I'm Alive!

I promise. And I promise I haven't been intentionally neglecting the blog, either! You can see from the mass of new entries below that I've been writing all sorts of things for your viewing pleasure. But I lost my flash drive and my laptop no longer works with the wireless internet at the one place in town where internet is still free, and spending forever waiting for Blogger to load is NOT fun on 10-cents-a-minute internet.

So- here are a few updates and you'll probably have to wait a while for more! As for pictures...you'll have to wait until I get back to the states in June.

Here are some highlights:

-Heather and I are doing Tai Chi twice a week with our Baptist missionary friends and some guys from the Taiwanese farm. For some reason there are three dogs who stand around watching us. Better that than creepy Marshallese dudes, I suppose.

-I bought a $20 ukulele and I'm trying to learn how to play. I know "Yellow Submarine," which is great because Marshallese kids aren't very familiar with the Beatles. A fellow teacher told me she was teaching the kids a Beatles song and mentioned they were the most famous band ever. "More famous than Akon?" they wanted to know. Oh dear.

-I tried turtle. It was delicious. I felt sort of guilty about eating an endangered species...but it was seriously delicious.

-On Friday I am holding a mock Passover seder. My friend Karen who teaches at a private school in town is reading "The Devil's Arithmetic" with her 6th-graders (girl at her family seder is transported back in time to the Holocaust), and she wanted to help them understand the idea of a seder. We're using Sky Flakes for matzah- they're Filipino crackers a bit like saltines. It should be pretty hilarious.

-Teaching is going pretty well these days. They changed to a wacky block schedule, and now I only teach on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I mostly use my free time to read books and veg out, but I've also started a Library class I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays to all the grade levels, one group at a time. They can check out books and learn about how a library books. In class, I worked with my 9th-graders on Reader's Theater. I wrote plays for the stories "Tacky the Penguin" (my favorite read-aloud) and "The Grouchy Ladybug" and worked on public speaking, expressive reading, and comprehension as they acted out the plays. Now I'm starting on a poetry/visualization/sensory details unit. Should be fun!

-An entertaining story (which I shared with my students, to great hilarity): the other night I woke up to feel something moving on my arm. I figured it was another ant and reached up to kill it or brush it off. To my surprise I felt something large and warm. I didn't have time to feel more than that, because I let out a loud shriek and flung the thing off onto the floor. I thought it was probably a mouse, but maybe even a large bug- we have some pretty big centipedes that have taken over the house, and cockroaches, while not a feature in the Laura house, are a familiar sight at school and in the bathrooms at the Tide Table restaurant. When I got up a second time to turn the light on and try to figure this out, I discovered it was in fact a mouse. I couldn't sleep the rest of the night, but now we've got glue traps and have had a few hilarious adventures trying to chase mice out of the house. Fun fun!

-Ok I have to go because I'm using the computer at our friends' house and they need it (I pay them but I've been on slightly longer than I intended). But I miss you all and I'd love to hear from you over email (I prefer email to facebook- FB takes forever to load!). Bye!