August 18th, A little on teaching

Since I spent so much time raving about the waves last time, I decided I would share a little about the teaching. Tomorrow will complete my first week teaching school. I'm really stoked about it. The kids are great. Even so, there are a lot of challenges. They are doing pretty good in Math. I've been reviewing so that I now they understand the foundation before we move on to new stuff. They seem to be picking it up nicely. At least the ones that talk in class do. I may have to do a quiz to see if all of them can really do the problems. Today for Social Studies I took them into the library and told them to find an article in National Geographic about people from another country. They were to list five ways that the other people's culture was different from their own. I've been teaching about culture and what it is. It seems to be a new concept to them. Overall, I think it went really well. We spent more time than I had anticipated because as I went to finish up I realized that about three students had no clue what I was asking them to do. So I went over an article with them and picked out differences for them. I think they learned something.

English is the hardest class here. They have difficulty putting a single sentence together that makes sense. Tenses and verb are all over the place. A lot of sentences are missing important prepositions and stuff. I feel really unqualified to get them up to speed in addition to realizing it is a colosal task. Everyone is high school is pretty much at the same level of English. In High School there are a lot of Chinese students. They don't know a lot of English words, but they are ahead of the Marshallese kids in putting together good sentences. One of our high school teachers is trying to teach an Accounting class to two Chinese kids who don't speak much English. He's sweeting it.

Rudy, an SM from La Sierra woke up Sunday morning with welts all over his body. I told him it looked like an alergic reaction to something. Since he had just been sleeping we hypothosized it was his bed. The first day he went and got some Benedryl. That didn't work. It got worse as the next day went on so someone took his classes and he went to the hospital. They kept him a day and night for observation. They said it was something he ate that he was alergive to. They said it's usually fish, but he didn't eat any within the last week. He took pictures of it as it got worse. His lips swelled up really huge. It was kinda funny. He's better now. He taught some classes today.

A girl got the flu today and was out. It's kinda crazy. Everyone is getting used to the bugs around here. I hope I stay healthy. I've been taking my vitamins! :D I bought a bunch of oranges last time I went to the store. They should help to.