School's out!

Indeed, it's been quite a year.

12 months ago, I was saying goodbye to you all, and wondering how the heck I would arrive at teaching classes in a language I'd only studied for a few months.

10 months ago, I visited my school for the first time during training, and then managed to pull off a decent intro class in "model school".

8 months ago, I went to my first teacher's meeting and hardly understood a word.

6 months ago, construction in our computer lab finished, and I finally got to start class for real.

4 months ago, we finally got moving, after strikes and weird cancellations calmed down a bit.

And it's really within these four months that most of the work has gotten done. I had mentioned final projects in my last post-- those are all graded now, and we had an end-of-year ceremony this past week. Some of the students did a really impressive job: one wrote 19 news/opinion articles on his blog, and another used Excel to do a pretty solid breakdown of how much of the expenses from building a house stay in-country, complete with a blueprint of said house (Dad will appreciate this). I really enjoyed the family histories that many of them wrote on Word, and will have to translate a few into English to share.

The pace of life has been pretty furious up until about now, between all the grading, planning and other business. So, I'm hoping to finally get some pause to reflect on how to make next year even better. In the meantime, selling and fixing computers as a fundraiser for our lab has been a success I'm not quite sure how to contain... if you're reading this and happen to have an old-but-working laptop, there is someone here who will buy it!