First Day of School

Although I am very excited to share about my first day of teaching, I must begin this blog by going back to yesterday and telling about my experience at church.

Since it was only the second Sunday that we have been in Tegus and most of us new teachers don’t know our way around Rio Grande (our neighborhood) yet, not to mention how to find a church, the school decided it would be a good idea to shuttle anyone who wanted to go to Iglesias Impacto. Of course, from now on we will have to figure out a way to get there (taxi or bus) which is still pretty intimidating. Anyways, I enjoyed the service a lot. The cool thing about Impacto is that they do everything in Spanish, but they offer headphones to anyone who would like to hear the translation in English. It’s much better than stopping after every sentence and waiting for someone to translate. However, I did not have a set of headphones yesterday. I just listened in Spanish, which turned out to be okay since I read the passage that the pastor was preaching from and then could kind of pick up his main points from the Powerpoint Presentation that he had. (I think I’ll use the headphones next week though) The church itself, the way the service was run and the type of songs that they sang reminded of Bacon’s Castle. I definitely think that I am going to start going there regularly because, besides being in Spanish, I felt like I was at home sitting on the 4th row on the left with my parents behind the Lanes and in front of the Loves The only difference was that after church there was a guy selling ice cream as we walked out the door (which I would highly recommend to BCBC)!

Now, I am not sure I can describe how thankful I am to everyone back home who has been diligently praying for me. There is no way that a teacher’s first day should have gone as smoothly as mine did, not to mention that once I got to school all of my nerves were gone. God is so good and everything went really well. I am hoping, however, that I didn’t smile too much and be too friendly (according to Miss Janet, that is a monumental mistake). I tend to not be able to be very strict but I did try to make my students understand that I’m not going play around and that my class is going to be a tough class! We’ll see if they are all as nice and respectful as they were on the first day, or if they start the scheming after I think I’ve already won the battle!

I was greatly encouraged after meeting all of my students today because I had be scared into thinking that they were going to be horrible. Even if they do turn out to be rowdy and talkative, I can already tell that they are mostly good kids who just want someone to care what they think and actually take an interest in each one of them. It’s amazing how quickly they opened up and just wanted to know everything about me and how long I would be staying at IST. I think they get nervous that every teacher is just going to up and leave them as soon as they teach for one year (which happens often at IST).

I can’t believe I just sat here and wrote this whole blog after my first day of school. I really should be looking over Diagnostic Tests and making lesson plans for the rest of the week. It’s amazing how much work a teacher does outside of school, and it’s just the first day!