Also, "Th" doesn't exist in Spanish. So my people kind of call me "atina." Which apparently sounds like the verb "atinar", which I couldn't really gather the meaning for... cue the communication mishaps. :)
I'm writing from my room in CHILE!! Ever since coming back in mid-December from study abroad last year, I was considering coming back to Santiago sometime within the next year to visit my host family and immerse myself in the Spanish language and Latin American culture again. Typical post-study-abroad-high-longing-to-go-back type of thing. I didn't really actively think about going back until the beginning of March, when I started tentatively sending emails to Grinnell alumni in Chile and the rest of Latin America, seeing if there were any schools open to having a gringa (person from the US) with very little education experience be an intern at their school. My hopes were pretty low, and I didn't expect much to actually happen. But IT HAPPENED!! When I got the email that my internship got funding, I was in shock and couldn't believe my plan was actually going to pull through. I jumped up an down, skipped around my building, and smiled like a crazy person the rest of the day. :D teehee
So, I'm back in Santiago, Chile for my next great adventure: being an assistant English teacher at the Colegio Raimapu in La Florida, Santiago, Chile. I'll be helping out in a classroom for high schoolers (9-12 grade US, 1-4 media in Chilean terms). I visited the school for the first time today, got a tour, met a few teachers (and of course I don't remember any of their names... I need to work on that...), and observed and helped out a tiny bit in an English class. I had some cool conversations about the school's founding (a few parents banded together during the dictatorship), some of the struggles of educating young people in Chile, and maintaining a school. I still have no idea what to expect: I have a little experience working with high schoolers through camps, and I have a tiny bit of tutoring experience with the Spanish Lab... but I have NO idea how this is actually going to play out. And I am perfectly okay with that!
So I'm sure you're all thinking... what happened to brain-obsessed-pre-med Athena? I realized that I was extremely tentative of that plan from the beginning, and after the clinical observations, I realized that being a doctor or surgeon or researcher for the nervous system really wouldn't make me happy. Originally I wanted to pursue that as a way of remembering my mother because of her quadriplegia, but that's not the aspect of my mother I would want to highlight every single day in my work. She was passionate about exposing her kids to all different kinds of things and ensuring that we learned as much as we could about anything at all. Education has done amazing things in my life, and I owe of lot of my own "success" to the teachers and people I met through school. So, education might be what I do with the rest of my life. We'll see how this summer goes. :)
I have mandatory blogging to do for the funding requirements, so there might some of those posts up here as well as my pensieve-like musings.
Thanks for reading, and thank a teacher today!
Athena
