Pleasant Reminder

Last week I was called in to the university for an emergency meeting with my advisor.  To my relief, the emergency was to ask (or maybe more like demand) a big favor.  Another professor had a death in her family and I was assigned to cover her courses for the week.  My initial reaction was not one of excitement because it meant a change to my work schedule and cancelation of other plans.  However, I took the text books home and planned the two courses for the week and on Monday I was surprised at how much fun I had in the classes.  We covered the material, role-played, played games, gave high fives, and hopefully met some of the course objectives too.  This was the first time since arriving in Ecuador that I worked with one class for more than one consecutive class period and the first time where I wasn't simply a guest speaker.  At the end of class on Thursday, I thanked the students and told them their teacher would be back for the next class.  I received a huge, immediate response, "noooo.....!" in unison, followed with requests to permanently replace the teacher.  Probably this had little to do with me (I didn't do anything all that fantastic) or the other teacher (she didn't do anything all that uncommon) but more to do with the general education system here, in which very outdated, less effective and less engaging teaching strategies are used.  Nonetheless, it still made my week.

This morning I went to another class and I pulled out my deck of Kentucky cards for an activity I planned.  I use them fairly frequnetly to group students, play games, and of course show pictures of my home state.  When sorting them out for my activity, I discovered a message in pencil on one of the cards from last week.  "You are a good teacher.  I'll miss you."  Aw, what a good reminder of how meaningful the little things are even when the big picture isn't that pretty.