Dondeques

Earth day activity I did

With the 14, 15, and 16-year-olds, I did an Earth Day activity that went quite well. I attached a copy of it in case anyone in the world cares. It is for ESL students, but it could work well and be even more fun in the kids´native language.

It was actually a self-running discussion with the 16-year-olds. AND they were all interested and paying attention and speaking English the entire time. Score.

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So then what did he actually say?

Today, a kid came into the teachers’ room asking for a ping-pong paddle. (There is a ping-pong table in the hallway that these children worship as a god) One of the teachers gave him a paddle, asking what I understood to be:

“what happened to the other one, did you eat it?”

I laughed, and judging by the looks that the teachers and the student gave me, that is not what he said.

Luckily for me, the teachers all kind of think I´m stupid, which at times can be annoying, but other times can be freeing. If I open my mouth and say something grammatically incorrect, or ask a stupid question, it´s generally excused by the fact that I´m a foreigner. Kind of the way you excuse a very young child for acting weird and chuckle at their linguistic mistakes. Oftentimes, I just start speaking without overthinking it, because I know it’s going to come out horribly, so why worry?

The teachers actually do a very hilarious thing when I talk, which is after I finish, they turn to one another and ask “did you understand that?” and usually none of them did, so they turn back to me and say “what?”. I don’t take offense, because they don’t mean it in an offensive way; I think it’s just a knee-jerk reaction to check to see if anyone else made sense of what I just said. And it’s so damn funny and so predictable that I can’t get mad.

And it’s not my problem, it’s theirs. The teachers I talk to all the time understand me very easily in Spanish. The ones who don’t understand me are the ones who normally don’t speak to me, or who are in too much of a hurry to actually listen to me and just ask “what” instead of thinking about it.

A lot of the reason they can’t understand me is because of my accent. I have a pretty heavy American accent when I speak Spanish which I can’t seem to lose. My biggest problem is my “r”s. In American English, we have really heavy r sounds (think about the r in the word American), and in Spanish they are very light, but I can’t lose my American r, so I sound ridiculous. Another problem is when a word ends in a vowel, I hit that vowel really hard. For instance “tengo” turns into “tengouw” when I say it.And I probably have other issues that I don’t even know about.

My friends here make fun of my accent a lot.

Sorry for the outrageously long posts. I don’t really talk to anyone all day.

Even though I am only a few years older than most of these kids…

I realized yesterday when a 14-year-old student accidentally spit on his desk while he was talking and dealt with it by lowering his face and blowing on the spit, that these are just children. I spend a lot of time subconsciously feeling inferior to them because they understand what the heck everyone is saying and I never do, but we are all the same. I am a stranger in a strange land and so are they—they have to figure out what is happening in this adult world, and I have to figure out what is going on in this foreign country.

Teaching incorrect phrases

In art class with the 12-year-olds, we were looking at pictures of masks. We got to a particularly funny-looking one, and the tiniest, most adorable little boy in the class said “es un tío raro” which means “that’s a weird guy”.

I like to get them learning English that is relevant to their lives, so I asked them if they knew the translation for “tío raro”. The tiny boy said that “raro” meant “extravagant”. I was so delighted by his response and the fact that he knew that word that I told him it was correct.

So I wrote “extravagant guy” on the board and told them it was a “tío raro”. So now they are all walking around calling everyone extravagant guys. It’s so funny and I do not feel at all guilty.

This is what I imagine an “extravagant guy” looks like:

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.

Dream Quotation

I had a dream last night about a badass teacher who walked into one of my classrooms while I was being all shy and easy on the kids (not that I really do that, I´m just very encouraging to them when they speak English and don´t call them out on mistakes often.) This teacher just started bossing them around, but it was obvious she cared about them very much. My dream-class responded very well to her attitude.

Dream-teacher told me “a satisfied student is not one who is babied. It is one who is pushed as far as they can go by a teacher who loves them.”

A pretty good quotation for a semi-concious mind.

5:30 after a day of teaching

I´m sweaty and stinky, and I´ve got that headache-y exhaustion that comes with putting your all into a job you really care about. I feel horrible and wonderful at the same time.