Yet another day down, and I rock.

Today went much better. Actually, I don't know if it went better or I'm just loosing my mind. We spent the morning going over words for different parts of the room, chair, floor, door, etc. We then went to the concept of "touch vs point". Something that has helped us play more games throughout the day.
I had the class break down today, as they are prone to do every 15 minutes during the day, and I found myself surrounded by about 4 boys speaking Spanish at about 500 words a minute. Finally Joseph, pronounced Hoseph, walked up to the board and wrote this gem down. After he had finished this they all started jumping up and down and pointing at me yelling Nacho Libre, Nacho Libre Which means that they either think I look like Jack Back, or they think I teach with the personality and entertaining energy of a professional wrestler. Either way, I think it's pretty dang cool.

In case any of you are curious, this is what my board looks like when I am done at the end of the day, (click to enlarge). I usually fill up my board about 3-4 times during the day and have to erase before I can go on to the next lesson. My fingers are dried and caked with chalk and my lungs are probably filled with dust.....I miss an overhead projector or document camera. Before anyone says anythign, I know that I spelled worried wrong.....something that will forever plague me, but how well are pro-wrestlers suppose to teach anyway?

In the evening decided to take advantage of the lax child protection laws here in Chile and decided to teach the students the American past time of "dodge ball". The students seemed to enjoy it, although the concept of "out" seemed to be pretty lost on them. We ended up having three of the teachers wandering through the game, telling people when they were out. The students would go and sit down on the sidelines and before you knew it, they were back in the game again. In some games the same student was out 3-4 times. I finally ended up handing out on the sidelines and just making sure we didn't have any reinforcements come around.
Sadly, the balls that we used had more in common with rotten sponges than actual dodgeballs, but fortunately there is no water here for balls to fall into and get nasty, no one could throw the balls hard enough to be a danger and the students didn't seem to care.
I don't know if it's wrong of me or not, but I miss the hard smack and feeling of terror when a proper rubber dodgeball makes contact with someone. Playing dodgeball with balls that don't hurt is like playing "touch" professional football.