Thrown in at the deep end..

What we thought was our training day turned out to be something entirely different. We were actually teaching, meeting the classes and pretty much on our own. Now this was scary. Mali was lucky and had a teacher to shadow but me, not so lucky. The teacher whose classes I was taking left yesterday, so when I walked into the first class with nothing but my timetable I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. The class, 6th grade grammar. Okay I thought, this shouldn't be too hard, I have a B at higher English. How wrong I was.. Opening the textbook I was confronted with subjective and objective pronouns. Oh dear. I can honestly say I had no idea what these were. I had a very long moment of panic where I thought 'what the hell am I going to teach?!' an this must have been apparent to the children as they asked if I knew what to do. at that moment I had a brainwave, it's only my first day, these children don't know me, I don't know them, we'll do an introduction class. Telling the class of 4 to put their textbooks away immediately perked them up, of they weren't already excited to have a 'muchcha nieve' or snow girl as I have been nicknamed on account of my skin being so white ( I thought I was tanned at home!).
The lesson went well, I talked to them about me, my home, the country, my family and they taught me their names, about their family and of course local swear words and hand signals. Who knew a hand signal could mean so much?!
I moved on to the 5th grade class, then 4th and finally 2nd. Introducing myself and getting them to make name tags and according to their various levels of English, teach me about their lives in Trinidad.
The overwhelming feeling was of happiness and excitement from the children. They want me and Mali to be here, teaching and learning with them, they want us to be in their school, they want to be friends with us and learn about our home and culture but most of all they want to learn English! And that's what i see is different to in the uk, every single child in the school wants to learn all the time, it may sound stereotypical to say this, but from my experience it's true!