When we came over here we knew we would have some challenges diving into a new culture. Our school is made up of many children from many nations. Korean, Indian, Thai, Chinese, English, American, Saudis, etc. There are many great aspects to working in our school as well as many challenges. The learning levels of all of these students range widely, so its tough to keep them on a moving path through the cirriculum. For example, in year three they are learning a list of 100 spelling words in term one, and my learning support kids are still on the first ten, while the other kids are learning the latter half of them. Some of my kids speak such good English that they won't shut up, and some hardly understand a word. In math, they split up the four classrooms into levels, and we work with the lower level. I asked one of my year three kids last week what 11+11 equaled, and after thinking about it she blurted out....."Twoty Two". (I had to stop myself from laughing right in her face, but it was super cute). I asked one of my students in year two a few weeks back to give me a word with the letter "E" in it, to which he replied, "E....U....N....A.........mouse". Hmmmmm. The other apsect is that it costs a lot of money to send your kid to this school, so most of our students are rich kids with maids and such, and don't know how to do alot of things on their own. Plus, in some cases, the parents don't spend a lot of time working on things at home with them, so at times this school makes you want to pull your hair out in terms of progress. Still, there are such wonderful pleasures in small rewards. I watched Jasmine teach her class the other day, and it was clear that the kids all love her and love music, and get excited to be in her class, even though they don't understand everything yet. Its quite a site to see a bunch of students dancing in a theatre and singing, "Peel Banana, Peel Peel Banana" while they dance around. And the girl who said Twoty Two was on the right track.....baby steps. So for now we will simply enjoy the process of helping our kids learn literacy, math, music, and become members of a sociological process, whatever that looks like. It is certainly good to be a part of it. And I think sometimes, we learn more from the kids than they learn from us.