Boys

The other day I was asked to be in charge of the boys. I have always wanted to have boys when I “grow up” one day and have a family of my own. But I’m not so sure about that after my experience over on the other side . Within 5 minutes I thought to myself… I can’t keep these kids under control! They are always fighting with each other and don’t listen when you ask them to do things. It’s pretty crazy. At least with the girls since I’m around all the time I have gained some authority in their eyes. In any case just as I was about to give up a group arrived to help out by just hanging out with the kids. And the boys respond really well to male attention and a lot of men happened to be in this group. So they came just in time to save me from losing my mind with the boys. I also found that if I participated a bit in their wrestling, they listened to me more when I told them to tone it down than they did when I just observed and kinda reffed their wrestling. It was a good reminder that to meet these kids where they’re at I really just need to love them and to play with them. And I have resolved myself to the fact that God knows what I can handle… so if I ever do have kids of my own and they’re boys I guess I’ll make it through!

Today (Sunday) I had to catch up on some homework with my study group. I kinda like when we don’t finish on Friday and have to do it on the weekend because there’s more freedom that way. For example, today my student had to study vocabulary words. Normally we’d sit in the classroom and go over them at the desk, but today I took her outside and told her a word and had her run to find the object. We ran all around the yard and through the house finding dolls, trains, balls, snapping our fingers, snorting. It was a fun day of “studying.” And this is a real blessing with my group of kids because as I’ve mentioned in other blogs they can be quite challenging and unmotivated. Creativity mixed with a warm, sunny day was the perfect blessing!

I also watched a great movie today called El Estudiante… if you can find it, you should check it out. It’s a good one. Kind of an Independent film or an artsy film along the lines of those motivational ones like Finding Forrester or Mr. Holland’s Opus, but in Spanish!