(written August 23, 2011)
Yesterday a group of us headed up to the school to get everything cleaned and organized for the new school year. The school room is in the same building as the church. There is a large room when that I think is used for the institute and then three smaller rooms. Each elementary class will have its own room and its own teacher. One mom will teach one grade while the other teacher (Samantha Vanderwarker) will teach the other when she arrives. Until then, Rachel Barilla is having all of the 4th graders watch their videos with her daughter.
My three girls came and helped, so we tackled cleaning the room first. Then we started pulling out all of the textbooks. There were so many teacher manuals—often two or three books per subject. And in 10th grade, the girls don’t always have the same edition, so I have two entire sets of certain subjects! After all the teacher manuals were on the shelf, I realized that I needed to make sure I had tests for each girl in each subject. That also proved to be overwhelming. Around 5:00 we decided to call it a day. Since we had made so much progress, it was decided that the high schoolers would start school the next day.
Today went much more smoothly. I decided that the girls would work on two subjects for the day since we got a later start than normal. A and Elizabeth (the 10th graders) opted for World History and Biology, choosing to put off geometry until later—hopefully this isn’t indicative of their attitude towards geometry for the entire year. Carolyn (the 12th grader) was able to work on Economics and PreCalculus. All I know is we’ll have quite an interesting year between the math (Geometry and PreCalculus) and science (Biology and Physics) classes. I know for a fact that none of those classes are my strong point.
This week will continue to be busy. Tomorrow a group of about five from Mexico is coming in. We’re not really sure how long they’ll be here. I’ll probably end up sharing my room—hopefully she speaks English, because Spanish (much like math and science) is also not one of my fortes. And then on Friday, we’re looking forward to two other missionary families joining us here for a cookout. Between all of the missionaries and the Mexico missions team, I think there will be over 30 of us! I’m working on planning some little games (Minute-to-Win-it type games) for us all to play. This will be a great group to watch!
Yesterday in family devotions, Walter Loescher compared Mohammed to Jesus Christ. The Muslims believe that Mohammed fulfilled the prophecy of a prophet that was to come that would be like Moses. The end of the book of Deuteronomy mentions that Moses was unparalleled by any other prophet of Israel in regards to the signs and wonders that he performed. In contrast, Walter mentioned that very few miracles performed by Mohammed are recorded in the Koran. The accounts of Jesus Christ, on the other hand, brim with exciting, never-before-seen miracles. Jesus Christ could control the wind and the seas! I’m thankful that we serve the God who is in control over nature and over all!
