International Women´s Day

Happy International Women´s Day to all the ladies reading this site. Today was a fabulous day. I was supposed to spend the morning ¨helping¨(in other words observing) at a conference at an all guys school, something I´ve only had to do once, and really didn´t enjoy because the guys tend to be rude. Instead I got to go to a women´s conference at the Roma Theater in honor of today. Then teaching today made up for all the rough days in the past. And trust me, there´ve been rough days. Such as yesterday when the other 2 teachers didn´t show up, and I had the whole school for 3 hours. Okay, that´s alittle dramatic, the ´whole school´consisted of about 15 students because most ditched. Still with kids from 8-17 it was impossible to get anything accomplished and was incredibly frustrating, especially since noone had the notebooks they were supposed to. Anyways, today was great, because for the first time ever, all 6 of my students present had their homework (my previous hw record was 3 out of 6). We also made a breakthrough on our study of fractions, and learned to convert from improper to proper and vice versa. This was huge as Monday I had to teach my 17 year olds what a fraction is and how to add them and it was quite a struggle. Then for social studies I took advantage of the fact that it´s Women´s Day, we´re studying the family, and all 6 present were girls. I gave them a typical but abbreviated Harding marriage talk on how to find a decent man. I didn´t intend to, but domestic violence is really bad here, and they´d never heard it before. I asked them what they could do to make sure future husbands treat them well, and they came up with hope and pray. They told me the role of a woman is to clean and raise kids (Paul, you´re not allowed to make any comments) and when I asked them their rights, they said death. They were half kidding, but also half serious, so I went on my little rant on deserving respect and refusing to settle for less, and practical things to look for in a guy. Then we talked about the influence of women. I told them that they always hear that the youth are the future, but it´s the mother who is the 'alma de la casa' and she raises the kids. She teaches her sons how to respect women and her daughters that they deserve to be respected. Her relationship is the model that her children will follow whether good or bad. It was amazing watching them, they have never been so attentive. I don´t think these girls have ever heard that they matter, they deserve respect, and they have a huge influence in the world. Nothing else I´ve done in the past 3 weeks may have mattered, but I hope they got something out of today.