Davis,+Mollie

My Summer ENGLISH Journal: WEEK THREE: 14 - 18 June

So Ms. Dickson has left Utila. I'm here all by myself learning how to scuba dive. If you want to see where I'm diving, check out this link ! Sunday was a full day of watching videos and reading the text book (boring!). Monday I took my book work test and passed with a 98%! I was totally ready for a day in the pool on Monday where I had to learn how to get all of my gear on and actually start breathing underwater. Now, today, Tuesday, I had my first dive in the actual ocean! It was a little scary because the wind was pretty strong and that meant the surge and the waves made it pretty hard to get into and out of the water. Once we got under the water though, it was beautiful. We saw trumpet fish, a few types of crabs, a butterfly fish, an angel fish, a flounder - and tons more!

Yes, this course is in English, but Natalie, my instructor, is British, so I'm practicing my accent understanding. I used to be really good with accents because of how many of my friends came from all over the world, but I've lost my practice. It's good that I'm working with her though, because I'll be meeting up with all of those friends again soon!

(pictures coming)

WEEK TWO: 7 - 11 June

FINALLY!! TUESDAY!! My classes are OVER!! I can finally be on holiday! I presented my proposal for tenth grade with Mrs. Bonilla. We got an A! That means I passed both of my classes with an A in each! No my summer can start! Wednesday Ms. Dickson and I drove to La Ceiba and after some AMAZING seafood soup, got on the ferry to Utila on Thursday. Since then, I've been wandering around the island trying to find a place to scuba diving. I know this sounds like I should be doing this in Spanish, and while, yes, I did start out doing so, it's been a whole lot of English because of how many people here speak English, or Creole. It's shocking how much English is spoken here. It's like we're not really in Honduras. In fact, at breakfast this morning - at a cafe owned by a Norwegian woman, two guys came in (from their accent, I assumed they were from Tegucigalpa) and one of them ordered breakfast in English. The other one said (in Spanish), "maje, we're in Honduras - speak in Spanish." So I thought, "maje, you're on the island - speak island!" I didn't say anything, though.

(pictures coming)

WEEK ONE: 31 May - 4 June

So you all are off on your holidays and here I am stuck in school - particularly a master's program. I'm learning all sorts of stuff that hopefully will help all of you next year! We have had two courses; one in dealing with changes in school and making you all ready to work better in the 21st century, and the second one is learning about how to improve things at school. Each group of students has to choose an area for improvement and write a plan for how to fix it. I'm doing my plan with Mrs. Bonilla to make tenth grade students more ready for IB. You all will be my guinea pigs! How excited are you?

It's been a hard week because I've had to do a lot of assignments for this class, and I've had to finish up all of my grading and do all of the end of year paper work. THEN I had to clean my classroom and pack everything up to move for August. I'll be heading to the conference room for all of next year. If you have me or Ms. Dickson, you'll have your English classes there with us. I'm not very excited about moving, though. (pictures coming)

13 May Number 1: Facebook! I use facebook to talk to all of my friends around the world! Sometimes I chat in Spanish and sometime in Turkish, but mainly I talk to all of my friends in English - although many of them are from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada... so they all write a bit differently than I do. That doesn't usually cause much confusion, but sometimes it causes a healthy debate!
 * What is my favorite way to interact with English?

18 May

I created an fml account today. It's all your fault 9.2. My very first post is: Today there was a coup in my classroom. I was forcibly evicted from my teacher chair and asked to answer obscure questions trolled from the detritus on my desk. FML I hope they post it.

For those of you who weren't there, it was a rather peaceful coup that did not lead to any wide scale classroom destruction or disturbances. The instigator wanted to protest summer reading, and when it was proven that I knew a bare minimum of random facts and author names, class resumed as normal.

I wanted to post this just so you know that your "English Interaction" can be something as trivial as an FML post. As long as you write like 100-300 words to explain it. (140 words)

19 May - update: Today my fml got denied. fml **