My Chirrens

Hello to all my fans! (mom)

Most of my friends teaching this year and last have blogs and they always post cute or funny anecdotes from classes that I love reading, and god knows I have plenty, so I'm gonna start trying to throw a couple on here when they happen... actually keeping up with writing here (which I already sense is gonna fail.)

Today for example: Mondays are my worst days. I only have 2 classes but they are BY FAR my least favorite classes. The kids are nuts, really immature, and basically act as though they've never had an authority figure in their lifetime. It's not even like a bad class in America where you have the typical kids who act out, because there they usually at least know what they're doing is wrong and just don't care, and will usually get some sort of punishment for it. Here I honestly think that sometimes they truly just don't know that they shouldn't be wrestling, throwing backpacks, or screaming, and they give me this honest-to-god wide-eyed look of "what??" if I tell them to stop.

The teacher who I work with for these classes (Lola, whom I actually adore) usually shows up late, stays for a while and then leaves again because she's the secretary and has other work to do. So as usual I show up and after the typical 5-10 minutes of getting them to sit down and stop yelling or throwing shit, I had just started something on the board when she arrives. As she walks in the door, another girl shows up at the door from another class, asking if so-and-so can leave for a second... this happens from time to time if they have a project to work on or some other teacher sends for them etc. The second this girl says hey can Sandra come outside? Sandra jumps out of her desk and starts marching towards the door like "I swear to god you better get outta here before I break your head" (literal translation). Luckily Lola had just gotten there and kinda holds the one girl back at the door and gets her outside while some of the students and I get the other girl to go sit back down. She starts crying and the class erupts into gossip-time about what is going on. The fight took place two seconds after school ended, directly outside of the front doors. At least go somewhere else!

Now, know that this class will do anything to not work, or find any excuse to talk about something "dramatic" (ie. the 2 times a year I get a haircut). It was a minor miracle we did anything at all today, but after my usual methods of whip-cracking proved fruitless, I resorted to the "walk around the class and pretend to write down the names of the kids who aren't working" ploy. This worked for a bout 2/3, but as noted before hand, I can be standing over a kid for a good 30 seconds who is talking, fully aware of my presence, but decides finishing their point about why Edward is better than Jacob is more important.

Often I find myself just stopping a lesson and entering into a serious conversation about responsibility and respect, something so much more important for them to learn now than English. Don't get me wrong, English is extremely important for them to learn and I take my job seriously, but there are certain values I feel are essential to just being a conscious, productive member of society that appear to be completely ignored in the majority of Spanish households of this generation. Almost every Spanish adult I am close to has echoed these thoughts at some point, but, unlike the opinion of Spanish construction workers, looking at the tools isn't gonna turn it into a building. Es decir, my role at the school might help a few kids get over a hump here and there in their goal to learn English, but let's be real- most of them are going to forget it like any good American forgets their obligatory years of high school spanish. But maybe if I can kick a few into gear and pop this thick bubble (more like medicine ball) of invincibility and entitlement their head is cased in I can actually pass on something of worth.

Ignorance is an epidemic, and the great thing about teaching a foreign language is that you can teach your material while slipping in the material you truly want to teach. I have taught in depth about Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Native Americans and their genocide, the holocaust, and much more, and I try to exploit the "cool" card I was given by telling them how important these things are to me, hoping they will take it seriously. The first big test was last week with MLK day coming up and reviewing MLK with my classes who I taught the lesson to last year. I'd say before-hand about 5% knew who he was. This year I'll give them about a 80% on at least recognizing the name, maybe a 60% on remembering that he was black and somehow had something important to do with American black people (including a number of remarks about him being a famous slave), and a good 30% who had a general idea of what he did, and why it was important. More than I expected had "I Have a Dream" hidden in storage in their brains which made me pretty happy. Overall, not great numbers, but it was a semi-quantitative way to look at the potential effectiveness of these talks. I don't have any delusions that I'm changing the world or even the high school, but hey... baby steps. If even just the name Martin Luther King takes up the cranial terrain that Hannah Montana once occupied, then in the words of Borat: Great Success!