so maybe that was part of it. Also our internet has been SUPER spotty lately- like it will work for 20 minutes and then quit, or it won't work at all. Speaking of, I have now officially gone a week without a shower. We have been without water in our house for most of the week- it will show up again at random times and one of us might get lucky to get a shower in during that time, but what seems to be happening is that we'll get all soapy with shampoo,etc ..... and then the water disappears again :) I've tried to at least wash my hair in the sink outside every day/every other day. Yesterday we had managed to get the pila filled with water so I took a bowl, my soap and shampoo and had a 'bucket shower'. That was pretty fun, but I did feel a little cleaner. We are getting a little tired of not having clean dishes or water to flush with though. mmm. always an adventure. We've also been without power quite a few times this week so that's been pretty fun too. I did most of my grades last night by candle light. :)

I'm eating applesauce right now. Let me tell you a story.

Every Wednesday, we get a ride into town with Mr. Rodrigo in his truck. We do crazy fast errands and then pile all our groceries in the pickup and head back up the mountain. Almost every week, we forget about the bread and it gets completely smooshed in the back from getting pushed into the sides of the truck or the water bottles or whatever. Two weeks ago, someone put the eggs in the back and when I got up to the house there was smashed egg all over one of the bags. SO! This week, I rode in the cab with the bread and the eggs safely in my lap. Instead what got smashed were the apples. Every week I get 6 apples to bring for snack at school so I had 6 beyond-bruised apples that were too mushy to eat normally. So I called my mom and got an applesauce recipe- and it turned out to be delicious!

So. now what what I want is recipes. It can be for anything- dinners, snacks, desserts.... but they have to be recipes that are from scratch. You can't send a recipe that says to use German chocolate cake mix or something ;) (bah. I shouldn't have said that as my example. Now that's what I want! :)) Anyway. If any of you out there want to send me your family's favorite dish ... maybe I'll make it here in Honduras :)