Words of the Day
la cigarra- According to a bilingual poetry collection I've been reading, this means locust. I'm not sure if the bugs that are currently making creepy alien noises on the hillsides near town are actually locusts, but that's what people call them.
la gata- A woman with light colored eyes. Gato/a means cat. I'm Catwoman.
No por mucho madrugar amanece mas temprano.- You can get up as early as you want, but dawn's not coming any earlier...Everything has a time and place. This dicho literally applies to my latest attempts to do laundry...We now only have running water at night, and from 4-5:30 am. I can get up as early as I want to wash things...except there is no light until dawn at 5:30 am.
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Awkwardest interaction with students: I was walking to the cyber cafe the other day when I ran into a pack of four 11th grade students. They are always together. Always. Their ringleader evidently thinks my constant sweating and heinous polo shirt wardrobe and GREEN EYES are the cat's meow and frequently tries to get me to help him with English so he can look at my GREEN EYES. Anyway, I had decided to ignore them, when I heard one of them say "Excuse me, could I trouble you for a moment?" in PERFECT ENGLISH. I was so taken aback that I made the mistake of turning around, and of course they then proceeded to bother me. I tried to talk to them about the English verb charts them were holding until I gave up and explained that dating them is entirely out of the question for innumerable reasons and that I expect to be treated like any other teacher. Except I had a hard time keeping a straight face because the situation was so absurd.
I (sort of) used a PACA tool! : PACA (participatory communitary analysis) tools are a set of very rudimentary development techniques that Peace Corps Volunteers learn during training, but use to varying degrees in practice. For projects such as TEFL or Business that work primarily in schools in very structured projects, the likelihood of using PACA tools regularly is rather slim. But I sort of used the "daily activities schedule" tool with my Saturday class of 11th graders, hoping to spark a discussion about gender roles. After reviewing adverbs of frequency (words we use to describe how often we do things) and daily activity words, we divided the class into small groups of male and female students. Then, they had to make an activity schedule of what they thought the other gender does during the day.
One really interesting thing most of the groups expressed while they were working on this was "I don't know what men/women do." This seemed sort of a strange sentiment to me, since gender roles are fairly stratified here: shouldn't it be obvious what everyone is responsible for in a given day? Maybe it's because so many people have parents who work abroad in Costa Rica or the US or Spain, or simply, because these things aren't talked about.
An activity that got unexpectedly out of hand: We played Tic-Tac-Toe with 11th graders in Las Palomas to review past tense verbs. We wrote out a grid with present tense verbs, and they needed to change them to the past tense form. The students got REALLY competitive, and started yelling at each other. It took some doing to remind them that it was only a game to practice grammar.
New favorite didactic material: Personal pronoun dice. They are great to use for speaking activities to help kids practice pronouns other than "I". There's really no shortage of ways to use them. Also, they're just entertaining enough to keep kids on their toes.
Dice template: http://www.toolsforeducators.com/dice/
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