Lesson 10: A Week in the Life of Mr. Stoddard

Many people know that I am an active person.  I always like to get involved and participate or lead many different activities.  When I go to a new place I usually try to quickly get involved and join groups and activities.  So what is it that I actually do during a week here in Honduras? Let me go into narrator mode...

It's 6:00am on Monday morning.  I wake up to the melodious gargle of my alarm, get ready for school and walk to the high school auditorium where we have staff devotions every morning.  After that I make my way over to my classroom where I start preparing for the day.  I always get an hour planning period from 8:30-9:30 when the students are taking Spanish class with another teacher, so that's my chance to catch up or work ahead on grading, planning, or various tasks in need of completion.
At lunch time, the students stay in the classroom and eat at their desks.  Later they go outside for recess and I get 20 precious minutes to get some things done, unless a student needs to stay inside for discipline.  After school I stay in my classroom and prepare for the next day.  I grade papers, tests, homework, outline the next day's lessons, and prepare any papers that I will need to send to the office to have copied.  We have secretaries do the copying, which means the teachers need to stay organized and send all the papers to be copied several days in advance.  I like the time after school when I can think about the day that just finished and figure out what's going to happen the next day.
At 4:00 I head over to the high school to go into student mode and take Spanish lessons from one of the teachers.  After that, I go back home for some rest, some dinner and getting some work done before our men's Bible study group at 6:30, after which I try to get some work done and sleep.

I'm doing No-Shave November - how
am I doing so far??

Tuesdays start off with staff devotions again.  During school I am basically with the students the whole day, except for an hour when they are taking Spanish-language classes.  And depending on the day they have gym, art, computer, music, library, or Chapel, which means I get another 30 minutes off at some point in the day (which really turns into about 20 minutes since I take the students there and pick them up). The students eat lunch in the classroom, so I get the joy of supervising them while they eat and try to stay civil.   After school, we have Challenge Club every other week, which is like a youth group activity time for the 5th and 6th graders.  We have songs, skits and games, plus a small group time.  It's refreshing to see the students in a different context and be less of a disciplinarian and more of a mentor-friend.  Tuesday night the staff have a big soccer match, usually with three teams rotating onto the field.  It's a fun time to expel some energy.  I wouldn't have said I was a soccer player before a few months ago, but I've caught on pretty quickly.  My position is usually the guy who distracts the other team and makes them think he'll do something epic.  I typically just run around and appear to have an idea what's going on.  There are still a bunch of rules and strategies and techniques that I know nothing about, I'll try to keep learning...

On Wednesday after school we have a teacher meeting, sometimes with the entire staff, sometimes with just the elementary teachers.  It’s always informative, but it usually means staying after to work in my classroom, resulting in me not leaving school until after 5:00.  Then I go over to Mr. Walters’ apartment for a weekly dinner in which we only speak in Spanish.  It’s great practice and we invite some Hondurans to come chat with us and laugh at our pronunciation and vocabulary (apparently “microwave-o” is not an actual word in Spanish).  Next is one of my favorite parts of the week.  I go over to George Ashby’s apartment for a weekly tradition of grading papers, eating popcorn, drinking homemade iced tea, and watching The Sing-Off.  It’s a singing competition featuring a cappella groups that George uses a VCR to tape so we can watch it later (yes, people still use tapes!)  A few of the teachers join us and it’s always a good time

Thursday is another packed day of fun and excitement.  After school I help tutor some of my students.  Fifth grade is the year that students are allowed to start learning and instrument, and I’ve been helping teach trombone to some of the boys in my class.  They are still beginning, but it’s fun and it’s a good chance for me to practice too!  At 5:00 I go over to the gym for some Ultimate Frisbee with other teachers – not quite as big a deal as soccer, but still a good time!  Thursday at 7:00 I help lead a Worship Night at one of the apartments.  I play piano and some of the music teachers sing and play guitar.  Apparently my piano skills, limited as they may be, are in high demand.  I’ve been playing quite a lot for various programs and events.

Friday is always an interesting day. The students are usually high-energy and ready for the weekend.  I can usually get away with doing and saying fun and funny things and the kids respond well.  We always have a Spelling quiz, a Bible lesson quiz and a Bible memory verse quiz on Fridays, so the students are always ready for the end of the day.  After school, I usually work in my classroom before doing something for dinner and who-knows-what after that.  Various Fridays have included playing ukulele with some of the security guards, going downtown for an assortment of activities, pizza night with the Cochran family (they live at the school with their five young kids, who all call me “Mr. Dinosaur”)...

And thus ends my work-week, which leads into the weekend, likely to be filled with many adventures, most of which you have read about.  Last Saturday we had a fundraiser at the school.  It was a Spaghetti Dinner, and it included live musical performances by students and staff.  The band director is a trumpet player and he organized a brass quintet and we played some Canadian Brass Christmas tunes!  (Sidenote: since Hondurans don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, they feel free to start gearing up for Christmas in October, so we’re in fully-swing Holiday Season here!)  On Sundays I usually go to a Spanish-speaking church in the morning and an English-speaking church in the afternoon.  The English-speaking church is made up of mostly missionaries, many of whom are North American.  So we had a church Thanksgiving meal after the service yesterday – except we had turkey sandwiches instead of the real bird.  Don’t worry – they still had real mashed potatoes, and that’s the important part!

We have Thursday and Friday off from school, so I’ll be taking a trip to Nicaragua with some other teachers.  We’ll be visiting a coffee farm and hopefully a volcano and some other adventurous stuff! I’ll write all about it next week!

Sorry for the decreasing amount of pictures – my camera broke and I’ve been using my iPod, but it’s not as good... Here’s a picture of the latest door design (created completely by some of the girls in my class – and yes, those are Angry Birds!)