Q&A

I'm opening a Q&A session to give you a better idea of the set up over here. My official title is 'language assistant' which means I work with a teacher who is teaching a specific content and I help them give the lesson in English. I have 8 hours in class and 4 hours of prep time with the teachers. I work with two different groups of students, basically the equivalent to 6th and 7th grades in: math (oh the irony),science,English,and social studies.The 6th graders are cute and pay attention for the most part;however, by 7th grade they begin to turn and it's much harder to persuade them that it is in their best interest to sit for hours on end listening to other people talk about seemingly unimportant things. I honestly feel like I spend 25-50% of the time just getting them to settle down and shut up. I'm slowly realizing how much more I like working with adults. Yet it's nothing compared to what Joana, the other American from the same program, has to go through. By pure chance I ended up with the bilingual program and she ended up teaching in the regular Enlish classes for the highschool aged kids. To start with, Joana is only 20 years old, so it creates for a wierd dynamic trying to be the teacher when you are practically the same age as your students. From what I understand, her students are mostly rejects that didn´t make it into the bilingual program but for some reason are still obligated to take English; apparently they're horrible. Therefore, I'm thankful that I have the group I do. More on this topic later, but right now it is break time and I have to go eat my mini pizza and fresh squeezed orange juice that I order everyday.