A Good Day
Baseball was amazing yesterday. I mean, I was still terrible and my team lost 16-4, but we had real teams. Sixteen guys and girls showed up to play and the difference showed from the first practice two months ago. We spent our first ever practice unable even to field a team, chasing loose balls and timidly swinging the bat with no chance of actually hitting anything. My best English student stepped up to the plate with a bashful expression and no confidence, sure that he would never make a run. Now he's the star player, first picked on the team, hitting home runs in every game. Edwin flinched at every throw for the first month - now he's one of our pitchers. Carlos swept in late to the game and turned his team around, coaching and switching positions around with spectacular results. It's awesome to see progress and to see more people showing up to play. Next step, get baseball gloves and take a trip to Guarjila to play against another team.
My little group of seven for English is one of the highlights of my week, and I'm going to miss them during the few weeks I'm on vacation. Now that they convinced me to add more classes, we meet twice a week and for being such a small group we have a huge range of personalities and abilities. I have two extremely self-conscious students who struggle with learning new vocabulary and understanding sentence structure, a few in the middle who are comfortable with speaking up and making mistakes and asking questions, and one who is fantastic. I love them all and really want to see them learn English, though I can't help but think they would do better with a real teacher who follows a set structure rather than my classes which usually start with new vocabulary then inevitably spiral out of control as I try to explain sentence structure and grammar rules and spelling. The board ends up filled with new words and phrases as they start asking me questions or bring up song lyrics or life situations. I feel like I'm throwing too much at them and not explaining it nearly enough. They told me they would miss me and our classes while I`m gone, though, so I must be doing something right.
Now I'm off on vacation to the Dominican Republic for two weeks, then my sister will be here for a month!
My little group of seven for English is one of the highlights of my week, and I'm going to miss them during the few weeks I'm on vacation. Now that they convinced me to add more classes, we meet twice a week and for being such a small group we have a huge range of personalities and abilities. I have two extremely self-conscious students who struggle with learning new vocabulary and understanding sentence structure, a few in the middle who are comfortable with speaking up and making mistakes and asking questions, and one who is fantastic. I love them all and really want to see them learn English, though I can't help but think they would do better with a real teacher who follows a set structure rather than my classes which usually start with new vocabulary then inevitably spiral out of control as I try to explain sentence structure and grammar rules and spelling. The board ends up filled with new words and phrases as they start asking me questions or bring up song lyrics or life situations. I feel like I'm throwing too much at them and not explaining it nearly enough. They told me they would miss me and our classes while I`m gone, though, so I must be doing something right.
Now I'm off on vacation to the Dominican Republic for two weeks, then my sister will be here for a month!
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