Last Day of School

After four long, hard, fantastic, challenging, frustrating, joyous, and certainly interesting months teaching at Best American School in El Progreso, Honduras, I now arrive at my last day of school! Tomorrow I will say goodbye to my students and fellow teachers and leave behind a community that I never imagined I would find here in Honduras.

Riding the x-ray bike at the San Pedro Sula Plantetarium with BAS

Since my first day of work in early September I had to overcome plenty of hurdles for example:

a lack of textbooks, no prior curriculum, no teacher guidebooks, zero experience teaching high school on my part, 200 energetic P.E. students from pre-kinder to 11th grade, communication problems within the school, and apathetic 10th-grade students doing their best to resist my efforts to communicate why sociology and psychology (and later physics and chemistry) are worth studying.

But the joys have outweighed the hardships:

wonderful teachers to help me along, $7,000 Lempiras/month to help pay my expenses and extend my stay here in Honduras, 200 energetic P.E. students from pre-kinder to 11th grade, slowly learning the name of each of my students and then greating each one when I see them throughout the day, running into teachers, students, and parents everywhere I go in downtown Progreso, my wonderful 11th graders,reliving high school (albeit it from the view of a teacher in a central american country), and experiencing all the things that make Honduran culture different, vibrant, and alive.

It has been an experience that I will never forget.

Stephanie and Dulce (in the background) on the bus to Zizima water park

Two of my 10th-graders, Ivis and Noam