Day 15

Day 15

Sep. 5, 2011

Monday

Morning: I was hyper. I had a peanut butter banana sandwich for breakfast with a pb/ nutella sandwich. SOOO good! This sparked a very happy and hyper morning mood. Splurging on comfort food is totally worth it. Played soccer with the brothers for awhile in the late afternoon. Spent the day doing English lesson planning. Helped Farid w/ his English homework again in the evening. The next day he reported that it was all correct. Win!

The English lesson, I should explain this. I spent most of my second week at the school district working on a project that the volunteer I replaced had started. It was a 'Myths and Legends' writing competition. Mostly I was typing up the winning stories that the teens of the Red Ambiental had written. Anyway, there is a man at the school district who works alongside my community partner there. I work with a woman named Fany who is in charge of the areas of Science, Math, etc. Profesor Manuel, who works alongside her, is in charge of language arts and communication, among other things. He saw this white girl in his office every day and saw an opportunity for his language teachers to get a lesson from a native English speaker. This works out for me, because I wanted to teach the teachers anyway. The way I see it, the most sustainable way to improve English skills here is to go straight to the sourse and work with the teachers.

Lucky for me, I have a lot of material from training that was put together by the English Teaching Committee that I could use for this. Without that resource, planning this lesson would have been a lot more work than it is. It's still a lot of busy work putting everything together. I am working on writing requests to the director of the school district and the directors of each school to allow the teachers to participate and request funding for basic materials, etc. Hoping for the lesson to take place by the end of the month.