Sunday Morning Coming Down

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Another week down. Another month started. I can't believe that June has come and gone and yet it is still freezing cold here in the southern hemisphere. It's difficult to explain the weather down here. It's often colder inside than out, forcing me to wear layers upon layers of wool and fleece. I even sleep in wool socks. I usually teach in a tee-shirt, sweater, vest, and fleece jacket. I would wear my hat and gloves but i move around too much so my hat falls off and my hands get too sweaty in my gloves. It's funny because I'm always so cold, but you would think that having lived in Rancagua forever, like most of the teachers, they would be used to the lack of indoor heating by now, but all you hear in the teacher's lounge is people complaining about how cold they are. They always ask me if it's this cold in the States, and I tell them yes, but we have indoor heating. I miss that.

School is still going well. I'm settling into this whole being a teacher thing. It's taken a while, and I'm still not totally comfortable with that amount of power, but it's fun. My co-teacher was out sick again this week, so I took the entire class for all our classes from Wednesday on. Teaching 45+ kids is utter chaos. I don't understand why classrooms are so huge. The disruptive kids control the classroom, and the ones who want to learn just aren't given the opportunity because most of the teacher's time is spent trying to shut up the loud people, to make them listen. I finally started threatening them with grades this week, which I hate doing, but it had the desired effect. I told them that their grade for my class was based on their continuous participation in English, and any Spanish I heard would count against them. That made silence fall pretty quickly. For the most part they are really good kids, but giant classrooms are not conducive to good teaching. Even the best teacher in the world would have trouble getting them to focus. When my co-teacher is there I only have half the class, which makes such a difference.

I'm heading out on winter break next week. Kelly, Kate, and I are flying up north to the second region, to a city called Iquique for a few days. It's a beach town, sunny and warm, thank goodness. We are also trying to go to San Pedro de Atacama for a few days, which is a huge desert a bit further north-east. After that, Kate, Cami and I are heading further down south to Valdivia, which is about 10 hours south by bus. We are helping at the Ministry's Winter Camps, where kids come and learn English for a week. It should be pretty cool. But also very cold and rainy. Valdivia is famous for beer and marzipan, so we're pretty stoked about those two things. They have a lot of German's living in Valdivia, hence the marzipan and beer.

Hope everyone at home is doing well. Send me emails updating me about your lives!

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