Joys and struggles of the first week of school

Well, my brain is too fried to do work, and my body is too tired to do anything active, so I'll take this opportunity to process the first week and a half of school...

This being my second year at the same school, I feel a lot more confident in my teaching and have a lot less to figure out as far as what to expect from the school and students. I'm also already familiar with the content and the resources available to me, and I can reuse teaching ideas from last year. Still, it's been stressful. Teaching is always a busy job, even when you're not the one writing the school's first curriculum, and I've had so many hours and hours...and hours... of meetings that have taken my time away from preparing for my classes. Also, this first full week, I've had gate duty, which means I have to be at the gate for the half hour before school starts and the half hour after it gets out to supervise the students coming/going and their parents dropping them off/picking them up (very few students use public transportation to get to this school). I've been working non-stop, getting to school by 7:00 am and leaving no earlier than 5:00 most days, then continuing to work from home. Another difficulty is that most preparing has to be done in my classroom, but I can't stay there much past 7:00 because it's not safe to walk home that late. Also, my classroom roof is porous, and this is rainy season. So it rains most afternoons/evenings, and it's hard to find a big enough dry area in which to work. I've been asking for the roof to be patched since the beginning of last school year, and I keep being told it will be fixed, but it never happens because there are so many projects to be done. I've also been informed that the roof is made of asbestos, so what really needs to happen is for the whole thing to be replaced one day when the school has enough money. On the positive side, the ceiling fans were replaced, so now I have five working ones instead of a single one like I did last year. My health has also been good since my last update.

As stressful as it's been, it has also been rewarding. I really enjoy my 6th graders. They are so smart and enthusiastic and always make me smile, and they've been behaving really well so far. Every Monday, I give my students a new list of spelling words, and their homework is to write each word in a sentence. These are some of my favorites from 6th grade this week:
success: "Success! Your download is complete!"
success: "Success is part of a company's policy."
satisfy: "I am very satisfy with Miss Emily, I feel happy, secure and funny."

One of my 6th graders was out of school already three days this week with pneumonia, but he has recovered. Another 6th grader returned to school for the first time today. Kristian missed the first seven school days because he was sick with dengue, a disease like a severe flu transmitted by mosquitoes. Today, I signed out the Science textbooks and was allowing the students to flip through them to get a feel for the information that was available. One of my 6th graders found an enlarged picture of a mosquito, held it up, and said, "Kristian, do you remember him?" I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but I'm laughing now. They're so witty.

In my 5th grade class, I have a couple of students who are very enthusiastic about learning, but with most of them, I feel I'm making no connection, and it's hard to tell if they're taking in anything I'm saying. Many of them are very chatty, and I keep catching them speaking Spanish, which is prohibited in English class. There's one student who is constantly out of his seat and never follows instructions. I feel I'm kind of, a little bit, starting to get a handle on the class, but I need prayer about reaching them.

I am often reminded of the conveniences I left back in the States. In Honduras, I've lived in four different houses, and at each of them, I ran out of water at some point. In the first house, it was all the time, and we had to flush toilets and wash our dishes and hands with water drawn by buckets from the reservoir that every house has. We even had to collect rainwater sometimes when the reservoir ran out. That was definitely the worst house of the four. This week, though, we were out of running water for three days and had to take showers at coworkers' houses and wash dishes with water from the reservoir. Ironically, an abundance of rain causes a shortage of water - something about clogged pipes. But thankfully, we have running water again, and our electric shower head has been fixed so we can take hot showers.

A prayer request for Central America: "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts an 'active to extremely active' hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin this year, with a 70 percent probability of 14-23 named storms and 8-14 hurricanes, of which 3-7 could be major hurricanes." Honduras was devastated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and flooding is a continual problem.

"The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace." ~Numbers 6:24-26