Car registration

All Curacao residents need to pay an annual registration fee for their vehicles. Once the fee has been paid, drivers are given 1/3 of a license plate, to be mounted on top of their existing license plate. The colors of these additional plates are different every year. This helps the police department; they can tell simply by looking at your license whether or not you’ve paid the fees.

Fees are paid at a local bank, which keeps Curacao bank hours—closing around 3 or 4pm on weekdays. Banks are completely shut down on weekends. As I work during those hours, a group of the teachers hired a messenger to do this errand for us while we continued teaching classes. The new mini-plates are silver. A colleague told me not to mount mine yet because during the month of January, people are known to steal them straight off of your car.

The new semester

It is that mid-year point. Our first semester ended in December, and the ESL team is consulting other teachers, reviewing student work, and testing kids to determine whether or not some of the students are ready to exit the ESL program. Some of my 2nd graders will begin an advanced ESL class soon and a few of the high school students have left the program entirely. The periods they previously had class with me will become free blocks in their schedules. Needless to say, they are thrilled to have the extra time!

My high school writing class is transitioning from personal narratives and creative pieces to analytic writing. I am determined to teach and reinforce the craft of the thesis paper as much as possible. To streamline the students' work, I am dialoguing with both their history and English teachers.

The fourth graders are about to begin John Reynolds Gardiner's novel, Stone Fox. I can't wait! The book is about a boy who lives on a potato farm with his grandfather. The grandfather becomes ill and the boy finds out that they have an enormous debt that needs to be payed immediately. He enters a dog sledding race in the hope of winning enough money to pay it off.

We spent yesterday's lesson learning about dog sledding--the equipment needed, different commands used, ideal weather conditions, etc. We may plant some potatoes soon...