La Primera Copa Del Mundo

7-13-2010
Day 131 of 365: Has it been a month already? Congratulations to Spain for winning their first ever World Cup, defeating the Netherlands in a hard fought 1-0 slugfest. I guess I can get a decent night's sleep again since I won't be waking up every other morning to catch a 330am soccer match. This final was probably the most brutal for me, since the game went into extra time and didn't end until after 6am, when Andres Iniesta put in the winning goal with just minutes left on the clock. Not having enough time to go back to sleep again before work that morning, I ended up winging it on about 3 hours sleep that day. Fortunately it's the last week of school and we're just winding down the semester, and Spain winning was worth the exhaustion. Those who are keeping up know that the 2 teams I'd been cheering for were the US and South Korea, but after they both got knocked out in the round of 16, I needed to pick another team to cheer for, and I felt like Spain was too good to have never won the World Cup. I normally like a good underdog to take down Goliath, but in this case, Spain had paid their dues over the last few years and deserved the title.

Now that the World Cup is over, I'll be working my butt off for the rest of this week in preparation for my school's Summer English Camp, which begins the day after school ends next week. Unfortunately, this means that I'm going to have to break one of my own personal rules, which is to never bring your work home with you. However, I feel like this summer camp is an opportunity for me to prove myself to my co-teachers, since I'm doing all the planning and teaching. If I succeed, I think it'll make next semester go a lot smoother than this first one. If I fail, next semester will be hell. There's really no other way for me to put it.

I think I can say that I underestimated this job when I first got here. I thought it would be hard at first and get easier, but this first semester has actually been the opposite. It started off easy because my co-teachers were bearing the majority of the responsibility. For the first month I was just shooting from the hip and having a good old time. Over the following 3 months they've gradually given me more responsibility, to the point where I'm now basically doing everything and they're primarily in a support role. This is actually how it's supposed to be, I'm just gaining teaching experience by the bucket now instead of by the drop. In fact, on the morning that I only slept 3 hours, I made a student cry for the first time. This sounds negative, but it's actually not. My co-teachers have been getting on my case about being too nice, which causes problems with discipline. I didn't have any nice in me that day though. This kid had it coming all semester too, so I don't feel bad about it. I still don't know how to discipline girls though. They walk all over me.