Miss! Miss! Miss!

Halfway through week one already. The first day of teaching flew by and the second made me question why I ever wanted to be a teacher. Then today I got over what the teachers here call the "first week hump" where you absolutely hate teaching the entire first week, and the students are so wild that they make you question why you ever wanted to be an educator in the first place.

Let me tell you a little about my students. First of all they always say "Miss! Miss! Miss!" very loudly all the time. They are starved for attention and praise and so they all fight for my attention and love positive reinforcement. There are some students who are at a grade 7 level and then there are some who don't know how to write complete sentences in English. It will be a challenge to differentiate the lessons for that big of a gap but, it will be exciting at the same time! The boys and girls are so different though for example:

The boys are very loud, energetic, and honestly just drain the energy out of you! Some people misinterpret their behavior as misbehavior and being "bad" students. But, I've found that while I don't get the same respect that the male teachers receive (they are much quieter and calmer for men) they honestly want to please me. And they do their work, they just do it with more noise than most US students would. Yesterday, I had to have a very serious talk with all the boys classes about their behavior and how they refused to quiet down for me. At the end of my rant they were all apologizing to me and today they apologized again and behaved splendidly. They are very sweet and always asking me if I need help carrying stuff and showing off their work for me almost in competition for praise.

The girls are the opposite of the boys. I walk into class and they quiet down immediately. They want to learn so badly and are always smiling and wanting to share everything with you. I simple noted that I needed to get markers for their resource boxes and the next day the girls brought in enough markers to fill several classes resource boxes! They are very generous girls.

I am excited for things to slow down into a routine soon so I can begin to breathe and enjoy this new country I am living in. I haven't even had time to take proper pictures of my compound, or the school. But below are a few of my classroom, my apartment, and some of the things I've seen so far sights I've seen so far.

My Classroom before....

The balcony/viewfrom my apratment

These guys ride in the backs of trucks everywhere!

Camel crossing

Headed to the race track

All of these are little shops inside the Co-Op which is similar to a saturday market.

Perfume stores are EVERYWHERE here. And they make their own very strong almost overbearing perfumes.

The hallway of my apartment building :)

math wall

Since other teachers are in my room when I am not teaching this is my little office next to my class.

The girls hallway of the school

The school courtryard. (every school has one of these and there are three schools on the campus)

So the building on the right is the "male campus" (school I'm at) gym and then the ones in the front are the elementary campus and the pool for the male campus.

All the building that you see in the background are part of the Glenelg school. Every campus (Elementary, Male, Female) have their own gyms, pools, and school buildings.

The tennis courts and then in the background is the sports hall where us teachers play games after school.

Other parts of the huge campus.

My apartment