Dondeques

Our school begins at 9:40. That is already late.

At 9:39, all of the teachers were in the cafe having coffee. (And by this, I mean five of us, because teachers arrive in shifts, and only those of us who had class first period were there). But that was alright, because none of the students were at school yet, either.

Once we all finally got there, the teachers discovered that none of the four administrators (principal, vice principal, etc) were at school today.

¨So we don´t have to go to class?¨ They said it like a joke, but were dead serious.

Several teachers stayed in the teachers´ room for five or ten minutes more, standing by the radiator and talking. Eventually, they all went to class. I don´t know who was with the students all that time. Classes started at about 10am today.

Also, when I was leaving the teachers’ room to go to the class with the 16 year olds, Julián, the teacher who I work with in that class, said “where are you going?”

I kind of panicked a little bit “we have class with 1st bac, right?”

“yes, but wait a minute”. As in, wait a few minutes more after the bell had rung two minutes ago. This place! I want to be to class on time and I want the students to do so as well. If the teachers aren’t there on time, how can we expect the students to settle down and get ready for class? What the hell.

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In other news, I am very seriously thinking about going back to the US next year and preparing to go to grad school to be a Spanish teacher. I want to be useful and be part of a faculty of teachers who I can communicate with. The idea of settling down in any way whatsoever terrifies me, though.

Look at me, going to a professional training conference.

I went to a conference on Friday in A Coruña, one of the biggest cities in Galicia, for language teachers. I went with the special education teacher, who is my friend, a woman who used to teach French at my school, the principal, and a Gallego teacher.

The first presenter was a guy from the US who had developed a strategy for teaching English. He didn’t talk about his strategy, just did a motivational speech for teachers, so it was pretty useless. I did, however, love the presentation because he spoke amazing Spanish and had clearly mastered the language, BUT he still had several pronunciation mistakes that I make, such as the stupid United States “r” sound. Rather than make me feel hopeless about overcoming my pronunciation problems, it made me feel great, because that means I’m not an idiot; I am at nearly the highest pronunciation level I will ever reach.

While the United States-ian (I continue to be uncomfortable with “American” and surely will be for the rest of my life) made me feel great, another guy made me feel horrible. He was a French guy who does the same job I do. He gave a presentation about his work, not in Castellano, no. He gave his presentation in Gallego. And I was like “fuck you, you arrogant prick. Here I am barely able to speak Castellano at times and you’re whipping around up there having learned fucking Gallego?!”

Let’s see if I can explain myself better. It is great that he knows Gallego. It’s an endangered language, so the more people that know it and spread the good word, the better. But, fuck, man. You make me look and feel like shit because I struggle massively with it, and at times can barely speak Castellano with the teachers because I am so nervous around them. And fuck, man, your presentation could have been useful to me. I could have gotten ideas from it. But you did it in Gallego, you freaking show-off jerk. I hate that guy. I don’t know him.

I liked the United States-ian guy more, but one wierd-ass thing he said was when he was talking about how students can’t learn a language just by studying it—they need to be talked to as well. He gave the example of “I can’t just go to New Guinea and give a stack of Bibles to the natives and say ‘here, study this, I’ll be back in two weeks to test you’. I have to go there, give them the Bibles, and talk, talk, talk to them.”

…Well, no. You have to not be an imperialist pig, you imperialist pig. What the hell is wrong with you?

And speaking of imperialism, the conference was supposed to be about language teachers. Language teaching in general. But it was almost entirely about English.

How to put my feelings about this into words…the current craze in Spain for speaking English bothers me sometimes. People say things like “Oh, Spanish people speak really bad English” in a derogatory way, and it’s become sort of a national identity and national source of shame that Spanish people speak bad English. Which they fucking don’t. They speak English at the same level (or higher) than United Statesians speak foreign languages. And you don’t see us deriding ourselves for our deficiency in this category. Why is that? Oh, right, because we’re a freaking superpower bully and we have the privilege to not have to learn other languages because we’ve nearly forced the rest of the world to their knees bowing to our damn language. (I do happen to love English as a language very much, I just don’t like what speakers of it have managed to do.) United Statesians can choose to learn a new language. It is a choice, not a requirement. And that is a privilege we have.

The emphasis on English made me feel scummy inside because my job right now is to be complicit in this cultural overtaking and perpetuate this mad desire for learning English. Butts. It’s one thing for the native Spanish teachers here to teach English, but it is another thing for me to traipse over and start blah blah blah teaching English to these kids. That was not expressed well, but I’m not sure how best to state that vague thought. You can count on the fact that with my small groups of older, more advanced English students this coming week, I am going to open up a discussion about what they think of this scramble to learn English and the cultural take-over. I will let you know what they say.

Luckily, the United States has not permeated too much of Spanish culture. They are so much more chill than we are. After we ate lunch, the teachers from my school and I were walking back to the conference, when two of them saw a store they wanted to go in. We had like 20 minutes before we had to be back, so we went in and poked around while the principal stood outside, checking her watch. Well, we poked around until 4:05, five minutes past the time when we needed to be sitting in those chairs listening to a speech. We leisurely walked back, and arrived at 4:10 to a speech that wouldn’t start for another five minutes. At least half the audience arrived between 10 and 20 minutes late. I just sat there laughing to myself, because that is absolutely unheard-of in the US. You arrive late, you are a freaking leper for the rest of the conference. Not here.

Oh, and sorry to make this entry longer, but I went out for drinks last night with Maria, the teacher of the younger children, who has a tendency to just leave the classroom when we’re working together. She is much more fun outside of the work environment. I think she was surprised by how fun I was, too. She told me some crazy shit. Crazy shit. Like how one of the 8th grade girls is dating a senior boy. I’m pretty upset about that, especially since there is no formal sex education in our school (or in Spanish schools in general, I think). What they have instead are “tutors” which is a class every week with one teacher assigned to a few students. That teacher chooses what issues to talk to the students about. And Maria is the 8th grade tutor and I think she does a really good job informing them about issues and they feel close to her, so they go to her to talk when they have a problem. So hopefully the girl already knows some things about how—-oh my goodness, look at me. I just realized I am putting all of the responsibility on the girl. I’m not even going to delete or edit that because it’s a reminder to me not to be a fucking idiot. I’ve got something sexist in my teeth. On the flip-side of that coin, I know that the senior boy has a terrible tutor, because it’s Julian, who is afraid of the senior class and no way would ever talk about sex with them. Maybe this boy has had sex education in the past. Let’s all hope.

More on my presentation about US high schools

A little bit more about the presentation on U.S. high schools that I did: (it is taking two class periods with the older kids and upwards of three with the babies, so I have more reactions to report)

When talking about the college application process, I tried to explain affirmative action, and why colleges make a concerted effort to accept minorities. This doesn’t really make sense to them, because they have very few minorities here, mostly recent immigrants who are struggling to get by and aren’t applying to college in droves. And the repression that Spain enacted was overseas in the Americas, not right in front of their faces, as it was in the US.

So to explain affirmative action, I had to first explain the oppressive racial segregation that is a part of US history and present. That was a tall order, and I was nowhere near prepared enough with historical facts and pictures to accommodate the amount of explaining I would have to do to convey what happened and still happens in the US.

I think my whole speech about the Jim Crow South was lost on them, because they didn’t believe the things I was telling them (when I said that blacks and whites had separate water fountains, several jaws dropped) and I didn’t connect it well to affirmative action. Maybe I’ll revisit the topic in a history presentation.

Another thing that probably flew over their heads was my mention of Gay/Straight Alliances. I mentioned it as an after-school activity without even thinking how much explaining I would have to do. Some classes thought it was a club for gay people to have sex. Some classes thought it was a club meant to turn gay people straight. Some classes thought it was a club for gay people to have sex with straight people. I hope, hope, hope none of them still think those things, but I doubt any of the classes are clear on the concept in the end.

Basically, many of the things I mentioned are so clear in my mind that I didn’t realize they needed explanation. So when the inevitable “gwhat ees dees” question arose, I had to improvise descriptions of complicated topics in simple English. Which I am not good at doing. And yes, I am allowed to make fun of their accents. You should hear how much they make fun of mine.

They were amazed by the range of elective classes and after-school activities and enjoyed imagining which classes they would take. They liked seeing a sample high school schedule. They liked when I talked about flour babies, thought prom and graduation were awesome ideas, and that superlatives in yearbooks were funny. Maybe I could do superlatives as a sort of end-of-the-year activity.

An over-all assessment of the presentation is that it was a hit. While some things confused the students, nearly every kid was listening for the entirety of every class. They asked questions, had mini-debates about whether the Spanish or US systems were better, and now they know that some of the things they see in the movies are real, and some aren’t.

Entroido/Carnaval

I’m way behind on events, here. About two weeks ago (at the same time as Mardi Gras) we had Carnaval (Entroido in Gallego) here in Lugo and Fonsagrada. It was a big freaking deal at school.

I was told it was absolutely mandatory to wear a costume to school, so I scrounged around the clothes I have here and found enough for this costume:

The rest of the teachers were pirates. Classes ended at noon, and everyone went off to prepare their costumes. All the teachers were in the staff room getting dressed and goofing off, and all of a sudden the vice-principal said “wait, who is out in the hall with the kids?” About four teachers ran out. Spain.

They love me.

This is one of the history teachers, by far the best pirate:

And I’m not allowed at all to post pictures of students, but I don’t think this nightmarish image counts as a photo of students:

They made those Simpson heads in art class. The Simpsons is very popular show here, and I just recently found out that America’s Funniest Home Videos is on tv here too. They dub the voices. I need to find it and watch it.

At school, the kids had a costume contest where they each did little skits or dances in their costumes and were judged. The 12-year-olds dressed up as a “really badly behaved class” and did a skit as such. They had to dig really deeply into their wells of creativity to summon the ability to act like a class that threw stuff, screamed all the time, and jumped out of their seats to hit each other. (Did you not the dripping sarcasm? Ok, good.)

The winners were the oldest kids who dressed up as cookies. The Simpsons masks were really well-done, but totally uncharismatic and I think everyone was mildly horrified by them, so they didn´t win.

It was all cute fun at school, but then when we went out dancing that night, there were some extremely horrible and stupid costumes. I would say one of the most popular costumes was a Native American (braids, leather-looking little dress) and one that followed close behind was ¨Black Person¨. I didn’t get any pictures of the Black People out dancing, but here is a picture from the parade of an example of someone in their Black Person costume:

There you go. The worst Black Person costumes I saw were a bunch of girls with that Afro wig, blackface, black long sleeve shirts, and long colorful sleeve-less dresses. I’m pretty sure they had something under their dresses to make their butts look big too. So that was a downside of Carnaval, completely politically-incorrect Spanish people.

But there were some super-great costumes, too! These are from the newspaper article about the parade:

Yay!

And there was some sort of evil carnaval bear or something in one of the nearby villages:

I don’t get it, but there he is. Killing…people…

Also, side note, carnaval is even more popular in the villages of Ourense, which is south of Lugo, and at some celebrations, people take burlap sacks, fill them with ants, sprinkle vinegar on them to get them enraged, and then hit people with the bags. Ants fall out the holes and into people’s clothes and bite them.

I am not making this up. I had people repeat this fact to me about five times because I didn’t believe it. I can’t even be upset about the animal cruelty there, I’m just so flabbergasted as to why anyone would even think to do this as a celebration activity.

Things learned about the English language

Here’s something I found out just last weekend: English is mostly made up of short, one-syllable words. A Spanish friend was telling me about how he used to have a hard time comprehending spoken English in class because the words were so short that they all blended together. My mind was blown by the truth of the unnoticed fact that was in front of my face for 23 years.

So next time you say a sentence in English, note how many single-syllable words it contains. Probably more than half. Maybe all of them. Wow.

Also, the phrase “do you usually use” sounds absurd. I was saying it slowly for a class when the boys at the back of the room (who do not understand English, they just hear sounds—and I could help them understand English if they would just come to class more than once every two months) started imitating me, saying “yoo yoo yoo”. We all laughed about it. I think the kids cut me a lot of slack because I’m cute and sweet to them. That’s not really the kind of teacher I want to be in the long-run, but it will do for now.

But it’s a strange situation I’m in; there is at least one student who is 20 years old, and the rest are not so far behind. Some of my students are so cool and fun that I would hang out with them if I could. And I’m closer in age to the students than I am to the teachers, and I have worse skin than most of them. The narrow age-gap plus this being my first year of any sort of teaching endeavor makes me cut myself some serious slack with the fact that I’m a total pushover.

Also, Spanish affinity for geography (well, the entire rest of the world’s affinity for geography) is making me get my act in gear and start studying some geography. Because I do not know anything.

Irrelevant graffiti for visual interest!

Presentation on United States High Schools

I did a powerpoint presentation about high schools in the United States for my six classes this week. Everyone loved it. I had every single student paying attention, and the majority of the classes were full of questions. Most of them in Gallego. Luckily I’m starting to understand Gallego well enough to give the correct answer to the question in English.

Some of the things that blew their minds were how early high school starts and how early it ends. They were amazed by the examples of elective classes from my (suburban, wealthy) high school.

When I showed them the slide that talked about gay/straight alliances in high schools, many students laughed just to see the word gay. They sobered up when I explained that the club was designed to raise tolerance for homosexuality though. Maybe they thought it was a good idea. Maybe they didn’t understand me. I think they did.

I couldn’t bring myself to explicitly explain what we talk about in health classes, because I can’t make myself say the word “sex” in front of a bunch of kids who might not be understanding the bulk of what I’m saying, but would definitely understand that one word. Today the twelve-year-olds laughed at me because the word “tongue” sounds like “tanga” which means “thong” in Spanish. But they are twelve and I’m an adult, so who wins that battle, eh?

(They do no have health classes in Fontem Albei, my school. I don’t know how these children learn about sex. One of the first things I thought on my first day in this town was “oh my God, I hope they have good sex education here, this town is so boring.” Although I think the town in general is their chaperone—you can’t really do anything here without everyone knowing about it.)

One of the things that interested them the most was this picture I included of a typical school lunch:

Almost every class clamored to know what fruit that was. They were convinced it was a lemon. I thought it was really weird that that’s one of the things they latched onto out of the whole presentation, but two days later I realize that they were disturbed because they thought children in the United States were being served plain lemons for lunch. I now totally understand their frantic concern over this picture.

I’m wondering if I should organize debates over which school system is better/which they would prefer to attend. My instinct is to coast on successful lesson plans, but in the past I’ve found that students get sort of bored with topics when we do them for more than one class in a row. We’ll see.

Protests

I went to a protest on Tuesday night that I didn’t give a shit about. Normally I love protests, but I couldn’t have cared less about this one.

Here is what we were protesting: In Valencia, Spain, governmental budget cuts forced a high school to shut down the heat, lights, water, and electricity. When the students and teachers held a protest, the police responded violently.

So on Tuesday night, in Lugo, Spain, on the opposite side of the country, a bunch of people cleared the playing children from the gazebo in the center of the main plaza, climbed in, made a speech denouncing the events in Valencia, and proceeded to make a buttload of noise. The noise started with the clapping after the speech and elevated banging pots, yelling, and blowing shrill-as-hell whistles.

I didn’t want to be there. I went because a friend of a friend helped organize it, and I ended up leaving the gazebo early because my ears couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t care if a bunch of shitty high school kids who were probably enjoying the break from the usual didn’t have electricity. I realized that anyone who cares about education (and I certainly do) should care about this. It just seemed such a stupidly miniscule problem to protest about.

But at the same time, I am amazed and inspired by what I saw. These people cared. They cared so much about something so simple and so far away from them that they climbed into the gazebo, then marched around the plaza and onto the outdoor stage where a concert was being held, shouting and whistling and banging pots to make people aware that there was something unjust happening.

And there were nationwide protests over the Valencia incident; there were a thousand people at the protests in larger cities, such as Alicante and Castellon, and they are still protesting in Valencia:

And there were many other protests in lesser-known, farty little Spanish cities like Lugo. There may have been only 50 of us, but we made a hell of a lot of noise.

And in the US, we’ve got enormous threats looming over us with the reproductive rights restrictions that are happening all over the country that are getting closer and more real. I’m not saying we haven’t done anything—the people who lined up outside the Virginia capitol probably changed the direction of the transvaginal ultrasound bill. I’m just saying: what if people in the US joined together and stood in the way of the approaching Goliath that seeks to eradicate our freedoms? What if we in the US took a page from the European book and turned our anger and fear into unifying energy? What if we mounted nationwide protests against these human rights violations? What then?

Spanish swears, or “tacos”

The teachers and students at Fontem Abei swear a lot. In any class, you hear kids say “joder” (the equivalent of fuck) or “callate, coño”, which means “shut up, dammit”. Except coño means pussy, so that phrase doesn’t really translate directly.

The best Spanish swears though are when they talk about what they shit on. Spanish people shit on a lot of things. All of the following things on this list can be used for situations ranging from being slightly startled by something to accidentally chopping your finger off.

Me cago en la leche: I shit in the milk.

Me cago en la mar: I shit in the ocean. (I used to think this was “I shit in my hand” because “la mar” and “la mano” sound similar when spoken.)

Me cago en tus muertos: I shit on your dead ancestors.

(unconfirmed) Me cago en su mierda: I shit on his/her shit. (I’m pretty certain I heard a student say this, but when I checked with the teacher, she said that she’d never heard that phrase. That does not rule out its existence.)

Me cago en todo: I shit on everything.

Me cago en Dios: I shit on God.

Also, a bonus sentence construction: “que te cagas” (“that you shit yourself”) is used when something is so (good, bad, unbelievable, funny, etc.) that you shit yourself.

Example: “My mom makes a cake so good that you shit yourself”, or “this light is so bright that you shit yourself”.

So, next time you stub your toe so hard that you shit yourself, don’t just stand there quietly waiting for the pain to go away. Shit on God.

Lugo is foggy.

This is what the view from our balcony actually looks like:

This is what we usually see: