Reflections from the Week

I am ti-red. Very, very happy that it's Friday afternoon, 4:53pm. It was a good week overall. Lots of learning about students and their needs, quirks, challenges, etc. Lots of lesson planning. Lots of funny Spanglish. On Wednesday, the whole middle school (which is just 7th and 8th grades here) went to a camp about an hour from the school for a daylong team building day. Here are some pictures from our day:



Here's the pool and a glimpse of the mountains. Even through it was probably 75 degrees and the water was freezing, a good number of the kids got in. You have to hand it to junior highers- they're ambitious...

Here's my bus, right before we left the school. These are all 7th graders. The woman in the front on the right is Miss Moore; she's the full-time aid to my student with Asburgers. I'm enjoying getting to know her.

When we arrived at the park, we spent about 30 or 40 minutes doing some crowdbreakers, like this one that required the students to get their classmates' signatures on their papers. This provoked a flurry of melodramatic activity (as do many things in the middle school wing, I'm finding...)

Here we have my very own Impact group. Impact groups meet for homeroom each morning, and also for a once-weekly class on topics such as responsibility, morality, leadership, etc. The whole middle school is divided up into six impact groups. Here, my group is working on a teambuilding game, where they're required to walk around an obstacle without letting the soles of their shoes lose contact with the soles of the next guy's shoes. I've done it before, so I know it is a difficult task. But I'm pretty sure that if my groups' lives depended on their ability to complete this game successfully, none of them would be with us now.

E for effort.

Next up is an example of the ever-popular "cross the swamp" game, where your team is given 4 paper plates and you must all cross over an area without touching the ground. Except since we're in Quito, we were crossing a molten lava field instead of a swamp. But I'm sure you could tell that from the picture.

The blind leading the blind. This was my team's second try; about 3 minutes after they all went crashing down the hill in a sprawling, sightless heap. I was proud....

So there are some highlights for you. The trip was exhausting, but it went well. If nothing else, I nailed down the last few names in my group. And I came back with a sunburn, in spite of my diligent sun screen application that morning. It seems that SPF 15 is no match for the Ecuadorian sun.

In other news, I started my Spanish lessons yesterday. There's a woman who works in the administrative office at the school part time, and spends the rest of her time tutoring all the gringos in Spanish. She's so cute- obviously an experienced tutor. She always speaks really slowly and clearly, and makes you repeat things, even if you're not in a lesson. :) I even bought a Spanish notebook. Now all I have to do is, well...study.

Tomorrow, after I sleep in as long as humanly possible, I will be joining a group of other new American ex-pats for a pot luck lunch at the Ecuadorian ambassador's house. We had to RSVP in advance so they could do a security check on all the guests.

A: I'm pretty sure I've never been security-checked before

B: An exclusive pot-luck? Really? The US couldn't spring for some burgers and hotdogs?

But I'm not really complaining...I'm excited. Never been to the ambassador's house before! I'll let you know how it goes.

Ok, off I go to dinner at a friend's house. Yay for the weekend! Yay for someone else cooking for me! Yay for friends!