I'm becoming more confident I'll be able to make the decision to return here next year. This semester has started quite well, and I've come to truly appreciate the community down here. The people are awesome. I still don't necessarily love the natives, and I think that's always going to be a struggle for me. I still have plenty of frustrations with the school, but so do a lot of other people, and it's a source of solidarity. Considering my options for next year, I could stay here, where I will have a large number of fellow returning teachers, a fairly intentional community, and a year of the position already under my belt, or I could try to find a job somewhere that isn't West Michigan (I'm just thinking realistically), where I have little to no connection to other people, and be going through a first year of a course again. Many of my colleagues down here need to consider paying off student loans and whatnot, which impacts their decisions; fortunately, I have no monetary considerations hanging over my head back in the States, and moving back would in fact probably make me feel less secure financially. At any rate, West Michigan is really the only place I think would suit me more given my situation than Honduras, and W. MI just doesn't seem plausible right now. I'll keep eyes peeled for other job opportunities, but things really seem to be aligning back in the Honduras direction.
That's certainly something I'd never have expected as of last November. God is wild.
I'm enjoying teaching To Kill a Mockingbird more than anything else so far, and it helps that my students have been most responsive to it, as well. I have still been struggling with procrastination, unable to spur myself to getting ahead. I need to, as my parents are coming down in three weeks, and at that point, I will be beginning a new book and will have to have sub plans ready and all of that so that I can enjoy the time with Dad and Carol.
I've been getting to know my students more. I rode home from a soccer game with one student and her dad, and had a good conversation. Some students come in before, during, or after school to talk. We've been sharing various things in class because of journal entries relating the book to their own lives. I'm very glad that this is the case; it shows me that my students are willing to let me participate in their lives, and that amount of trust is a real gift.
However, I'm suddenly faced with the sometimes awkward position of too much trust. One of my students just today came in to talk, among other things, about her problems with drinking over the last few months. She had gotten quite out of control with it, and realized she still was feeling unfulfilled, so she's fortunately realized drinking is not the way to go. On Monday, in a not-so-small-group discussion during chapel, several students in my group asked me about my opinions on premarital sex and its sinfulness - not asking hypothetically, mind you, but because I'm confident 60 percent of my 11th graders have had it. I'm realizing just how more...debauched, for lack of a better word - these students' lives are than mine ever has been, and I'm struggling with the idea of being a role model, when I haven't, in my six extra years of life, had to deal with hardly anything they deal with. You'd think having been upstanding throughout basically all of my life would equip me well to deal with these questions, but it really hasn't.
Not to mention, despite their increasing trust in sharing things with me, the majority of my students pay me very little mind in or out of class. Being talked to outside of class is a humorous interaction. A conversation about a low grade is as effective as talking to air - if you fail the year, you just take the recuperation exam during the summer and you're all set. A class discussion about improper use of the word "gay" is entirely undermined at the end by the student who says, "But Mr., in the culture down here, it's not bad," which is utter bullshit (it is bad, it's just as derogatory a term and just as misused as in the States) and just a sign of general unwillingness to ever consider change - the biggest frustration I have with Honduras. Any suggested shortcoming in life down here is just pegged as "cultural" and thus irreversible. After all, who is an outsider like me to claim that something is wrong with a culture I'm not even a part of?
And even despite these frustrations, the frequent feelings of my own futility, for some reason it seems I'll come back. I don't exactly understand it myself.
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Aaron, you sound so much better in your blog. You're sounding rational and strong, realizing that though you'd like to be in MI, another year in Honduras may be the best option since, as you said, you've got a job there (and from what I hear MI is suffering job-market-wise even more than the rest of the country) and a year of experience under your belt. Go you. It's really cool that you're making the effort to have conversations with your students in and out of class even when you feel looked over - I bet you many of those kids will look back on their time with you and learn something from it or make some connection that you wish they had made in class - but we all know life doesn't always work that way. You're planting good seeds in these kids. I'm trying to focus on that same thing for the high school freshmen girls' Discipleship group I'm leading; I hope my words - and really God's Word - will plant a seed that I may never see blossom as most of what I see is them talking madly about teacher and boy drama, but down the line, when they come up face to face with a hard part of life, I hope they will know whence to draw strength, the Lord. I'm glad to hear that your Dad and Carol are coming to visit, yay! They will be so proud to see your place.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I was talking to my sister recently about the "cycle" of culture shock, and she said that supposedly it takes 6 or 7 months to really get used to things...there's a whole graph of the different stages that you go through before and after that point. Maybe you are over the hump! woohoo!
ReplyDeleteI can see the frustrations you are having, though. You don't have the "cultural legitimacy," perhaps, that a fellow Honduran would have in these conversations. Maybe you need to find a 'cool' Honduran to back you up on these things. :-) Or somehow prove to the students that the issues they are dealing with are similar to the ones in the states (Show them Mean Girls?? jk)