The Longest Yet

My goodness, I haven´t posted on here since school started. There is lots to tell.

First off, school is going fairly well. I am getting better at being a teacher: being able to prepare in a timely manner, write lesson plans, learning what works for each class and what doesn´t, etc. I became the bad guy the first full week of classes...I gave a detention out and took up a cell phone in my homeroom the first two days of last week. I think they got over it. But then they all failed a quiz from Friday. Perhaps they hate me right now. But I can hacky sack and they did invite me to a concert with them last Thursday, so I guess their memories are short. It is funny to me that the high schoolers always try to invite the teachers to party with them...being a high schooler here is very different from the States. They begin drinking when they´re old enough to hold a bottle (Yes, I´ve seen a picture of one of my students drinking her first beer at 1.5 years old). So partying is a very openly discussed topic. We sometimes have to avoid our students on the weekends when we go dancing. I don´t think it´s exactly appropriate to dance with your students...HA.

After only four weeks here, I moved to a new apartment last weekend. It was just fine and dandy living with a family, however I lived on a side of town all by myself. Anytime I wanted hang out after dark, someone had to walk me home for safety sake--which gets a little burdensome for my friends. Plus, I had little privacy and very little space at my house, and I didn´t speak Spanish to them very often (which is the only reason I wanted to live there in the first place). Some other teachers had a room they needed to fill at their apartment, so I decided to move last weekend. And it was a WONDERFUL decision! Already I´ve had more privacy and more friendship all at the same time. Plus the girls in the apartment have lots of Guatemalan friends/boyfriends, so the opportunity to practice spanish is still there.

The funny story of the weekend is how we started a bar fight last weekend at a dance place. There was a whole group of us who went dancing together...one girl was going for her first time. She, of course, has very long, long blonde hair, which attracts a lot of attention down here. So, of course, she is aked to dance, and, of course, we tell the guy she doesn´t want to. (Not only is she new to the whole dancing thing, but she is married.) Well, the guy gets mad because we box him out of our circle and tell him we don´t want to dance with his drunk, old, 65 year old father. Well, he´s not happy about that so he starts telling us how we´re ¨bad for business¨in very broken english. At this point, some Guatemalan we don´t even know reaches over and shoves the old man out of our face...props to him because we don´t even know him. And, to make a long story short, a fight ensues. The 2 men who wanted us to dance are very drunk and therefore easily irritated. They begin to fight people, other men try to calm them down, they yell at the ¨Yankees¨some more, and we grab our coats and leave. No one at the school has ever been around for something like that. So needless to say, that´s been all the talk for the past couple of days amogn teachers at our school. OH, and the girl got a grand total of about 20 minutes of dancing. She still wants to try and go again. Yay!

There is more, but I´ll wait till later because this is long already. I´ve decided I need to post more often so all of them are not this long!