Long stories

Our boats came this past Thursday. I went down to the UW boathouse to pick them up and . . . aw hell, I don’t feel like telling the whole whiney story. Here’s the short version: we have the wrong boats. Completely wrong boats were delivered to us, so we can’t row in them and we’re getting the real boats (ie. the ones we ordered) sometime late next week, which, translated, means either September 27th or October 3rd.

Classes at school are beginning to take on some personalities. They’re looking good. But I tell ya, I’m not used to 50 minute periods. They go by pretty fast compared to the two hour classes I had in Ecuador. I feel like I’m not getting much done in that amount of time. Teenagers are also an odd bunch, eh? I knew this, of course, but the past week has just been a large reminder. The scariest thing is that I can already sense that I’ll be used to it in another week or two.

One of my narcissistic fantasies about returning to school involved befriending all the Spanish-speaking students with my Latino culture hipness. That one died a quick death. Teacher equals unhip, to begin with, and then there’s the fact that I don’t speak Spanish as well as many other teachers do. And we’re in the USA, where teenagers are cooler than everybody else.

Eileen’s also started with school. So far, she’s very unimpressed. We were gonna post a comparison between SECAP, the hole-in-the-wall school I worked at in Ecuador (where I kicked in my office door), and the UW Madison Doctorate Program in Audiology; but again, it’s a long, whiney story. The short version: they’re both really disorganized; they both cancel classes without telling people; they’re both run by men named Fernando (not really); and nobody really knows what’s going on at either place.