"If it's not challenging you then you're doing it all wrong"

Teaching.
It is challenging. It is hard. It is tiring. It is overwhelming. I would be completely lying if I said I haven't thought about why in the world I decided to come down to Honduras to teach for a year. Many people thought I was crazy for wanting to do this and to a certain extent I was..and some days I sometimes believe they were right. Your first year of teaching is already hard enough..now add 42 ESL students to teach (both the 6th grade and the 9th grade geography class), a language barrier, weekly power outages, a curriculum that sometimes doesn't provide you with resources, so you end up making a lot of them yourself, and bi-weekly grade reports to send home to parents to let them know how their student is doing. It takes a lot of time and hard work. You wake up and go to school. Then after school you plan get everything prepared for the next day (and if your lucky the day after that). Then you come home and grade and plan ahead. Then you go to sleep only to repeat that cycle 7-8 hours later. Teaching is really a 24/7 job. You are constantly thinking about ways to introduce new material, how to help out your struggling and excelling students, and what you are going to plan for the next week. There have been so many times the past two weeks where I have wanted to just give up and go home. Every teacher has those moments where you feel like no matter what you do, nothing is getting better. Everything you do is for your students. During student teaching, my senior year of college, a friend and I would exchange quotes and jokes to tell our students almost every morning. I have continued this tradition down here and write a weekly quote on the whiteboard. I sometimes feel as if I benefit from this more than they do and wonder if they even read the quote.

I have had hard days and awesome days. I have been overwhelmed and I have been overjoyed. I have been tired and I have been recharged. Just another day in the life of a teacher. As I am writing this, after a very hard week, I have realized there is still nothing else I see myself doing. Yes, sometimes I would want nothing more to scream in frustration or sit in a corner and cry from being overwhelmed, but then I have one good moment, just a small one, and I realize my bad days are not the end of the world. Those good moments, even those good days, are what I need to count.

I have always loved being a student. I loved learning and I loved going to school. Maybe that is why I decided to go into teaching. Now I am a teacher...but I am still learning something new everyday. I am still a student. That right there? That is the best part about being a teacher...regardless of where you are in the world.

My sixth graders after finishing their short stories. 

They have been working on them since September

and were so excited to see all their hard work

pay off. These are the moments I love.