Monthly Archives: March 2005

A little experiment to see if this will work:

My dairy allergy never fails to bring about stunned reactions. As I’ve been telling people for years when faced with the question, “but how do you get your calcium?” milk sucks and it’s not necessary. A recent mainstream article entitled, “Milk Isn’t What Makes Bones Strong,” reflects the recent press that the story is getting. Of course, I could have told you all of this eight years ago. And John Robbins, heir to and defector from the Baskin-Robbins fortune, could have told you all of this about twelve years ago. So there.

Yesterday, after having successfully avoided dog crap in Ecuador for six months, I stepped in not one, but two different piles. It’s a literal parallel to the figurative crap I stepped into at SECAP a couple of weeks ago. You know how sometimes in your life, a whole bunch of like messages converge on you? In college, for example, you’d be taking four entirely different classes, but in your Educational Psychology class, the professor would mention his work on forgiveness, which would also come up as a major motif in a book you were reading for an English class, and then a movie would come out called “Forgiving Miss Daisy,” and then you’d hear that Don Henely song “The Heart of the Matter,” which everyone thinks is called “Forgiveness,” cuz he repeats “forgiveness” over and over again, and which you haven’t heard for the past three years. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Well, recently, I just read on bOINGbOING a snippet of a speech by Milton Glaser about10 things he has learned. Number 2 is “IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.” It was compelling only because there are other such messages that make me dream of ditching the teaching gig back home. The Bush Administration wants to screw with social security; the SECAP mess-up reminded me of how little I like dealing with school administrative policies and changes; and recent contacts with my colleagues back home have been thoroughly depressing. Given, it’s March, but I’m becoming more and more sure that at least a temporary change of profession is in order.

Additionally, I’ve been writing a lot recently. And I’ve been reading a couple of great books. At a poetry reading in Madison last year, Billy Collins, when asked how he got into poetry, said, “because I was jealous. I’d read poems and I’d think, ‘I can maybe do that.'” I’ve been an English teacher because 1) I love literature. I like reading and writing. And 2) I like teenagers — their optimistic, naive potential; their hunger for ideas, subversion, relationships. I don’t like educational policy, administration, grading, parent conferences. I’m sure as hell not gonna get my masters in administration or ed policy. And since the great school I work at seems to be undergoing a melt-down, maybe it’s time to move on. Besides, my passion is increasingly for at least attempting to produce what I love rather than just consume it. Maybe it’s time to employ my own naive optimism, hunger for ideas, and jealousy to some other end than teaching. We’ll see what the next several years bring.

So, I finished up my observation at the Aeronautical High School on Friday. I saw three classes. The first one was freshmen-aged students and the next two were the equivalent of seventh grade. The first two were chaos. For the entire 40 minutes, the students talked to each other constantly. The teacher talked over them, but did little to even try to get them to be quiet and did nothing effective to shut them up. I would have lost it as the teacher. The classes got so little done, it was amazing. Still, there was something different about the students that confirmed my hypothesis about teen-agers in Ecuador. The room abuzz in activity: some students drawing, some trading notes, several just talking to each other. There was even a paper airplane. But I didn’t see many – or any, really – withdrawn, hurt, timid loners. The obvious picks for social outcast status were not outcasts. The certainly laughed at each other; a few of them craved more attention than others, putting on brief performances, like a solitary dance move or something; they made fun of mistakes; but they didn’t make fun of identities.

I’ve tried opening up my own classes with some informal discussion in Spanish, just to get some of my new students warmed up to me before everyone shows up. I make sure to act like the ignorant gringo, asking lots of questions about high schools and whatnot. I’ve conveyed my surprise over the way adolescents here treat each other and the public in general, how they seem to be pretty kind to each other, how they don’t single out losers and worship the cool, popular people. Of course, my students, consumers only of Ecuadorian education, have no foil. They don’t know anything else, but they did say that yeah, the high school students here are pretty tranquilo. Maybe it’s just that Quito is a little more relaxed than Guayaquil or other cities on the coast. The costenos have a reputation of being a little more aggressive and boisterous.

Today, I was talking with Luis, our landlord, about my theories about American vs. Ecuadorian teen-age-dom. He said that his high school was not at all like the one I saw. There are academies, military schools, religious schools, and financial schools. I don’t know to what extent they all really differ. Military schools feed into the actual military. Religious schools, obviously, have a mass as a part of their school day. They’re all private, pretty much. The academies are college prep schools, as I understand, and in fact, COTAC, the Aeronautical school I observed, has the rep of being one of the top five schools in Quito. The colegios fiscales, Luis told me, are much worse. He went to one called Mejilla, which has 4000 students in grades 1-12, and whose campus takes up two full city blocks. There, he claimed, the students made fun of everyone – the teachers, other students, administration. For example, on Mondays, they had their “minuto civico,” which is basically a sort of pledge of allegiance to the flag. An awkward man with big glasses would lead the anthem and some kid would shout out an insult, so he’d start it from the beginning again. “We’d do this for two or three hours every Monday,” Luis said, stopping half way through and beginning again.

So I guess I should maybe go to one of these fiscal schools to see just how bad things can get. Thus far, pretty much every experience I’ve had with adolescents has just confirmed my hypothesis that US teenagers are basically brats whose main concern in life is to be cool and who step all over their peers in striving to achieve this end goal; and because “cool” is paramount, the general public kind of fears adolescents since they’re capable of being very disagreeable, obnoxious jerks in their quest for “cool.”

So the next objective is to try to get into Mejilla and see if the students there are as jackass-ish as US students can be.

Oh, one other thing. There was an article in the paper this week about these parents who banded together to stop some gang members from intimidating/robbing their children. Apparently, in the south of Quito, there was this gang who would wait outside of school and mug students. They’d tell the students they would kill their parents if they didn’t fork over ten, twenty, or thirty dollars. Well, the kids told their parents and the parents came to the school gate after school to find out who these gangsters were. In this way, the parents ended up meeting other parents of other kids who had been mugged. They met up and decided they would capture the gangstas. So one day, they carried out their plan. They went to the school, caught two of the gangstas and beat them up a little, and then stuffed them into a trunk of a car and took them to the police.

I chose this article for a Spanish assignment this past Thursday and at the end of my summary of the report, I included a little commentary. On the one hand, I said, I admire the parents and I would want to be a part of such a group, not necessarily so I could kick some gangsta ass, but because to go to such an extreme for the protection of your kid is kinda cool. But on the other hand, this whole situation illustrates the rampant disorder of Ecuador. The parents didn’t call the police because people don’t really have much faith in police here. Nor did the police punish the parents; apparently taking the law into your own hands is okay if there are enough people. Without any sort of system in place to handle such a thing, you can be sure this sort of crime will happen again.

Some miscellaneous news. I’m attempting to write a couple of more polished essays to perhaps even submit to a magazine or two, so much of my recent writing time has been taken away from blog writing. I’m also on a strict 30-page a day reading regiment, which, of course, I’m not quite keeping up with. But it’s going alright. I’m reading Kavalier and Clay right now, and it’s wonderful.

This has been the week of the high school visits. I’ve seen three classes so far on two separate days, and today, I see three more. The first teacher was actually not that bad. She was enthusiastic and a little quirky, like all the great foreign language teachers are. Her main problem was her English proficiency. At one point, she had the students translate a little impromptu three-sentence story from Spanish into English. They wrote it on the board, and though she corrected spelling and other small details, she failed to catch some pretty major errors. Here is the final product, endorsed by the teacher: “There was a flood in La Bota the last month. Many houses fell down. Many people didn’t have where to live because the rain.” Yikes!

Teacher number two had better English, actually. Her problem was just that she wasn’t a very good teacher. She got mad at her students every four minutes or so while simultaneously conducting a pretty sloppy, uninteresting lesson that didn’t seem to be that coherent. Teacher number three also had tons of proficiency issues. His class was very disciplined and somewhat interesting; the lesson was on climate and he even included a little science demonstration in which a group of boys helped him make a barometer. Unfortunately, the experiment suffered some technical snafus and ended up wasting about 7 minutes of the 40 minute class. And he pronounced barometer not with the emphasis on the ‘o’ but rather like “barrow” as in “wheel barrow” plus “meter.”

Overall, my impression is that the class size (35 -40 kids) and time are detrimental to the kids’ learning anything. And the teachers are sub-par English speakers.

My own classes have been pretty unremarkable these past couple of weeks. I gained all of Westra’s students, and they’ve completed changed the classroom dynamics I was getting really comfortable with. It’s been a little stressful, though I recognize that I really have nothing to complain about because it hasn’t been anywhere near as bad as it can get back home. Still, there’s always a two or three week adjustment period with a new class; I’ve always hated it, and these past weeks have confirmed why.

Additionally, Ecuadorians don’t really have as honed a concept of tact as we do back home. They’re a little more blunt, or “straight-shooting.” This is a good thing in many ways; in fact, I think overall, I would vote for the Ecuadorian lack over the US excess of tact. They’re a little more sincere. There’s not as much sarcasm and irony and saying things you don’t mean. But they’ll also tell you that you’re a more difficult teacher than the one they’ve had for the past four months and that they’re having a harder time with you than with their old teacher. You learn not to take such things personally, in a culture where it’s a regular practice to nickname someone “the fat guy.” So it’s not affecting me like it would back home. Still, it’s not how you want to end your day. I’m looking forward to the weekend.

The recent stress has me a little homesick, but complexly so. On the one hand, I’ve been anticipating returning and not having to deal with the SECAP administration or the drawn-out process of getting from point A to point B via three different busses. Sometimes it takes an hour to get from the gym to home and then to Eileen’s school to meet her (a trip that would take 15 minutes by car). On the other hand, the recent taste of the more stressful life that I regularly live at home has me dreading the return to the never-ending work.

Fortunately, it’s March. Which means that I wouldn’t want to be in Wisconsin right now anyway, since March is, as Garrison Keilor puts it, “God’s way of showing people who don’t drink what a hangover is like.” And my sister Angie and brother Will are coming on the 22nd. Really, before we know it, it will be mid-April, and then we’ll be saying “Holy cow! We go home in three months. That’s not enough time to do everything we need to do here!”

The day I tried to explain the expression, “do you mean it?” to my class:

The phrase was a part of a taped conversation between two embarrassingly enthusiastic students discussing their vacation plans. If you’ve ever listened to foreign languages tapes you know that these tapes are usually cheesy and contrived. I remember listening to such tapes in my beginning Spanish classes thinking, “wow, these people are lame.” I use the tape accompanying my text because it lets the students hear an accent other than mine and sometimes we share a laugh over the emotive actors. Anyway, in this particular conversation one student invites her friend to accompany her on a trip to the beach where her parents own a condominium. The friend replies, “do you mean it?” My students were flummoxed when I explained that she was asking if her feelings matched her words: if she was sincere. It’s not that they didn’t understand “sincere” there is a cognate, “sinceridad” in Spanish. What they couldn’t comprehend is WHY anyone would ask, of course if you invited someone you want them to come. I said that sometimes people might feel obligated to invite someone, but not really want them to come. Blank and confused stares: huh? I tried another angle. Say your girlfriend bought a new dress that she is wearing to your date tonight. She is really proud of the dress, but you think it looks awful. Instead of telling her “honey, I think that dress is terrible,” you lie and say, “you look great.” You don’t really mean what you said. That example clicked, but the whole explanation got me thinking about generosity here. It’s not that people are more generous necessarily than in the states and it’s not that there aren’t often strings attached. It’s just that, from my perspective, people are really excited to offer things and it doesn’t feel like they are doing it out of obligation. Every time Tim goes to our landlord’s apartment to ask a question he comes back with some juice or bread or candy. They also regularly feed us lunch on Sundays. One time they asked Tim if he wanted some more juice. He tried to articulate in Spanish the idea that he didn’t want to be a mooch. They smiled and said, “why?”

Student dialogues: I had my students write a conversation based on pictures which showed some problem. One of the pictures showed two students studying while a puppy chewed up a backpack. I explained the assignment (we were working on apologies and excuses) and broke the class into groups. There was one group of three assigned to the puppy picture. I suggested that they write the conversation between the students and maybe another friend or the mom of one of the students. Immediately one of the students asked with a smile, “Can I be the puppy?” I laughed and said, “sure.” The puppy actor is one of by better students. His group came up with a dialogue that went something like this:

Francisco: What is the answer to number 3?
Diego: I don’t know.
Fransisco: What a cute puppy!
Puppy: That backpack looks delicious!
Fransisco: Come here puppy.
Diego: You don’t want him he is crazy puppy.
Fransisco: Come here.
Puppy: Now is my opportunity.
(Puppy grabs backpack)
Fransisco: Stop! He broke my backpack!
Puppy: Yum
Diego: I am sorry, he is crazy puppy. You use my backpack.
Fransisco: Thanks

They had most of my class laughing and applauding the puppy’s performance. It was a good day.