I am a horrible blogger so far

Well, it's certainly been a while, a testament to what I went through at institute and what sort of break I needed. That said, yes, I am still alive, and doing much better.

So... what happened during the last 10 days of institute when I didn't write anything? A lot, I guess... the end of school was really sad... the kids drew pictures about how they would miss me and all that. Did they learn? They certainly learned something. A lot of them were way better at English than when they started, and it was really cool on the last day when one of them (who was a constant mumbler in both English and Spanish) finally started talking to me in understandable English phrases. A lot of them still had trouble distinguishing "ch" and "sh", and nobody except one or two could really write good English sentences, but they did improve and clearly had the desire to keep going.

I can't help but think of the ones that we didn't impact as much as we would have liked. One kid who was a perpetual discipline problem and actually got suspended from summer school... but he scored rock bottom on his real tests (the ones he took before we came), in Spanish reading as well as ESL, and I can't help but think it's that lack of success that prevented him from engaging at all. We had another student who was just always distracted, always fidgeting, and it will stick in my mind the one morning we were doing phonics as a class--I tried to go over and help him, and I just remember I would point to a letter and ask him "what sound does this make?", then when he just stared, "¿qué sonido tiene esta letra?"... and he still just stared. I felt rather helpless because I didn't have the time to help him individually, but he was such an engaged kid when you could deal with him and not speak over his head. It is those kinds of cases I will have to think about how to address, as well as the ones who are ahead of the pack.

But yes, they learned some other things too... when I brought my animal slideshow they all loved it, and some of them yelled "a larva! a pupa!" They liked the laptop too, of course, and I told them they'd need to graduate from college too to get one. I showed them pictures of my school and they all wanted go to there, at least for a day, and they loved some of the animals from the homeland that I showed them. They got so excited when we played "a verb is something you can do," and they understood and (I hope) retained what a verb was, after so many attempts! My idea, which was a joke, that "a noun is something you can poke" actually proved successful at getting some kids to learn too...

So yes, it was sad to leave the summer kids, although I'll never be mistaken for a first grade teacher. We had a pretty good sendoff speech from one of the other 2006 corps members, though I'm sure he'd given pretty much the same speech before. It was also sad to say goodbye to all the CMs from other regions, but I certainly didn't mind leaving Moody for my own new apartment...

I'll update more on the week off and the beginning of "orientation" (bleh) soon. Hope everyone is doing well, and feel free to call or email, I want to stay in touch with everyone :)