Turning the day around


Peace Corps / Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

Today started out as a pretty crummy day for me. I’m not quite sure why. I woke up tired, but I’ve been tired all week; I even managed to accomplish more of my new daily exercise routine before I left for school. I had been getting too tired to go on during the previous few days.

At school, I had no scheduled lessons. I went in to get some work done and show my face before English club in the afternoon. I was asked quite quickly to come and teach a lesson with some students. I agreed because I had no other actual work. However, I do like to have more prep time for my lessons, at least enough to look over the book lesson and ask questions about what needs to be covered. I taught it anyway and it wasn’t a complete failure.

After that I attempted to respond to an email which has been sitting in my inbox since June. the subject matter of the email brought me down even more and it didn’t help that I was interrupted twice in my composition to go speak with the new 5th graders (I never know what to say with the younger students).

However, once English club rolled around things started looking up. Granted, only one student showed up it was still a successful meeting. Tanya is a student in the 11th grade and she’s going to graduate in June. She wants to better her English so she can score a little higher on her end of the year exams. She definitely isn’t one of the top English students but her enthusiasm was a breath of fresh air. I asked her how English club would best suit her and we decided to watch and discuss movies in English. I hope more students show up and join us next week.

Around dinnertime I received a call from my landlady asking me to bring over the rent money. I did hoping for a quick drop off because I wasn’t in the mood for chatting and thinking in Russian. But lo and behold, I was asked in so we could catch up (it had been about two months since I last saw her). The conversation wasn’t terribly long and it did a lot to brighten my mood. I always walk away from her apartment with the feeling that I know Russian better than I thought. Maybe they just understand my broken Russian. Either way, it was a good end to my day.

I hope tomorrow starts and ends like today ended.

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