Ups and downs and what I've been up to down here

So I realize that not only have I done a great job at updating my blog, but I haven’t talked a whole lot about what exactly I’m doing here.  When I’m not working on writing or translating something for the ADE website, I am teaching.  Every time I tell someone that I am an English major, that person almost always responds with, “Oh so you want to be a teacher?”  And then I have to explain that no, I want to be a writer.  But I love serving, being with children, and I have known so many wonderful teachers, that I have always felt it kept it in the back-up plan section in the back of my mind. 


I’ve been teaching an English class and a creative writing class at the high school, four English classes at the elementary school, and a Sunday school class for toddlers, as well as helping out two days a week with an English conversation class for adults.  I work with the whole range of ages, from the little boy at church who mutters in slurred, soft-spoken Spanish and still wobbles when she walks, to Andrea, a woman around ten years older than me with dark eyes and a beautiful strength about her.
I must admit though, that teaching is not always satisfying and very rarely glamorous.  It makes you mind-tired, kick off your shoes and sink into the bed tired (or is it only so exhausting because I have to teach in another language?)  It makes me think about my high school geometry teacher, the one with a voice that pinched and who charged a quarter every time anyone dropped a calculator, and makes me wonder if teaching was how she became so bitter.  (And what did she do with all those quarters anyway?)  


I’m exaggerating and to be honest, nothing lifts me up like walking into the sixth-grade classroom and hearing eight voices say, “Hallo!”  Don’t tell the other classes, but these guys are my favorite.  They are young enough and driven enough that the lessons can imprint on them and just old enough for me to play a game with them in class without feeling guilty for not giving them a dry assignment.  Yesterday, we played “I spy with my little eye” (no one could really say the word “little,” but hey, you can’t win them all), but everyone’s favorite is the slap game.  The slap games entails forming two groups, lining up, and, after I say the vocab word in Spanish, sprinting to slap the word in English.  Education and exercise – you’re welcome, kids.  They have learned basic phrases, the days of the week, and the colors through the slap game and I’m proud to say we have no injuries to report yet.


Being a teacher has been just as frustrating as it has been rewarding, which seems to mirror my time here.  There have been cold days, the sort of mountain cold that gets trapped in the bones of your fingers and buries itself in your hair and makes you realize that even your eyelids are cold.  There was today, where I sat on a clump of grass outside the tin-roofed school beside Lauren and we just talked, letting the warmth sink into our jeans.  There was the day we had creative writing class where my shouts of “Escuchen!” were drowned out by scraping chairs and raucous laughter and I fought back tears all class.  There have been times where I’ve had one arm around my host sister, Daniela, the two of us laughing not because anything is all that funny, but because it feels so good to laugh together.  And I’ve been learning that it doesn’t much matter if you’re a teacher or an engineer of if you’re in Virginia or Costa Rica.  Even though there will always be times when you wish you were somewhere else, there will always be times when you know there’s no place you’d rather be.