Living life to its fullest

                Going through the open gates of the orphanage opens up the gates to my heart. All of a sudden, the world starts to revolve around only the kids and nothing else. There is still a little annoying voice in my head that’s making me be less confident and is making me second guess myself. I am working hard currently in Cambodia to break free from that voice. I am holding back and I don’t want to do that here. I don’t want to have regrets when I leave to go home.

                When you walk into a classroom all the kids faces light up because they have a new teacher with a different teaching style and there excited to see how that class will play out. Unfortunately, when I was teaching I lost control of the class. I broke the class into three small groups and that helped quite a bit, because all the kids started to focus on their small group teacher. I now have a greater respect for all my teachers because I have experienced how hard it is to keep a class going in the right direction. After attempting to teach them how to say ‘tree’, I realized that I need to focus more on how I pronounce words so that I can teach the pronunciation right.  Now whenever I say a complicated word I notice how my tongue and my lips move to make that sound. Tomorrow I will be very passionate, fun, and interesting and get them excited about what I am teaching. This morning in the tuk tuk I got a lot of tips and I was able to make a great lesson plan for teaching packets and I feel a lot more confident and prepared. I really hope that will show in my teaching tomorrow.

                Today and on the weekend we were doing manual labor. I like having a structured day normally when I am doing a task. Doing the manual labor there isn’t a schedule and sometimes I feel like I’m not doing enough. I guess I am just scared to mess up because these kids have so little compared to me and I feel like I need to be perfect for them. I learned today that maybe I don’t need to be perfect; I just need to learn from my mistakes. That’s going to be really hard for me because I hate it when I mess up, I feel  really guilty like I let everyone down. That is my goal now, I want to be able to be more confident, not second guess myself, and learn from my mistakes. This confidence will help me in my everyday life. I won’t second guess that I did my science project wrong or second guess my answer to my math homework. This will save me the time I waste when I re-recheck my work even after I’ve checked multiple times.

                Nothing will hold me back when I teach these kids tomorrow I will prepare lessons and teach them to the best of my ability so that they can learn all that they can from me. When that voice comes back into my head, I’ll just have to ignore it. I’ll assure myself that I am capable of doing the right thing and I can get the correct answer without over checking my work. I will buy a souvenir here to always remind myself that I am capable of great things!