New Year

“I think teaching is maybe the only profession in which we get to say ‘Happy New Year’ twice a year,” my assistant principal told us last week at our first middle school staff meeting of the upcoming school year. 

She’s so right.  I’d been thinking exactly along those same lines for the past few days since coming back.  My mind has been a whirl of plans and goals for the new school year.  How can I make my classroom run more smoothly and more effectively?  How can I start a routine to be even more active and healthy?  Which places will we travel to this year?  It’s a new year, and we’re starting fresh. 

But at the same time, not really.  It’s my second year here, and my friends and I are so excited to already know so much.  There’s none of the stress of last year wondering where to buy curtains and how to get there and how to spend our weekends and who can help us get our internet turned on.  We, the brave 2nd years, are the people who can answer all of those questions now. 

So it’s not just me, but it’s all of my friends who are here and excited about the new year.  It’s going to be a great one.  For a lot of my closest friends, this is their last year in the country and we’re determined to make it great.  A few weeks ago at dinner, five of us went around the table listing our goals for the year.  Improving our Spanish is a big one, as is making an effort to get out of the city more often and do more traveling.  We have renewed drives to stay fit and get in shape for even more races and events, and a strong desire to meet new people and broaden our social circles.  It’s the support and accountability, more than anything, that assures me we’ll meet our goals. 

The social dynamic here (and I think in any international school) is so different from being in the States, or from what I experience when I go home for the summer.  At home, I stay with my family, and if I spend a day sitting on the couch and exchanging few words with my retired father, that’s perfectly okay.  I might see one or two friends one day and another group the next day, and that’s good.  In Guatemala, our families are not here.  So co-workers here are friends, family, and support.  There’s always something going on and someone to see.  We lean on each other, help each other.  My friends in Guatemala are quick to do favors, because we’ve all been there.  If your car is broken down, or you haven’t purchased one yet, someone with a car will happily pick you up…because we’ve all been there.  If you need to go to the doctor, there’s always someone with a great recommendation of who to see or how to make the insurance work or who you need to talk to to get things done.  My friends and I make each other dinner, push each other to be fit, study together, work together, help each other.  Simply put, we are, out of necessity, more invested in our friendships and making them solid here.  While we’re in Guatemala, we try harder to take care of each other than all but the best of friends elsewhere might.  It’s a really, really special community that I’m a part of.  I’m lucky.

And I’m glad to be back and starting this New Year.      

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cambodia: Reflections and Highlights

Image
I was really excited to visit Cambodia for a few days and hit up Angkor Wat and the other temples in the area.  Cambodia felt like my kind of adventure--and I can’t even really say why.  But I was excited.  I was excited for our hotel there--a full-out boutique hotel (not a hostel), with AC, a swimming pool, breakfast included, and airport pick-up for free--which cost us a scant $20 per night.  And we’d read about a lot of great tours we could take with local guides.  Flying in and flying out, this leg of the trip would be a breeze, and hopefully everything would be as cheap as the hotel.   The Mango Rain Boutique Hotel Our flight to Cambodia was unlike any other I’ve ever been on.  There were only about 20 of us on the flight--which would not have been strange, except it was, because we were on a full-size plane that could have seated 200.  The 20 of us were mostly grouped together towards the back of the plane.  Second impressive thing was that as soon as the plane got to al
Read more

DI Globals 2016: A Tale of Two Teams

Image
For the past 3 years, I have acted as a team manager for Destination Imagination at my school in Guatemala, and each year, my team has earned a trip to Global Finals in Knoxville, Tennessee.  This school year, I was blessed to manage the exact same team I had last year—the Aguaguates, the most wonderful group of kids any DI team manager could wish for.  This group, all 7 th graders this year, has everything needed to not only excel at DI, but also make a team manager’s job almost unnecessary.  They have amazing team chemistry, and they understand the importance of teamwork.  They’re crazy creative and hilarious and amazing actors when they get on stage.  They push themselves to improve their performances.  They know what they need to get done for DI, and they create their own practice schedules.  In short, they are a DI dream team, not to mention really, really great people .  This year though, I took one look at the school calendar and decided that if the team qualified for Glob
Read more

Yearly Update: The Journey to 30

Image
Over a year has passed since my last “update.”  And the year I was 29, despite the fact that I lived close to home rather than abroad, was anything but boring, so there’s no real reason for the lack of blog posts.   The year I was 29, I survived what may have been my most difficult year of teaching yet.  Many overseas teachers say, “Teaching in the States is so much different than teaching abroad.  You’ll see.  That’s why I went overseas; I’d never go back to teaching in the States.  It’s just...too much.”  Well, they’re not wrong.  I admit, I thought that with five years teaching experience under my belt, my first year in the US, my first year at the high school level, would go rather smoothly.  While in a sense it did (no concerns about the quality of my work from administration or complaints from parents), it was mentally and emotionally very taxing.  Even this year, my 2nd back in the States, I’m still adjusting to and coming to terms with the fact that as a US teacher, I wil
Read more