Well, a lot has happened in the last few days. I moved to Terry and Shari's house for the week. They're in full-time ministry here, and were incredibly helpful in connected me with people before I moved down. My parents were in a small group with them a few years back, so they've been good family friends for a while now. At any rate, they're in the States visiting friends, families, and churches, and wanted me to stay with Alba at their house. Alba is a young lady from Honduras who lives with them. So, I'm now there to be with her. She doesn't speak any English, so that's been a little challenging, but it's been forcing me to speak Spanish, so it's also really good for me.
School is still difficult, and is actually getting slightly worse as the kids get more comfortable with each other. I did get moved to a much larger room, where all of my students actually fit. There are closets where I can now keep all of the extra supplies, as well as shelves where their books are kept for easy access. The closets are proving to be a bit of a problem because they like to hide in them when I have to leave the room to make copies of workbook pages.
Today, in order to maintain order and get all of my kids to finish their work, I had to close one girl in the bathroom, open a closet door so that two kids couldn't look at each other, and remove one girl from the class to finish the page we were working on. And some of them still didn't finish, so I sent it home for homework with them. It's frustrating, but I get gain some attention when the air conditioner had been off for nearly 20 minutes (and believe me, it gets hot fast in there), and I told them if they listened I would turn it back on. They managed to give me their full attention for almost 10 whole minutes. I was impressed. I don't know if they'll remember any of the English words I was teaching them, but they did remember "boy" and "girl" that we went over yesterday, so that was encouraging.
So, yeah. It's been rather crazy at school. It's hard, too, when all the kids use workbooks, but some of them don't have them. Then, I have to leave class to go make a copy of the page we're working on, and even when I give them work to do, they get up and go crazy when I'm gone. Would it be wrong to duct tape them to their seats? Probably. I've decided to give them a second recess, in the middle of the afternoon classes, where they're expected to sit through two and a half hours of classes. Hopefully, a 15 minute break to run wild in the middle of the afternoon will prevent the half an hour of free time I have to give them at the end of the day, when they've all snapped and are no longer capable of paying attention. I'll have to think of some educational games to play outside, maybe.
Because I have some more free time this week, I'm planning on spending a lot more time than I usually would in prayer and digging into the Word. It's been a while since I really dug in to God's word.
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