Another Week

Well...another week is almost over. I can't believe I've only been here for 3 weeks. I feel like i've been here for months. I have learned so so much already! Not only from Breakthrough but just from living in Chicago.

One thing I love about my neighborhood is no matter what, it's never quiet. I know some people might not like that but I do. I wake up every morning to rap/r&b music coming from a neighboor's apartment or across the street...and I go to bed with either kids laughing and playing outside or some mom yelling at her kid. There is always t.v. to listen to or music to dance to! :) Another thing I love about this neighborhood is the people. Yes, the people. They are really friendly. I walk to work everyday and there is always someone on their steps or in their yard and they almost always say hi or talk about the weather or something. Now, of course, I could talk about the things I don't like about the neighborhood too but i'll keep that to myself :) haha...I would rather talk about the positive things.

Work is going great. Unfortuantely tomorrow is Friday which means my class again. I'm not going to lie...I really don't know what to do with them! haha...Hopefully i'll have this great wonderful epipheny (sp?) and everything will go great tomorrow.

Yesterday was interesting. We had 6th-8th graders in the computer lab working on "blogging" like I do. They even use blogger.com like me. Anyways, their assignment was "using correct grammer/sentence structure" write about your favorite sport or t.v. show. basically they had to write one or two paragraphs about it. They had an hour....guess what? Half of them didn't even finish one paragraph. I was sitting with one girl who literally spent the entire time staring at the computer and wrote 3 sentences. In one hour. Another girl...she had 2 sentences I told her if she wrote 2 more than she could be finished, 30 minutes later...she had written 1 more...I was like...why aren't you writing? "I don't feel like it." I was like, come on, it's not like we are asking you to write on Shakesphere's plays or something...ugh! I just didn't understand it at all. But that is the attitudes these kids have. Education is just not high on their priority lists. I have kids in 6th grade who can barely read. Oh, and we had a reading test on the computers for around 35 kids (1st-5th) to see where they were "grade level" wise. We had 3 kids who got above a 50%. 3 wow...3! It's crazy. Breakthrough, though, is doing an amazing job though and I know that a lot of them are doing even better than they did last year. I just pray we can continue to help them because honestly, reading is the most important skill they can learn.

Alright...that's it for today. continue to pray for me. Pray I continue to love these kids through God's eyes not my own because some days it's not that easy :)