Week 2. . . . crazy rollercoaster

So this has definitly been a weird week. I am currently sitting in Katherine's apartment waiting on her to get ready. This is the 2nd time this week i have seen her so that is one of the highlights of the week. We ate at a mexican place tonight taht is near her apt, and it was really good. It is now the 2nd best mexican i have ever eaten. La Cocina being first, of course. This definitly made up for the fact that i havn't had good mexican since my last day in Mebane.

This past week started off nice with me having about 4 hours of alone time when the rest of my team went to the beach. It was the first time i wasn't around everyone. I think i mentioned this in my last posting so i'll move on.

That rejuvenated feeling lasted all of a day or two max. The school we are working at is just frustrating sometimes. My class was insane on Tuesday, and we all feel like the discipline policy of the school is way too lenient so we are hesitant to help discipline. I definitly thought most of my kindergarten class should have been in time out and lost their "choice time" priveledges. Choice time is the time at the end of most days (like 30 min) that they get to go outside and play soccer or play w/ the building block things, or do art, painting, or what they call dramatic play, which is legos, dress up, etc. It's a cool concept, i guess. . .?? It's so hard for me to judge what they are learning because I am use to teaching in a high school classroom. Totally a different world. My students were better as the week went on. The frustration continued though with the whole question of what we are suppose to be doing after school. We were told we would be tutoring, but of course that hasn't started because apparently we need materials to tutor the kids with and they wern't prepared with that before we got here? We have been in their library a little bit a couple afternoons trying to straighten things up. Since they are a charter school, they do not have the funds yet for a librarian. All the books they have have been donated over the last 2 years or so by parents or other places. So they don't really have an organized library yet even though they have quite a few books. I think we are gonna do some more labeling and work in there next week, but hopefully the tutoring will start?

Wednesday was lovely Valentines Day. I got some cute valentines from my kids, but the highlight of the day was afterschool when we received our first Amerimail package. Amerimail is what we call the mail that is sent to us from base, so what you send there gets sent to us on our different projects about twice a week. We also can send mail to friends on other teams without having to pay postage through this mail system. Well, ours was sent to the wrong address originally so this was the first package we had received. Valentines Day was the perfect day to finally get this because i definitly felt the love when I got lots of mail! So i want to say thank you to everyone that is sending me mail. It was definitly the highlight of my week and pretty much the highlight since I have been here in L.A. So thanks ya'll!!! =)

Today I was supposed to go to Catalina Island for a couple days to see the team that is there, my friend Allie is on that team. Well we had some team drama this morning and because of that we were not able to go today. We also lost a team member today, which i have mixed feelings about. While this was a good opportunity for this guy to change his life around, he hasn't taken advantage of it, and it has caused some stress on my team. So Gold 1 is down to 8, but it is a good 8, so I am hopeful for things to get better.

We are moving to our unfurnished apartment on Monday so i am not quite sure what the internet situation is going to be there. I will try to update once more before we leave the hotel. (i always have something to say!)