Wow–where has the time gone? I see I last posted to this blog almost 2 weeks ago–sorry about that.

The work here is never ending–lots of students need a lot of preparation time. The books finally arrived but only one of the teacher manuals did–so now we hand off the manual as we jump from class to class.

Still–the classes are fun and the students are absolutely wonderful. Well, I would like to say that about my teenager class but I’ll withold comment… Actually, both of my 2 hour classes of adults, one from 9-11AM and the other from 7-9PM, are great and have bonded very well. In fact, on Fridays they like to take “Teacha” out for lunch and dinner respectively. That’s always very entertaining because I never know where we’re going, what we’re going to eat or much of anything else. Then, once we get there, I am subjected to the same experience the students have in my class–trying to understand what is being said.

The next few months should be very interesting as we get more teachers and redistribute some of the students. Hopefully we’ll get down to class sizes of around 12-15 max–that would really help the students in their learning. One problem here is everything is so communal, when you tell the students to work individually, they never do. To them it’s not cheating to share work and answers–just the way they do things. As a result I have had to adapt a lot of techniques to make everything pair work or separate the class and do two separate exercises.

Still, the adults I have are really trying hard and always have questions. I try to concentrate more on conversation skills than anything simply because that is what they most lack. Of course, my biggest problem is understanding them, especially being deaf in one ear. Try covering up one ear while trying to understand someone in rapid-fire Spanish in a room with about 25 students–now there’s a challenge.

The school alarm continues to go off occasionally but now it’s not my fault. The school owner discovered that as he set the alarm at night when leaving, it set it for the entire building. Thus, when I walked into a particular area upstairs, it set the thing off. That has been fixed so now it’s only the forgetful owner or the wind knocking something open sets it off. Does keep me on my toes though…

The photo blog has been updated with my latest trips and forays around town. That’s beginning to wear a bit thin simply because I’ve pretty much seen everything around here. Guess I’ll have to start taking some weekend trips farther afield.

All of you up there in funland USA enjoy the coming circus. The Ecuadorians are very interested in the presidential race–much more so than I–and as I read the few things I can on the internet, it looks as though the popularity contest is about the same as usual. Glad I’m here.

With the Internet problems here, not to mention the time constraints, I haven’t been keeping this up as well as I should. I promise to do better in the future so please stay tuned!