Training Day (minus Denzel)

Oh yea,

I forgot we have JOBS here, too. This week, we were able to attend a seminar thanks to our wonderful staff manager, Anne. All of the Makarios staff that works at the school (Anne, Robin, Cara, Cristina, Ashley, Kendall, myself) were able to go to another city, Jarbacoa to attend training in "positive discipline."

Sharla's friends, Krista and Chad, have started an amazing school in Jarbacoa called Doulos: http://doulosdiscovery.org/content/.It is truly an amzing place. They have 300 kids in a bilingual, Christian learning environment. It is a beautiful school in the mountains with some amazing people working there. They have a completely bilingual staff. Dominican teachers work in the younger classrooms, and at some point in elementary school, the gringos start teaching in English rooms. The goal is to have teachers all teaching in their native language. Anyway, I digress.

A lovely teacher/pastor named Jim was sent by his church to come and deliver this seminar on Positive Discipline. It really gave us some time to think about how we want to improve our classrooms. We were able to take these tools and think about how to apply them to our school, where kids are all preschool-aged. Although we all have a heart to improve the lives and education of our kiddos, most of us do not have teaching experience outside of this environment. Also, our kids are all ages 3-6, have never been in a school setting in their lives, and sometimes do not even speak much Spanish. There are a lot of challenges to face. The Doulos staff welcomed the 7 of us with open arms, and I am so thankful. I am also thankful to Anne for arranging sessions like these to help enrich us and make us better teachers!

Pray for us that we make the best educational environment possible for our kids, and that we are able to jump all of the hurdles along the way.

And, this has nothing to do with the seminar, but we drove up on Tuesday night, and stayed overnight to attend the Wednesday all-day seminar. Tuesday night, we ate....MEXICAN FOOD! There are Mexicans here, and they opened a restaurant! Yes! Since queso is pretty much tex-mex, the cheese we ordered was a little bit like a ball park, but the salsa was spot on, and just being at a table with tacos was awesome. Kendall and I almost cried when we found out where we were eating. Hallelujah! (The picture above shows the roomskies after Mexican dinner).