I made it to the end of one week of teaching! Here's the highlights from the week:

>>Monday: First day teaching full time; I realized how much work it was! And that, while Kelly can lead PE and things like that on the fly, I need to write lists of what we can do in order to fill up the time.

>>Tuesday: Monday night we had a huge storm; wind speeds clocked up to 75 mph in some parts of the city and thousands of homes and businesses were out of power. Dale and Leslie's schools were both cancelled because they had no power and/or trees down. But not my school! Everybody was a little late, but otherwise the day proceeded as usual. Except that I was thoroughly flustered, and hungry all day, because I prepared for school with no electricity in my house, put makeup on by candlelight, and didn't open the refrigerator in case it took a long time to get power back! :-) I ate a lot of granola bars that day. And both of my lessons went badly. Bible study was wonderful, though, and I asked for prayer for the next day...

>>Wednesday: My supervisor, a professor from Dordt, spent the day observing and giving comments as she could. I was nervous before she came, but she was VERY nice and relaxed, so I relaxed too. Everything went swimmingly (literally -- our kids swim on Wednesday mornings for 45 minutes) and I was very encouraged by her report. God answered the prayers from Bible study people and you folks! Thanks!

>>Thursday: My lessons went decently well, although I'm still figuring out how much it takes to fill a whole lesson. And of course, it varies with every day and how fast the kids make choices or glue their assigned objects onto the paper. And I learned that I have to be very careful to remember their capabilities and not plan a lesson that is too hard for them. The afternoon lesson was very good, but a bit above what I could reasonably expect them to do. AND -- in the evening I helped out at an ESL class and an Egyptian guy tried to hook me up with his son ;-) -- and taught me to write my name in Arabic! Did you know it reads from right to left? Pretty bizarre. I'm glad it's them learning my language, not the other way around! I also joined the church band, which is playing next Sunday. It was WONDERFUL to play in a group again. And the other folks who play are very cool. More friends! Yay!

>>Friday: Another good day. This time I learned that if the aides aren't excited, "ain't nobody excited." Everybody was ready to be done with the week. I'll try to be more positive next time, and see if my enthusiasm will catch. But you know -- it was Friday. I also learned that a certain amount of flexibility is important -- one student started crying during a lesson, and that distracted the class a lot. I assumed she would stop soon, since she usually does, so continued as if nothing was going on. But Kelly suggested that next time, if she's distracting all the other students, I should let her go for a walk with her aide so the rest can focus. Flexibility... not my strong point, but I'll learn!

>>Saturday: I was so tired I couldn't get up when my alarm clock went off, so I slept until my eyes opened of their own accord. :-) Then I had a bunch of school preparations and errands to do. And in the evening I went to a church service with the brother and sister-in-law of a friend from church in Idaho (Garrisons). Who knew -- connections everywhere! It was a neat church service in a huge church, and the sermon was very good. We had dinner afterwards and I met their daughter, who is close to my age and offered to show me "the real Chicago" (i.e., more than just the touristy Navy Pier) next Saturday. And we had a real, honest-to-goodness, thoughtprovoking late-night discussion. I miss those a lot, now that I'm not at college anymore!

>>Sunday: God continues to bless at my new church. I continue to sit next to the lady God put in my path the very first sunday I visited, and we've built a bit of a friendship. I feel bad to leave her (next Sunday is my last Sunday here!) -- so I'm going to try to convince some of the other folks from my Bible study to sit by her sometimes. She would appreciate that a lot. The adult sunday school class I began last week is fantastic -- lots of neat people trying to learn to discern God's will, and I even ran into some of them two times during the week last week! I'm beginning to feel connected, and that's so encouraging. I had some questions left over from our late-night discussion last night, so I asked my sunday school teacher and he was able to point me in some helpful directions. I didn't get back till after 1:00! Then Leslie, Dale, the dogs, and I went for a picnic/walk/hike at Kankakee state park, because the day was perfectly gorgeous.

One more week of full time teaching! I'm excited because I think I have a lot of good lessons prepared for this week. And... I get to go back to Sioux Center in two weeks!!!!!!!!!! Yippee, yi, yay! And Dale and Leslie decided to make a road trip of it and drop me off, so I don't even have to find tickets. Wow.
I apologize for the length of this post. I didn't realize I had so much to say! Congratulations to you who made it to the end. And aren't you glad it's on my blog, not cluttering up your inbox as a mass email? ;-D