Teaching Actual Youths

Word of the day

primaria multigrado- the Nicaraguan equivalent of a one room school house

I've somewhat recently started a new lil project: teaching English at a rural multigrado school called El Penon. The profe there, a really smart guy who works really hard, asked me if I would be interested in teaching some classes there to his primary school to 4th-6th graders to help them get a head start for high school. There are also some students there who study in what are called "ciclos," (cycles) a one day a week form of high school taught by only one teacher (which sounds dubious to me, but I guess more education is better than less, right?) and he wanted to include them as well. At first I told him I was too busy, but then I realized that the real issue was that I was too lazy...While my Wednesdays are now legitimately a 12 hour marathon of time out in the campo (when all the classes actually happen, which is basically never), it's been really rewarding. And I have other times to nap. Like today...(Not even going to get into it, it's too depressing.)

Teaching younger kids is really interesting. For one thing, they catch on really quickly. I've only taught a few classes so far, but after teaching a class about "What is your name?" and then coming back two weeks later, they still were totally awesome at the dialog we were practicing, which let me tell you, rarely happens in high school. Brain plasticity! The classroom management issues are also a little bit different. There's a lot of rough housing and other silliness. However, while some kids are really shy, many haven't gotten to the awkward teenager stage yet and have pretty much no pena, which is amazing. They also haven't gotten the jaded high schooler attitude yet. A pretty common whine I hear from the high schoolers when I tell them to do work is "Profe, no quieroooooooo" (Teacher, I don't wannaaaaaaa) which is not anything an 8 year from the campo says. Again, awesome.

However, I have a lot more respect for the environment volunteers, who work with primary schoolers now. It is really hard to teach on kids level without talking down yet while still being understandable. I kind of feel like that in the high school sometimes too, but in the primary school it's definitely worse. Part of the issue is that the kids don't have much understanding about how their own language works yet, never mind another. I've also gotten really used to giving at least 50% (if not more) of my classroom commands in English, and I decided to introduce that bit by bit, but it still sometimes slips out, and it weirds them out a lot more because they aren't used to me yet. 

More stories of youths and hopefully some photos to come! We'll see how this goes...

Ugly pets

We recently acquired the ugliest pets in the world. Actually, this time they are pets of the "soon to be food" persuasion: two black pigs. They are supposedly special or something, but I don't see their charms. I did catch this picture of them grazing with the bunny the other day, which is pretty hilarious, but after all the books I've read about diseases being spread between species (ie Guns Germs and Steel, a Mike Davis one about bird flu) also sort of terrifying.

Reading Reviews 9

Woefully behind! Doing twitter style reviews again.

2013
December
104. Blue Nights- Joan Didion
Poetically expresses the desperation of getting old and loss. A wee bit first world problems-y though...

2014
January
105. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao- Junot Diaz (RR)
Blows me away every time. Probably in my top 10 of all time.

106. The Accidental Billionares: The Founding of Facebook- Ben Mezrich
Melodramatic. I also feel people play up the "Facebook was founded by social outcasts and has caused us to be really weird" angle too much. We love founding myths far too much.

107. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools- Jonathan Kozol
Crier. Outdated although I doubt the issues have changed a whole lot.

108. Love in the Time of Cholera- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
My host mom reminds me of this story's female protagonist Fermina because she loves pets.

109. The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders- Madusree Mukerjee
An interesting look at the history of interactions between Andaman islanders (who live off the coast of India) and the rest of the world. I wish Mukerjee had written more about the intersections of the politics of decolonization and indigenity, because that was most interesting in my opinon.

110. Stuff White People Like
Don't read this during Peace Corps, you will become nostalgic for all of the delicious things to eat and cool places to go.

111. Galapagos- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Mehhh, not his best.

112. The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love- Oscar Hijuelos
Definitely too sensual to read during the lonely times of Peace Corps.

February
113. The Best American Travel Writing of 2013- Edited by Elizabeth Gilbert
Really solid collection.

114. El Peregrino (Diario de un Mago)- Paulo Coehlo
Weird magic stuff + El Camino de Santiago (an obsession of mine)= came out to a strange whole

115. The Descendants- Kaui Hart Hemmings
Well constructed plot.

116. The Dinner- Herman Koch
Upper class Europeans have never looked sinister.

117. Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace or War- Mary B. Anderson
Ch 7, roughly, things aid workers do that have intended effects is really brilliant.

118. El General en su Laberinto (The General in his Laberinth)- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Simon Bolivar's last river trip was a little circular for my taste, by really well written.

March
119. The Expats- Christopher Pavone
Could a plot be more over the top? Luxembourg? CIA? Balkans? Mexico? Demasiado.

120. Brief Encounters with the Enemy- Saif Sayrafiezadeh 
Short stories on the eve of a war suspicious like Iraq.

121. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius- Dave Eggers
It was, pretty much.

122. Push- Sapphire
All of the emotions.

123. Dance Dance Dance- Haruki Murakami
All the elements of a good Murakami story: weird sex with prostitutes, a man in a sheep costume, a weird relationship between a dude and a teenage girl and a strange building. Yet somehow it doesn't seem too far fetched to be readable.

124. Blow Up and Other Stories- Julio Cortazar
Dark.

125. Nicaragua without Illusions: Regime Change and Structural Adjustment in the 1990s- Thomas W. Walker (ed)
A dense academic read, but really interesting for making sense of what Nicaragua was like in the 1990s.

126. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies- Jared Diamond
Lots of interesting theories and explanations on a global level, but glossed over a lot when it came to the case of specific regions.

"Vengo de mirar el mundo de nuevo"

As usual, Ana Tijoux says it again.

Students as People

At the risk of sounding like a terrible person...it's only this year that I've really been able to appreciate my students as people. 

My first year of teaching was so all over the place and so much about getting the hang of classroom management that I don't feel like I was really able to relate much to my students. I was too exhausted by them to want to. I tended to see their behavior as a variable in the way a class resulted, but didn't always take the extra step back to consider why their behaviors existed. I got caught up in the cult of the "necio! necio! "(annoying/bad!)  instead of trying to be a model of positive reinforcement. 

My second year is different, for the most part. I'm a little better at being patient (some days). I know a few of their home situations a little better, which can help. But I think the biggest thing that is different is that now that I know many of their names or at least recognize faces, I see them around the various towns where I work and in different contexts. While it's awkward at times (ie the rebellious student eyeing me as I was curled up in a ball of pain on the bus, or when they're drinking at parties), it's also a really beautiful thing that builds a bond with them. I see them performing folklore dances at special events, riding bikes, loitering in the parks with their friends, watching their brothers and sisters, holding their children, selling food from house to house, doing errands, playing soccer. I've gotten slowly accustomed to having no space apart from them, and I've grown to find it more comforting, a sense of belonging to a community, if only in the most temporary of ways. 

Like any teenagers anywhere, life isn't all rainbows and sunshines. There's plenty of the awkward manifestations of puberty, especially in the boys, as they awkwardly grow into their bodies, suddenly lanky and high pitched, posing as more knowledgeable about life than they really are with hair gel and fake swagger the only things backing them up. Then, there are the happy teenage couples, who scare me with the likelihood of teen parenthood. I want to give all of them a million condoms. And then, the students who I imagine may not have enough to eat, or whose parents are absent or have other difficult circumstances.

Yet there are moments of pride as well. Having two of my favorite students from last year, with completely different personalities, go off to study English at UNAN, the public university, was an amazing reward for me as their teacher, as well as seeing them participate in a leadership camp put on by Peace Corps.

So that´s exactly my resolution for this year: to see the students as more than students. To see them as people.

The Undervalued Vos

When you study Spanish in school, they generally tell you that there are two forms that you use to express the word you- usted (unfamiliar or showing respect) and tu (informal/familiar).

However, if there's one thing I've fallen in love with recently about Nicaragua, it's the word "vos." While delegitimized by Spanish grammaticists, vos is used in the majority of Central and South American dialects of Spanish as the informal "you", albeit in different forms depending on the region. Note that I say region and not country: in Nicaragua, for example, no one in the Northern mountainous region uses vos, opting for an exclusive use of usted.

But there's something that I find really sexy about vos (pronounced bos, with the o pronounced roughly the same as way as rose), the way it comes out of your mouth round and hot and thick and resonant, and the intimacy or friendship it implies. So many times people use usted with me, which makes me feel old and too respectable, or tu, assuming I won't understand vos, which makes me feel ever more conscious of my outsider status.

Vos is just right. The kind of casualness I miss from American culture, but with an implication that I could belong here, that there are ties and friendships that anchor me.

It saddens me that students of Spanish aren't usually taught this form. It's a giant slight to so many Latino cultures, and sometimes even to the students themselves, because in their grammar classes, vos is treated like the redheaded stepchild, abandoned in favor of the two forms that dominate the written word. It's a shame, because I think it harms the students pride in their culture, in what they speak with their siblings or their friends, deeming these linguistic interactions to be of a lower quality.

On the Wall

Word of the Day

 

el marco- picture frame

Here in Nicaragua, you can tell a lot about desire from the images people post on their walls. There are pictures of the family looking serious and proper on a photoshopped background perhaps featuring a giant marble staircase, library or red carpet. There are glamour shots of women, perhaps when they were still young and hadn't given birth yet, with their curves in all the acceptable places. Giant homes with lush backyards, sparkling with cleanliness. Religious images, perhaps a washed out Mary featuring her impossibly light skinned cherubic baby Jesus. Pictures of random babies, particulary blondes, with inspirational mensages are also a big seller. 

These images often make me feel uncomfortably aware of the position of relative affluence in which I was raised and of the perniciousness of white supremacy, spurred onward in the modern era by media, but existing in the Americas since the conquest. So many of the backgrounds come from my original context, yet placed here they constitute an impossible dream, a desire for deceny, comfort, luxury or to be something other, supposedly more beautiful than what is. The escapism breaks my heart a little.