Earthquake!?

It has become a daily ritual for me to walk the mile home from school and I can’t help but brag that my student accompaniment has been increasing. It used to be just Janique and me because he comes over after school until his mom gets home, but now I have students asking me at lunch time if I’m walking home. Sometimes I’ve walked with groups of over a dozen students from various grade levels! On the way up, we sing songs, play I-Spy and guessing games and just laugh and laugh. It’s a great way to calm down and regroup after a stressful day and it is these students always help put a smile back on my face.

It was testing week. But there was a small problem: up until Wednesday, all of the tests weren’t ready! The district is supposed to supply the math and language arts questions for each grade, but we didn’t receive them until Tuesday morning. What’s worse is that they email the exams to the principal, so she still needs to print them out and run off all of the copies. With a small copy machine that is currently broken, the teachers were none too pleased. Ms. Hall and I tried to make due by continuing to find review work for the students to work on, but even they were getting frustrated because they just want to get the exams over with. Luckily, I was able to begin evaluating the students on the oral comprehension passage on Tuesday afternoon, but I had to listen to each student individually and did not finish until break time on Wednesday. After hearing the same passage twenty-seven times, you could ask me about Anna and her surprise present in a big box and I could recite the whole passage for you!

By an act of God, and the help of some neighboring copy machines, we were able to run off all of the pages for the written math and language arts tests. After Ms. Hall dumped them on my desk, I still had to collate and staple each packet of four sheets, but that was the least of our worries. The tests did not come with answer guides or scoring sheets, so I had to make them, too. I wonder if it’s always been like this! The students were able to write their composition essays on Wednesday and also completed the language arts written test. I have all of the written tests graded – unfortunately not too happy with the results – and I started grading the essays. Even though the students still need a little work on their grammar and spelling (there are some words I can’t even sound out because of the differing pronunciations here!) I enjoy reading the extremely creative stories. Now that I know my students much better, I can share in their humor and find myself laughing along with the characters.

They took both of the math tests on Thursday morning, but I haven’t had a chance to grade them yet because from noon until very late that night I was in the hospital. To make a long story short, I was transferred to two different hospitals (by ambulance each time) only to find out that I do not have Dengue (a potentially serious virus transmitted by mosquitoes) as originally thought, but I do have a viral infection. Guess I really am experiencing ALL of St. Lucia! I couldn’t help but look around in awe while sitting in my hospital bed because the place looked like something straight out of an old war movie. It was a single room with a small receptionist desk and seven or eight beds separated by blue curtains. Something else I definitely wasn’t prepared for was the minute long earthquake that effected almost the whole island! The doctors and nurses ran out quickly leaving all of us inside hooked up to I.V.’s and such. I don’t think there was any serious damage, and that hospital visit is one I will never forget.