Last day of homestay...

...and I'm pretty happy about it! Don't get me wrong, it's been a great few months, I'm just so ready to move on. My family has been...ok. For the most part they're nice to me, although I'm pretty sure one of my aunts is crazy even by US standards and yells at me at random. No big. There are some days when I'm sitting there surrounded by people all talking at me in Hassaniya (they know I don't speak it, but that doesn't stop them!), kids climbing on me, eating weird food and I can't help but think "OK, where the heck am I??" But then there are days when I'm sitting there surrounded by people talking at me in Hassaniya, kids climbing on me, eating weird food and I know I'm going to miss them. I won't miss the pancake batter with pasta in it for dinner though. Eew.



Anyway, the only real news recently is that model school is over! It was really great to have three weeks actually in the classroom, working with real kids. My class was really small (we had a record 8 of them show up for the test), but even so I learned a lot about the kind of problems I'll no doubt run into. The girls can be painfully shy and hide in their mulafas when you try to get them to answer questions, even when they know the answer. It's considered OK here for kids to snap their hand and yell "teacher! teacher!" when they want to get your attention/ask a question/give an answer. Might not sound like a big deal, but it is when 60 of them do it! I'm fine with the snapping, but I'm making a no yelling teacher rule from day one. We'll see how that goes. Of the 8 kids who took the test on Friday, we had 6 pass. That's considered really good. We (Mike and I taught 5th year together) were really happy with it since one girl who failed only started coming for the last week (she got 3.5/20, and they were totally lucky guesses...she filled in some vocab blanks to make sentences such as "Shakira is very jump," and "I don't know where the post office is, can you score me?") The other kid who didn't pass stopped coming by the end and only filled in half the test. If he'd bothered to do the rest of it, I'm sure he would have passed, he just didn't for some reason. But at the end of the day, our students who came to class did well. That's a good feeling. And I taught them the word awesome, so what more do they need?



So tomorrow morning I leave my house in Satara for the last time (I really hope my family fully understands this...they've been know to be a little slow/forget that I've told them things) and go to the model school cerimony, then to the center. It will be nice to have a week or so all together before heading out to Selibaby. I'm excited to start my real life here, although since it will be Ramadan right as we get to site, it will be a slow beginning. Maybe my new family will teach me some Pulaar. Good thing I had those 3 weeks of Hassaniya! : ) Megan and I did set a record with a total of 5 different teachers during stage. Pretty impressive!



That's all for now. John, who's sitting across the cyber from me, just informed me that he's stalking my blog so I better post this for him. Creep : )