During the duration of this CFE, many lessons were learned through the schools, but many more were learned outside as well.  Many of our life lessons were learned from the apartment that we stayed in.  This apartment was provided by Technologico de Monterrey at no cost to us, but there were lots of problems that also came along with it.  There was no wifi, no hot water, the floorboards were uneven, the refrigerators were not fully working, there was no washing machine, etc.

At first we were abhorred at our bad luck, but overtime, we overcame each problem one by one.  To combat not having wifi, we downloaded offline versions of movies to watch while we were at school so that we had something to watch at our apartment.  To combat not having hot water, we decided to make use of the showers at school.  For the weak refrigerators, we just bought food that didn’t need refrigerating.

I personally felt that the biggest accomplishment that we achieved was overcoming the lack of a washing machine.  Since there was no washing machine, we had to improvise by using a bucket and a washing sink.  We couldn’t just leave our dirty clothes because we needed more to wear.  The process we went through was to fill a bucket of water and detergent, then added our dirty clothes.  After soaking the clothes, we put them into the sink to rinse out then we hand wrung and hung the clothes.  Since we didn’t have hangers, we had to hang them wherever we could (on chairs, in closets, etc.).

This shows our capabilities of improvisation, adaptability, and thinking on the spot.  This reflects skills needed by beginning teachers because lessons may not go as we plan for them to be.  As a result, we have to be able to think on our toes and change what we have to or adapt our lesson so that we get our lesson going and still keeping to our lesson objectives.  We need to use all tools at our disposal even if it wasn’t something that has a use that it was intended for.