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.

Whoa. I’m sitting here at the Plaza de las Americas waiting for Eileen to finish her workout at the gym, and about 20 candidates for Miss Ecuador just walked right by me on the way to the gym.

So this morning, after having assured me no less than four times that we would not unify the two morning Basic 3A classes at SECAP, the director of my SECAP interrupted my class to say that we would unify the two morning Basic 3A classes. The inefficiency, ineptitude, and idiocy of the SECAP administration is alarming. Twenty students showed up this morning, expecting a section of Basic 1B. But their teacher, Preeti, was at the other SECAP meeting with the directors of both SECAPs and 15 students who petitioned to have 3A at the north SECAP. Were the 20 Basic 1B students ever informed that class would in fact start tomorrow? No. Was the guard informed? No. Perhaps a secretary or a janitor? No.

Nevermind that it’s easier to divide a class of 15 students among four other 3A classes than it is to unify two classes of 20 students. Nevermind that we’re already three days into 3A and that I’ll have to repeat the last three days of instruction with my new students tomorrow. Nevermind that two weeks ago, we presented SECAP with our preferred schedule of classes and that I’ve met with my director three times since then to encourage his initiating our preferred schedule. Nevermind that because of said meetings, I’ve assured my morning students time and time again that we would not be unifying two classes of 20 students to create a class of 40. Nevermind that the students who petitioned to have a 3A class at the north SECAP are a mere 12 minute trole ride away from my SECAP. Nevermind that most of my students come from the south and that they live about an hour away from my SECAP.

In fact, nevermind logic altogether. What a stupid way to run a school.

Clearly, this little note makes no sense. Suffice it to say that I’m really pissed at the morons who run SECAP right now.

So. A student of mine, Natalia, has been wanting me to go to her sons’ high school and observe classes and help them improve their methodology. From the get go, she has been thoroughly impressed by my teaching style, which is more a comment on the failings of Ecuadorian methodology than it is a comment on my teaching expertise. Multiple people have told me that the methodology here is severely lacking. Class sizes are usually between 30 and 40 students. Each class is 40 minutes long. School starts at 7:00 and ends at 1:00 or 1:30. And the teachers pretty much just lecture.

In any case, I’ve been wanting to observe an Ecuadorian high school also, so Natalia and I kind of mutually asked each other if it would be okay if she set up an observation for me. Back in January, she wrote a letter or two to the powers-that-be at her sons’ school and then last week she informed me that we had clearance. Today, Tuesday the 22nd, we would go to the school and observe a class.

So we went. We got there a little late, as per usual, and it turned out that we were sitting in on an English department meeting to present our case. What case? you might ask. Good question. I had no idea, really. I turns out that the school had lost one of the letters Natalia sent. In fact, they had lost it twice (she sent a second copy after they lost the first one). So the English department only knew that a parent of one of their students was coming to talk to them about some North American teacher.

I was hoping Natalia would do all the speaking for me. But no. Before a very formal-looking crowd of 12 teachers, Natalia turned to me and said (in Spanish), “do you want to present them with what you’d like to do here?” The thing is, Natalia pretty much wants me to revolutionize the teaching methodology of these teachers. I really just want to observe Ecuadorian adolescents and, secondarily, the teaching methodology that I’ve heard so much about. I told them I simply wanted to observe some classes and that maybe we could try to share some ideas about instruction, etc.

(A brief aside. My students back home sometimes laugh at the fact that on, say, an in-class essay, they’ve “totally BS-ed” and they still got a good grade. Or they’ll express frustration with having to BS. I always tell them, “yeah, but the ability to BS is a good skill to have; you’ll use it on a regular basis in life.”)

I then launched into a big pile of BS about how it has always benefited me to share ideas with my colleagues, etc. blah, blah, blah. I wanted to say that I was flexible with however we decided to arrange things, but even though I can think of how to express that sentiment in Spanish right now, for some reason, at the time, I wasn’t confident that “flexible” in Spanish is “flexible,” albeit pronounced a little differently. I then told them that if they wanted to come to my classes at SECAP to observe, they could. Whoa. That got a reaction. They seemed pretty offended, actually (which is exactly how teachers back home would have acted, I think). But then we got to the business of scheduling some specific classes and they pretty much literally fell over each other trying to get me to come see their classes. I couldn’t figure it out.

So that was that. I didn’t see anything, but I committed myself to going to the school for two hours next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. A little more than I bargained for. And I’m not sure, but I may have given them the impression that I was going to be a regular teaching consultant and that I might even teach some classes there. Geez. I don’t really know what even happened. I’m gonna have to slowly backstep out of this one next week.