We are so sorry it has been a while updating you on the blog recently! As October arrived, our routine has become more concrete and predictable. To be honest, we missed this. It’s amazing how one can have such a love/hate relationship with daily routine, but through this transition we craved it and are so thankful for a new routine here in our new home.
Classes are going really well! We cannot begin to tell you how much we love our jobs here. There are days when they are trying…maybe a lesson plan doesn’t go how we thought, a student acts up and becomes disinterested, or we are thrown a curve ball and have to adjust on the fly (this happen A LOT in our context). Yet again and again we are humbled and overwhelmed with this amazing opportunity. Our classes are an hour and forty minutes long, with a ten minute break somewhere along the way. David teaches sophomore writing, sophomore oral, and freshman oral. I teach freshman oral, sophomore oral, and junior speech. Because our company has had a team here on this campus for some 30+ years, our team has progressively created our own curriculum we use in the classes. This is SO helpful to have a backbone for the lessons, and significantly reduces our time spent lesson planning. What’s also nice is there are three of us foreign teachers teaching any given class. So when we lesson plan, we meet together once a week for a brief time and go over what we are thinking or planning on doing for next week’s class. This is a luxury I know many teams within our company do not have so we are super grateful. David teaches 14 hours a week and I teach 16 hours a week. This leaves a great amount of time spent hanging out or meeting with students- our favorite part of our job!
Though there is no way for you to know all of their names or their faces, please remember each one of our 410 students. We have to remind ourselves that these are individual people and not get overwhelmed by the huge amount. It has not been hard at all to have a heart for them and to pursue relationships with them, because we truly love them. The harder part has been using time wisely and not overworking ourselves in this way or overdoing it. I have no doubt this will be an on-going balance struggle in our time here.
We had the opportunity to Skype with our home fellowship in Knoxville this past week and that encouraged our hearts so much. We way underestimated the value of having a body back us up and stay in close contact with us. It’s easy to feel forgotten, being on the other side of the world and having so few people who can relate to us on a deep level while doing our work. Thank you to them, and also a huge thank you to our friends and family who have been so intentional with us. One of the biggest challenges of this transition has been balancing new relationships here, old relationships at home, and our work. Considering the fact that we have close connections in several states, having lived in several states, it’s so hard to stay connected well with friends all over the place. Thank you to everyone for your patience as we work to stay connected, and your continued intentionality! We are certainly learning to show grace to ourselves along the way. We couldn’t do this without you!
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