Back to School

Monday, Bocas del Toro, Panama.

Even the locals say this is unusual.  It rained here, really hard, before school, during school, and after school.  On our way home from class around 12:30 we had to wade a little bit down the street, and then had to change our route to avoid having to wade a lot.  Where the streets have sidewalks (like the one we see from our hotel balcony), some of the streets are flooded to the point of the sidewalks being under water.  Even now it is raining, though not quite as much as before.

I am working outside on the balcony.  I had to look for a place that had both electricity and no leaks.  Our bed in our room didn’t qualify.  It had both electricity and a leak—right by my pillow.  Not quite sure how we are going to deal with that tonight.

Today was our first day of classes in Bocas.  They put us in a B-1 group with a good and entertaining teacher.  B-1 would be appropriate, because we finished A-2 on our last day of classes in Boquete.  However, this B-1 group has already been meeting for a week, so we are a week behind.  That’s not good, because we probably would have been have been a week or more behind (functionally) even if we hadn’t missed a week of classes.  

Consequently, during our morning class break we spoke to the administrator about our concern, primarily that we needed more review of the material we learned in A-2 and weren’t ready to skip ahead to the second week of B-1.  By the end of the morning we had worked out a good solution.  We will be going to 3 hours of “mini-group” lessons in the afternoons and dropping out of the morning group lessons.  We liked the students in our group this morning, so we’ll miss them.  But we will get the same teacher, at least for this week.  I think Peggy and I will have more time in actual conversation practice in this mini-group, and get more personalized grammar teaching, too.

During our vacation week I could not make myself study.  As Peggy said, I only studied about 20 minutes during the entire week.  But as I replied, it was quality time.  Peggy, on the other hand, studied for hours.

Well, I guess it’s time to go study.