This is just a dog that I want

 I'm in my second week of taking over the class, and it's been going well. Two weeks of orientation dragged and was mostly me watching the other teacher and feeling like I would do things differently. I cringed one day when she was teaching the students about scarcity.

...and this...

"It's eh-scaaarce." As in, I cut myself and it turned into an eh-scar. It would have been okay but she kind of shamed a little boy when he pronounced it correctly. "It's not 'scarce', you're not 'scared', it's eh-scaaaaaaarce." Extra elongating the aaaaaaaarrrrr sound. Then she made the class repeat after her three times as she pronounced it her way.

Nice lady though.    

It made me look back and think that I probably made a lot of mistakes teaching Spanish last year, too.

... also.

I really like my kids and I think they're easier to teach than American kids. My school is a pretty well-recognized international school, and from what I've heard it's a reach for a lot of middle class families. Our kids are in much better positions than many others in Guatemala, but I think the reason they're easier to teach is that they're less coddled. I don't mean toys or material things, I mean behaviors. My impression is that parents here see their kids as less needy. If their kid is being bad, I don't think the first reaction is to think "How can we make this easier for him? Should we give him Play-Doh to keep in his desk so that he can fulfill his fine motor and tactile awareness needs?" At least I can say for sure that this is definitely not the school's reaction. I'm not passing judgment here one way or the other, and if anyone has seen my cuticles they know I could use some Play-Doh to distract from the picking. I do think, though, that the result may be that kids in the U.S. end up more accustomed to adults doing the accommodating, and don't encounter the same kind of expectations that are the policy at my school. It's not about volume in the classroom or being on task either, because my students struggle with that too, but it is about showing respect to adults and accepting them as an authority from the beginning. I had several kids who struggled to do that even after I'd been teaching them the full year in Minnesota.  

It makes for a more enjoyable classroom, to be honest.

Speaking of showing respect, today I was on recess duty and Otto made a creeped out, halfway disgusted "EEeehh!" noise. "You look like a snake! Or like a dragon!"

Um.

I think he's never seen light eyes in the sun before. He told me I had no pupils and it was just all green. Not my eye color, but whatever. I've never had my appearance described as that of a snake before, but I found it unexpectedly enjoyable.