Being a teacher :)

5/29/2008

cool kid mainor
andres
with some of my girls :)
my little friend estefani

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The past four weeks, us GAP kids have gotten the opportunity to go and teach Bible classes in a local school. For most of them it's to practice their Spanish, but well I just do it because I want to. We were split up into pairs and I got paired off with David ( crazy crazy kid from Alabama haha) to teach a class of beautiful first graders. We decided to start teaching on the fruits of the spirit, since it would be simple concepts for the little ones.
I cannot express how much of a blessing it has been to teach them, and not to mention a blast :) Many weeks these kids will come up to us at lunch time and want to share their lunches with us, and well honestly I just melt whenever they tell me they brought an extra bag of mango slices for me, or when they give me half their sandwich, it's just so amazing to see how kind these little kids are!
Today, we were told that we had to test them on all we've taught them, so we spent the previous week reviewing with them extensively, I made them a worksheet with all the words they had to know. So we get to class today, and I ask some of the kiddos standing outside if they studied; more and more as I asked, I realized that none of them had studied and they were most likely gonna bomb it. Hence my decision to cut off half of the questions ( there were only six anyways). I tell them they have to write three of the fruits we studied and their name; what I didn't realize is that it took most of the half the class period , just to write their names, and later I started seeing little arms going up to tell me that they didn't know the letters they were supposed to use. At this point I felt kind of dumb, because I don't really remember how much I knew when I was in first grade, so I assumes that they would know spelling haha :) The teacher then pulled me aside and told me that I should write down the answers on the board for them so that they would know how to spell it, haha. I felt quite defeated at my grand attempt as a teacher at this point, so I walked up and wrote the answers for them, but I thought that maybe, just maybe they would know how to write one word: Dios (God). So I decided to put a little star at the end of the test and told them to write down from who all these fruits came from, I had to explain that they had to actually write it down and not shout it out as they were presently doing. Their heads all bent over and started concentrating on the extensive test, however this concentration that made me feel like a true teacher soon vanished; again, little arms started flying up asking me how to spell God, so I decided I would just the letters instead of writing them, ya know try to challenge them a bit more. So I said. "It's spelled D-I-O-S, ok?" "Ok! yeah we got it!!" they all replied.
I pick up the test and start seeing that some only got half-way through their name, others mixed in their name with random bits and pieces of the words I had written, others had odd spellings and letters I never even said for spelling GOD ( ie: eios, dsio, diso,fizo, kioz)m but all of them, without exception had a star drawn on there as part of the "instructions" I had given them. Without a doubt, they were the prettiest stars I've ever seen.
All in all, this has been quite an experience for me.