Dia de la mujer (Day for Women)

Yesterday we celebrated women, which is actually pretty cool in a culture that is dominated by males. They had a little meeting in the beginning of school with the teachers to thank the women teachers and to pray for them. Then, they gave us a longer break in the middle of the day and gave us some snacks to celebrate. They handed out little pink ribbons for us to wear on our shirts for the day. It was so cute to hear the students telling me “felicidades profe” and I got some hugs from the girls, which melted my heart :) A boy in one of my classes gave me some flowers that he picked from a bush—so cute.

I taught 4 classes that day and I was feeling so great up until that last class. 8D is not my favorite class. During the other classes, the students laughed, had fun, and even told me they liked my class. Well, 8D was asleep. One student answered my questions while the others stared into space, played with their cell phones, and copied homework for other classes. I tried to make the class more interesting and I had taught this lesson with other sections and the students enjoyed it. I even taught the lesson with a class of 50 students and it went really well. However, this class not so much, and there were only 30 students. They were disrespectful—didn’t listen to me and kept sneaking their cell phones out and doing math after I told them this was English class. It didn’t help that my counterpart kept “stepping out” of class so he wasn’t there to help me with discipline. To make things worse, I had them using magazine pictures to describe people, as I had done with the other section, and they drew on my pictures. This was really frustrating because now I can’t use those ones again. Instead of doing the assignment, they goofed off and ruined my materials. Ugh! I’m glad I got to go home after that. It’s too bad that the school day had to end like that because the rest of the day was good and I felt confident about my lessons. I’ll just focus on the good :)