Tomorrow I begin the second trimester. After having received a lot of good ideas from other people, I'm going to try and implement some of them - like Jeff's idea of having individual students responsible for the main ideas of a unit and stating these ideas for every class; Zach's idea of having a list of numbers (every student has a number) and randomly drawing from that pack to answer questions; and David's idea to make groups for the entire year so you don't have to continue making groups every time you do group work.
And I'm dropping the stuff I tried last semester that didn't work, emphasizing the things that did, and trying some more new stuff. This is all quite exciting, because I feel like I'm starting to be a good teacher.
And I still want to do everything outside of school, too, but I have to choose my battles. I'm considering dropping the theater group until my Portuguese AND Changana have improved, in lieu of working with the World Food Programme. Of course, working with the WFP would be enhanced by my connections with the theater group, so I'm not about to burn my bridges. We'll see what happens.
I've been missing people a lot lately. And it's different because it's been almost seven months since I've seen anyone.
Every day there's two things that get easier and one thing that gets harder. So I'm moving in the right direction, but there are still so many things I have yet to overcome.
Peace
John
