Everything I need to know, I learned from my seventh graders...

This probably won´t be a terribly coherant entry. Just wanted to put down some thoughts about teaching since I don´t know how much I´ve really mentioned it.

It definitely exhuasts the heck out of me and sometime it drives me crazy. I walk to the bus every morning thinking about how many fights I´m going to have to break up by grabbing them around the waist and hauling them off one another. But then I think about the fact that these are seventh graders and there might be two among my 70 students that are too heavy for me to pick up. I think about how many times I´m going to have to scream "Silencio" or "Atención" at the absolute top of my lungs to be heard and the headache I´m going to have. But then I think about the kids that catch me off guard with their questions that come out in little more than a whisper because they are so concerned with respecting the teacher. And then I remember that I am the teacher and if I command that much respect, I can´t imagine how they view the rest of the world. I sit in the office on my break reading a novel about the "underworld" of Quito for one of my classes. It has a lot of vocabulary, references to places, etc. that are completely foreign to my side of town. And then I hear my students talking about the same places and using the same words. I worried about monitoring the boys´drawings when I tried to teach anatomy and then Diego came up and asked if he could maybe take home the "mal hechos," the papers that people had mistakes or were ripped. I handed out Halloween stickers and was mobbed by kids with open palms when I tried to throw out the empty sticker sheets. Last week, they all gasped when they found out their trip to Colonial Quito should cost a dollar but the school was only making them pay a quarter. But today, I had my class interrupted twice by men selling Bob Esponja (Sponge Bob) activity books for $0.50. Literally every time I start to wonder what the heck I´m doing with my life and if I can even handle this profession, one of them comes over and hugs me or holds my hand. I have Hallmark commercial type moments every single day. Living in such a poverty stricken country changes your perspective. Working here has turned it upside down and inside out. I don´t know how I´m going to leave.