hoists from afar

wow, i haven't written in a long time!  i have a bunch of ideas and half-finished posts, but i've been too swamped with lesson planning and cramming for the gre to write much.  but i just wanted to give a quick update.

classes are going pretty well.  i'm starting to feel like a real teacher, and i didn't even get lost walking to/from school today, which is a first.  i love my little students, even if some of them are an absolute nightmare discipline-wise.  some days when i arrive at the designated hour for english lessons, the teacher is nowhere to be found and i can hear the class shouting and shrieking at each other from outside the building.  i come in the classroom, and they're running all over the place, jumping on the desks, talking, laughing, screaming, wrestling under the desks, smacking each other on the head, etc.

i spend most of the hour trying to make myself heard over the din and keep them from killing each other.  i say in loud spanglish, using all my actor's training to project my voice: "ok, let's work on the pronunciation now:  7 is seh-vin—sergio, sit down—repeat please, seh-vin—miguel stop hitting him—that's it, seh-vin—marcela stop talking to her, eyes up here please—now 8 is eht—comic books away, laura—repeat please, eht—david, what are you doing under your desk?

but other times it's great.  most of the kids are super enthusiastic, and in some classes they're jumping out of their chairs to answer questions.  especially in the lower primary school, as soon as the guard un-padlocks the gate in the barbed wire fence, i am swarmed with little people shouting "la teacher de inglés!  la teacher de inglés!"  they grab my legs and hands and kiss my cheeks and drag me across the soccer field, cheering.  when i run into some of them around the school grounds, some shout "hola ey-low ticher! ow are yew?" and i feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  after class one day, one of the little girls gave me a card she'd made.  it was decorated with hearts and flowers, and in adorably misspelled spanish, in an eclectic mix of capital and lower-case letters, she wrote "to the english teacher who is katalina, good morning thank you for coming here to be with us.  i  hope we will be friends forever, good bye!"

my kiddos even cheered when i gave them homework.  what strange children.  i kind of doubt they'll actually do it, based on what i've heard from other teachers.  but nevertheless, i appreciate the enthusiasm.  it was a pretty cute worksheet, if i do say so myself.  i used dora the explorer characters to illustrate introductions using the verb to be.  my cousin diego is quite a fan of the series, perhaps because it features "go diego go!" well these kids seemed equally excited.  oh, also, while looking for dora pictures online, i found out that the girl who does the voice for dora is named caitlin!  also, i came across this amusing article about an unfortunate dvd store mix-up between "go diego go: nickelodeon all star sports day!" and "bubble butt bonanza no. 17."

in class today we were making posters about numbers.  i heartell that posters on the wall help create a positive learning environment and reinforce what is taught in class, but we haven't got the money for such frivolities, so i decided we'd make our own.  each pair had a number, and was to write the digit, english word, and number of objects on a piece of paper: 1 star, 2 houses, 3 smiley faces, etc.  i was wandering between the desks, monitoring and commenting, "good job, very nice, how pretty!" they didn't know what i was saying, but i hoped my tone expressed the meaning.  i came to one boy and said in spanish "oops, check your notes again.  is that how it's spelled 'tweny'?  sound it out, twehn-tee.  ok, now what are you going to draw?"

"20 machine guns!" he shouted, leaping out of his chair and miming shooting.  "pow pow pow!" 

he took me completely off guard and i snapped angrily "NO, you will NOT draw guns now sit down and pick something else!"  i guess i was a little harsh, as i hadn't specified.  but i didn't write a thesis on peace education for nothing.  a bunch of these kids are only here in bogotá because they were displaced because of the fighting.  i will damn well not have a picture of a gun in my classroom.  much less twenty.

it's odd how the war finds its way into everyday life.  as the guards were letting me into the schoolyard, i saw a group of people waiting outside the gate--relatives of new students waiting to register them.  a young fellow in the front of the line, who couldn't have been much older than me, looked up to ring the buzzer, and i saw on his neck a hideous scar.  it stretched more than a hand's width across his neck and was poorly healed, raised in some places to the thickness of a pinky.  it looked like someone had slashed at his neck, trying to slit his throat, but he had somehow survived.  it reminded me of the scars i saw on people's faces in uganda and rwanda.  i shivered.

on our way to school the other day, my host papi pointed out a large, ostentatiously decorated house.  "this is the house of a big narcotrafficker. they were very rich, and looved to flaunt their wealth.  he drove a mercedes!"
"do they still live there?" i asked, a bit nervous about living in such close proximity to a  narcotrafficker.
"oh no, they died young.  they were both shot," he said casually.

ok, i ought to go study now.  i'm off to medellín on friday to go take the grrrrrrrrrrre.