The cars here are crazy. It seems like there are no rules for how to drive but somehow everyone knows what to do. Everyone is going really fast and they don't yeild to pedestrians, nor are there many crosswalks and so getting across 6 lanes of traffic involves some ingeniunity. I had never been to the school before today and Danielle was kind enough to draw me a map of how to get there by bus the day before. And it seemed pretty straightforward - I was already on the main street; I just needed to get off the bus in about 15 minutes when I saw a Dominoes. But the problem was getting on the bus. Since I'm used to the bus stopping at the bus stop, I was confused as to why none of them were stopping for me. After I saw someone else hail down the bus like a taxi, I did the same and after 3 tries I got the right bus.
The school is in a very rural neighborhood and parts of it are still under construction but it looks pretty nice. For the new teacher orientation, there were about 16 new teachers including myself and they all seem really nice. Most of them seem like they are in their 30s. There were 3 other guys besides me - Carlos (who is from Guadalajara teaching physics) Stephen (from Boston teaching English) and Matt (from Canada). I seemed to be the only one who had just arrived yesterday so everyone has a place to live but Carlos is looking to move out of his current place and so we went searching together after I got out of my meetings. Although, after looking for a while, we realized that we want different things - he wants to get an apartment and furnish it, whereas I would like everything there and would like to bike to school everyday. I'm going to be so happy once I find a place though - I'm still orienting myself and if I keep having to move around it will only add to the stress.
A lot of the things covered in the meetings didn't really apply to me, but as they were all in Spanish, I just worked on understanding. I forgot to ask but I still don't know if I'm going to be called Mr. Chin or Sr. Chin. They did really stress teaching in English though...I think I will have to talk in Spanglish for the Pre-K kids.
After we got out of the meetings, it was around 2pm and then I went and talked with the teacher that taught the class the previous year. From what he told me, it seems pretty flexible. My only real requirements are that I teach them MS Office which includes Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But I have such a wide range of students - 3 year olds to 5th grade. So I will be teaching really basic things to the 3 year olds like how to hold the mouse and use the computer and more advanced things for the older classes. I think it is going to be a lot of fun and very interesting to see how someone who has never used a computer interacts with it. I will really get to learn about different learning styles too. And I will get to push the older students to do more advanced things.
The only bad thing is that I need to turn in my lesson plans by Thursday. Pablo (the computer teacher from last year) is going to give me his lesson plans from then so I can probably just tweak them and turn that in though.
I was really tired today and after searching for an apartment, it was like 4 pm and I hadn't eaten lunch so I went to Plaza del Sol (a pretty big mall) and went to Chilies and then exchange more money. Then I came back to my hotel and fell asleep and now I'm going back to sleep hahah.
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