Cockroaches are Disgusting!

So sorry it's been a while since I've posted. I have been extremely busy with this teaching stuff and hanging out with friends during my free time on the weekends. In this post, I would like to share how my teaching is going.

I am currently in my third week of teaching here in Taiwan. I'm teaching 4th and 5th grade Math, Science, and Social Studies. I have fifteen 5th grade students and twelve 4th graders. I absolutely enjoy my 5th graders and am still trying to decide on how I feel about my 4th graders. Since I'm more accustomed to teaching middle school students, teaching 4th graders is quite different than what I'm used to. The 4th grade class, even though it's a small group, consists of all different levels of learning. Three of my students don't know their English very well. I have a few who will finish their homework very quickly, a few who work at a steady pace, and a few who are very slow. During the first 1 1/2 weeks, I was a little frustrated with the 4th graders and was really praying for patience. Today, I actually enjoyed teaching them! That was for sure an answer to prayer! My 5th grade students are that a-mazing group of students that every teacher hopes to have! That's just a brief synopsis of my feelings about teaching thus far.

Funny story: Today, during Math class, things got a little dramatic. A student was at my desk asking a question and I started feeling something crawling on my leg. I had a long skirt on and I slightly lifted it up to see what was going on and it was a cockroach on me...yuck! So, I flew it off my leg and it landed under one of my students' desks. So, all the students who were right around it moved away from it. One of my students went and got a broom (right outside the classroom) and began trying to kill it with it. That didn't work. So, another student just stomped on it and killed it. Then, a different student swept up the dead cockroach and put it in the trash and then mopped up where the guts had been. It was pretty intense...hehe. But afterwards, I told my students that we all learned a lesson: Teamwork! Different students helped in killing the cockroach and we accomplished our task at hand.

This month was Ghost Month. Many people of Taiwan burnt money and sacrificed food to the evil spirits to make them happy. I saw it pretty much everywhere I went. Pray for the people here who serve false gods and believe that they are gaining merit by offering these sacrifices of food and money to dead spirits.

Peace out.