Yes, I'm Still Alive

It's been four good weeks here in Andover. One week of orientation, one week of shadowing the other NC teachers, and two weeks of teaching on my own. So far, we've had 4th through 6th graders, mostly from private Catholic schools, but we did also have a group of underprivileged kids from Hartford. The highlights from my days are usually seeing the kids get excited about something I show them, and the lowlights often come from annoying parent chaperones who get in the way. Each day is a mixture of field group (hiking, team building, and teaching general science concepts), classes (ranging from dissections to using acid/base reactions to tie-dye), and large group activities. This job is one where you must be "on" from 8am to 9pm or beyond. Even during the break times, I am often running around trying to clean up from my last class or prepare for my next one. When I go back to the staff quarters in the evening, I am too exhausted to do anything but go to bed, but that's what I expected. Hence, my lack of blogging.

On the weekends, I catch up on sleep, run, dance, and explore the area a bit. This weekend, I seem to have the start of a cold I probably caught from one of the kids, and I don't feel like doing much. This afternoon, I'm off to another Nature's Classroom site in Connecticut. They try to keep the ratio at 1:12, so sometimes that means switching the staff around a bit. It's just for the week, but I hadn't realized how settled I had begun to feel here already until the possibility of being switched presented itself.

No horrible mishaps yet, and we had some great spring weather last week. But I'm off because I need to return a frog my kids caught on Friday to it's pond so it won't miss out on making an addition to the gene pool.