Scary thoughts

As I was sitting in two different second grade classes last week to observe, I had a lot of thoughts that I wasn’t proud of. First of all, I found it really hard to concentrate. I guess since I was having a bad week and feeling unproductive and just generally in a bad mood, I just wasn’t fully present at all, either day. My mind kept wandering and I was more bored than I usually find myself in classrooms. It brought me back to my earlier (pre-College Student Affairs) days in the GSE, when we would have to do random observations. They would always be in regular classrooms and I would always be completely, totally, fully bored out of my mind (actually, the few times they put me in a resource room as an attempt to show special education, I was even more bored).

When everything is in Spanish, this makes paying attention even harder. Think of a really boring work meeting or class. Your mind jumps around all the time and you have to consciously remind yourself to stop and pay attention to what’s going on. This happens in Spanish too, except it’s a thousand times harder to come back. My second grade classes were fairly easy to follow, but I sat it on a meeting of the board of directors (really, just three guys who felt like showing up plus the nurses) at the health center last week too. That was hard to follow in general, since the topics really ranged and there was no agenda. But then, when my mind would wander, I would lose the conversation completely. If I missed just a sentence or two, the conversation was changing directions and I’d have to remind myself to try and pay attention, try to figure out what they were talking about, and then attempt to keep up the conversation, nod appropriately, and not start to daydream again. Most of the time, I got really lost and would just give up for a few minutes (an act that I discussed with another PC volunteer today who said it was “really kind of great, actually”) because it was futile.

Anyway, that was sort of a side note. I’m not proud of my mind wandering, but I think that’s pretty normal stuff. Really, I was worrying because being in those classrooms made me want to teach regular education back at home. All I could think about, especially in the second classroom, was how much easier and more organized and pleasant it would be to do the same thing back in the states. I didn’t like student teaching for my regular fourth grade class one bit, but it seems immensely more pleasurable than teaching at any level here in Honduras. I loved working on my lesson plans back home and seeing how the lessons worked and reading through the different books and grading and designing projects and watching the kids interact…I liked all of this, just not the actual day-to-day teaching and dealing with regular kids. But being in the second grade classes was just depressing. One of the teachers was leagues better than the other (which made it hard to write their feedback form together, but I managed) and I just couldn’t stop thinking about how well she’d do in an American classroom. I couldn’t help myself from comparing everything to the way it was back home. The longer I was there, the more I wanted to just come home and teach at the elementary school I was at down in Monroe.

This is sort of related to how I’ve said that everything will seem easier when I come home, because it will be in English, but with a shameful spin. Sitting there in the classroom…I just wanted everything to be easier. I saw myself teaching in the future because it was something I could do, and I think fairly well, but mostly because it would be simple and such a relief after living here. It’s embarrassing but I wanted to write about it to sort through my own thoughts. I didn’t come here because I wanted the easy way, I came here (at least in part) because I wanted to be challenged, to do things that weren’t easy, to learn to do things better with limited resources, to push myself. I guess after two years here I might feel like it’s OK to do something because it’s easy when I get back…but certainly not after less than a month in site.

But I’m not freaking out too much about this, since I still don’t actually want to teach regular ed when I get back. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it would definitely be a back up (I might even prefer the unpredictability of subbing to that) and that I most definitely still want to work with people with special needs. When I think about how rich and equipped my classroom would be (if I were to work basically anywhere suburban in the US), I can definitely see myself teaching special ed and really enjoying it, at least for a few years. This is something I was unsure about before, and I’m glad to feel this way now. Part of coming here was also to learn more about myself and what I wanted to do with my life (I honestly wrote about that in my aspiration statement), and at least I’ve started along that journey. I knew it wouldn’t all be pretty.