Corn Powdered Girl Gives Saturday Teaching a Try

Word of the Day
pena- shyness, nervousness, embarrassment.
Emily (dancing around capriciously, generally being weird): No tengan pena!!!!!! (X100)
Students faces: We are not convinced by your antics, gringa. We're still going to have lots of pena.
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When my alarm sounded at 5:30 Saturday morning, I momentarily felt extremely disillusioned with my job. There's something especially sacred about Saturdays, and having to rouse myself at this hour went against all of my better instincts. But after drowsily sprucing myself up, fixing myself a cafe con leche, and hitching a 20- minute taxi ride, I arrived for my sabatino class in a nearby community called Never Oporta, comically referred to by people around here as "Never". Sabatino classes are held on Saturdays, mostly for teens who are working, who got pregnant or have dropped out and are trying a second round. It's also for adults coming back to school or who perhaps have never studied. Theoretically, it's only for people who are over sixteen. It's sort of like the Nicaraguan version of getting a GED.  Since "Never" is currently in the process of constructing a building for the high school, however, the majority of the students who come to the sabatino are young, at approximately the typical age for going to high school. Many of them probably work, on farms or helping around the house, and some live in agricultural communities that are very far away. Most people showed up nicely dressed in their uniforms, blue bottoms and white tops. It felt like a real day of weekday class, except that there's a lot more to cram in if you're only teaching once  a week.

While we were waiting for school to start, I toured classrooms (they use the primary school, which is why they need to wait until the weekend) and met the principal, a very nice man who was eager to introduce me to his school. "Pregunteme!" "Ask me!" he goaded, trying to load me up with information. This phrase and his particular intonation unfortunately reminded me of a bizarre and hilarious character on Mexican comic genius Eugenio Derbez's show "Derbez en Cuando," which led to me being awkward because I was trying really hard not to laugh. Womp womp. Anyway, I started off teaching a section of 8th graders with my counterpart teacher Xiomara, who's about my age and the possibly the sweetest person in the entire universe. The students were well behaved, somewhat in contrast to their urban peers. For example, when I went over to ask a boy not to use his cellphone, he just handed it over to me. Boy, they were shy though. We tried to do a game where they would introduce themselves... "My name is ________" and think of a word, in Spanish if they wanted, that began with the same letter as their name. I begged, pleaded, put myself entirely at their mercy, smiled freakishly, with limited results in the back corner. The kids were not even going for "My name is _________." They were just not going to talk. The 7th and 11th grade sections went much better, in this regard, because the kids were less nervous and even knew a little bit of English, in the 11th grade class.

A new language, when you're just trying it on, maybe even for the first few years, is like a straightjacket, until it finally begins to open doors and allow you to see things in a new light. I had a bizarre urge at many points in class to just stop and break down the act and just chat with them in Spanish, however selfish this would be from the long term perspective. It was almost physically painful to see vibrant young personalities reduced to so little.

One of my students really provoked this reaction. He's maybe 12 years old, tiny, and he sells vitamins on the buses as a traveling salesman, for lack of a better term. This kid is a legend. The first time I saw him, I wished I was had a video camera to record him, in case it ever fell upon me to teach public speaking again. Excellent posture, projection, appeals to the heart strings, excellent knowledge of whatever (questionable) product he was purveying, details memorized but not in a way that appeared canned. Seriously, legendary. In contrast, seeing him trying and hack his way through "May I leave the room?" made me want to unlock his cage, unclip his wings, set things right, as bad as this instinct was. In some ways, being confident and highly competent in your first language (L1) can be a temporary mental barrier to gaining confidence in your second language (L2). Not to say that it can't also be a huge advantage, especially with languages like Spanish and English that share so much vocabulary.

The other teachers for the Saturday class are all really cool. We shared a lot of corn snacks and corn drinks during the break and after classes were down for the day. People are so instantaneously generous here. For instance, if you buy a bag of corn snacks, with an amount inside that is about a one person serving, you automatically offer to share with everyone, and they might take you up on it. Or if someone gives you a piece of breadfruit, you split it with the person next to you, aunque sea un poquito. We do not really have this custom with single serving snacks, ie a bag of chips, a candy bar, etc. in the States, so I really need to work on not being such a gluttonous egotistical American.

I had one other experience that was really interesting. One of Xiomara's former students, who's a teacher in a rural community called "The Clouds" (this lead to about a half hour of jokes about how he had "fallen from the sky", "had his head up in the clouds..."etc) came to talk to me in English. He was really excited because given his location, he doesn't have many opportunities to practice or speak English. Given the dearth of opportunities, he was so nervous he was literally shaking. The fact that I had the power because of a few weird coincidences of my birth to literally make a grown man lose his train of thought because he was so nervous was a funny contrast to the sense of powerlessness that is an inevitable part of a PCV life. Powerlessness over the distance from family or friends, which only multiples at the appearance of the slightest adversity (for them or me),  powerlessness over the weather, over when the water will come so that I can do my laundry, over what I will eat for my meals, over whether there will be real ice cream that's not frosted or defrosted 6 times in stock anywhere in town, over whether the chickens and dogs will create their own symphony at 3 am...It was a weird contrast and a weirder moment. I hope he got something out of our brief conversation.

Conclusion on Saturday classes: Definitely not ideal for "having a life," but absolutely worth getting out of bed for.