Vayo con Dios

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. Starting school has been alternately frustrating, exciting, nauseating, and confusing. Things are starting to settle down a little bit into some sort of routine. Most of the kids in my classes are starting to get their book which helps a lot. And I’m feeling more confident with lesson planning and classroom control. Having never taught kids in America (unless you count Highway Foreman) it’s been a real challenge.
I teach five classes a week at the high school (each class meets two times a week.) And two classes at the private school. For one of the classes at the private school, I’m just the assistant teacher. It is a really high level, so I pretty much just show up armed with a bunch of discussion questions to get them talking in English.
I’ve learned more about English grammar than I ever thought possible. I cheat and look everything up the day before the class so I can explain it to the kids. Like did you know that when we use the phrase I wish, we put the verb in past tense even if the event is in the future… Try it out. I wish I will be going to the party just doesn’t work, does it? The even weirder thing is that I start to analyze my writing to figure out why I do the things I do. I could go on, but I don’t want you falling asleep.
It also makes me want to go back and apologize to my high school teachers for the days I spent writing notes, day dreaming, and pretending not to care when my teachers were working their butts off trying to teach us stuff.

Note on my blog names for Carla---- There isn’t always a relationship between my blog posts and their titles. Some of it is just stuff I want to remember in the future, but it is either not appropriate for a blog post or not enough of a story to blog about. The story behind the bear with a pocket. I was in class and koala bear was a vocab word. I was trying to explain it to the kids complete with drawings. And let me tell you, me drawing animals does NOT work. If anyone wants to send me a kids book with animal pictures in it. I would love it. So after a long time of guessing all sorts of things. The kids finally said in Albanian… Oh it’s a bear with a pocket. I said yes thinking that they were describing it, but it turns out that that is the word for koala (Ari me jep or a bear with a pocket.) It cracked me up. So it is now immortalized as a title on my blog. I’m sort of known for being the one who knows all sorts of useless words in Shqip. It’s the way my brain works. Its easy for me to remember the word for a koala, but I still get all tripped up trying to say I need.