Samuel's Adventures: One down

As in the first full week of school!

It was a great week, really. A bunch of new things for me, but mostly enjoyable things. Challenging, sure, but nothing God and I couldn't handle.

In fact, I have been very thankful for the way God has helped me many times this week. School is going very smoothly and us staff have been getting along splendidly. Praise God for a lot of answered prayer!

I'm really excited about the rest of this year. Teaching is a lot more work than last year, but the ability to teach the older ones, have intelligent conversations about pretty much anything, and the students' longer attentions spans have made it worth it so far.

Perhaps to the chagrin of my students, I have decided to be fairly hard on them this year. No slacking! :) All of us, myself included, just started memorizing the Sermon on the Mount for Bible class. I'm hoping we'll at least get to the end of Matthew 5. The memorization includes the signs and being able to write it out in Spanish. And they all need to memorize at least 10 vocabulary words each week. Each word misspelled on the test on Fridays needs to written 20 times at home. Am I being cruel? :)

For math, I'm having them memorize all the math facts up to their level in math. Once all four of my students get their speed drills done under a certain time we'll have a party or celebration of some kind!

So why am I doing this? Well, believe it or not, there is actually a method to all my madness. My goal with all this is not just to inflict torture and hardship on my students, but to try to expand their brains. Some of my students, one in particular, just does what he has to in order to get by and I want to try to make it hurt a little when he or any of the others doesn't try his hardest. I keep pounding it into them that it doesn't matter as much where you are in the learning process, but rather the amount of effort you put into it! So when Samuel tells you to do something, you say "ok", or "I'll try". If you say "I can't", have fun running to the fence and back! :)

I did somewhat the same thing with Miguel at the end of last year. He had to have all his words memorized before he was allowed to go play in the evenings. And he did! He eventually learned that if he would quit crying and try instead of whining and moaning and just focus he would finish much faster.

Now at the beginning of this year, we were all amazed at how much Miguel retained from last year. Call me crazy, but I think all that pressure may have expanded his learning capacity. Plus as an added benefit, he now has more fun in school!

So yeah, that's what's been going on. I would love to hear from y'all if you have pointers, tips, or critiques. Some of you have been very helpful already! For some future posts, I hope to share with y'all some things about each of the different classes--how I teach, what I teach, etc. That way you can peek into life at school and (for all you teachers out there) help me out when I'm doing something wrong!

And finally, thank you so much for your support and prayers! God has been working here, and it's due to the prayers of people that love God. Thank you and God bless you!