Happy Birthday, Angel!

Today is my little boy’s fourth birthday. 

It’s sometimes hard to talk about Angel, simply because there isn’t a concise way to explain how he became mine.  I was working at an orphanage in 2013, and, on October 4th, a tiny, hours-old baby boy arrived after he’d been abandoned in a trufi (a form of public transportation).  As newborns require a significant amount of care and the willingness to give up on the very concept of sleep, the tías let me keep him with me.  Days turned into weeks, which turned into months of taking care of this beautiful, often-sick, rather high-maintenance child.  In the first three months, he had severe jaundice, a couple of colds, one infection, and vomited after almost every bottle (come to find out that he was tongue-tied).  He never slept more than 2 hours at a time, and he cried if I wasn’t holding him.

And I loved him as I’ve never loved anyone before or since.

As Angel grew, I reminded myself that he wasn’t mine; he would never be mine.  It was harder and harder to remember that as time went on and I taught him to roll over (he wasn’t a fan), sit up (champion baby), crawl, pull up, and all the rest.  One night, when he was 5 months old and violently ill, we watched Star Wars together at 3:00 am because it was the only thing that would calm him down.  His first word was “dada,” about which I am still a little bit bitter.  I made him a baby book because I wanted him to know that, no matter what happens, no matter where he goes or what he does, he has always been loved and wanted.

On the day he turned 11 months old, I left Bolivia, and I haven’t seen him since.

About 6 months after I left, Angel was assigned adoptive parents.  To make a long story short, they were not the right family for him, but they took him home anyway.  I spent 12 days in a sort of horrified stupor, and then I got a text from Hannah.  Skype now?  Urgent.  I pulled up the video on my phone, and I saw my baby’s little face there with her, and I sobbed.  His first family brought him back, and it is the greatest miracle I’ve yet to see.  A few months later, he was reassigned to a Bolivian lady who lives in Italy and loves him beyond words.  She sends pictures every once in a while, and she’s everything I could have hoped for if I’d been able to choose Angel’s mom.

It’s still hard to think that someone else holds that title now.  Someone else will send him off to his first day of school; someone else will watch him grow up.  I got 11 precious, short months with Angel, and, regardless of legal or biological definitions, he will always be my son.

Little Man

October 4, 2013

Hanging out with Grandma.

The last time I held my son.

Angel and his best friend/cousin Carmin

Meeting his adoptive mom.

Blog Post #5: The Super Honest and Not Funny One

I really, really dislike the school I teach at right now.  There it is.  I have spent the past few months growing steadily more frustrated with a small group of people who seem not to care much about any of the things that they say are important.  We claim to be a school that offers a quality education, then we cancel classes for dumb reasons constantly.  We say that our students are our top priority, then we screw them all over with huge changes for no apparent reason.  We say that we love Jesus, then we act in the least loving way possible with our students.  I’m so, so very sick of it.

Selfishly, I’m also sick of being told that I’m not doing enough when I’m a first-year, unqualified teacher who has been given more classes than anyone else in high school and literally NOTHING to go on other than vague curriculum guides.  I spend every night and weekend working to make vocab lists, make tests, write lesson plans, and grade so many papers, but it’s never enough:  Lindsey, where are your curriculum maps; Lindsey, why aren’t your lesson plans on RenWeb? 

There is one bright point:  I adore my students.  They are zany, witty, lovely people with bright futures ahead of them.  And I think that’s so much of why I’m so tired of this school and its enormous, overbearing workload; I can’t help the ones who struggle academically because I have to do so much just to prep material for the median learner that I can’t focus on any of the outliers.  I am not doing a good job for my advanced kids, and I’m certainly not doing a good job for my struggling students.  And it hurts to know that I have so little support from my school that there’s nothing I can do about it right now.

I was violently ill a few days ago, and, because Carachi has no options for substitute teachers other than to throw it all onto the one under-appreciated guy who does more work than the rest of us put together with no thanks and little acknowledgement by most everyone just because he doesn’t whine about his workload like most of us do constantly, I just went to school anyway and asked my kids to bear with me while I taught from my desk chair.  I felt like death, but the student that I have the most difficulty with, the one who hasn’t turned in a single assignment on time and still says “herro” to me instead of “hello” every day because he knows it annoys me, that was the one student who decided that my horrible day was in desperate need of fixing—and he succeeded.  He parted his hair down the middle, declared himself the “Papa Evo” (joking reference to Bolivia’s president) of the class, and went from problem student to police officer in exactly 6 seconds.  I think I should have taken notes on his classroom management.  I am so grateful for that student, and then I have to listen to most of his teachers disparage him constantly.  No, he doesn’t do well in school.  But he is so musically and artistically gifted and so genuinely concerned about the people he cares about that I, for one, don’t think we should judge him so harshly on his academics.

To be honest, though, I'm just as guilty of complaining about the kids.  They're an easy target; they're teenagers, so they do and say a lot of dumb things.  But I forget that we've given them essentially 5 days off this semester, and we wonder why they're lethargic in class.  Hmm, maybe because we didn't think about the implications of taking away their Spring Break?  Oh, and speaking of calendar changes that will hurt the kids, our students were informed yesterday that the school calendar is shifting because we didn’t get our paperwork done for like 8 years, blamed all our problems on the Bolivian government, then they (quite reasonably) asked that we comply with the law.  The horror!  How could they persecute us for being Christians!?  It’s kind of despicable how our administration has tried to reframe their own failures.  Anyway, this calendar change means that our kids will essentially lose 6 months of next year and be a full year behind their Bolivian school counterparts, then lose another 6 months should they want to go to university in North America or Europe.  Of course the students were upset.  I would have been furious in their place.  But they were simply told that “it’s only a year; that’s not much.”  Um, no.  These are kids’ lives we’re casually playing with, and it is not okay.

If you’ve read this far, here are some of my favorite class quotations from the recent past to add a bit of levity:

“Yesterday I was so bored that I actually decided to study.” -Pau

“I’m a children.” -Roberto

"Miss, do you want to get a family Spotify account with us?" -The 8th grade boys
"No way.” -Me
“But you’re our dad!” -Them, inexplicably

“Humans were made to slurp.  That’s why God gave us the talent to slurp.” -TJ

“Creativity is the spark of . . . uh, smartness” - José Luis

“I know about crane juice!” -Nicolas, adamantly

"Miss, we brought you flowers." -The 9th grade girls, holding weeds.

"Miss, we found a baby for you to adopt." -The 9th grade boys, holding Nicolas

Evopolio: One Game to Rule Them All

Yesterday, I found a new favorite board game:  Evopolio, the Bolivian version of Monopoly.  Some friends and I get together a few times a month to hang out and play games, and we’d been joking about this one for a while.  Evo Morales, the socialist president of Bolivia, has fairly low approval ratings in the city (here’s hoping I don’t get deported for saying that), so we assumed that the game would be making fun of him.  Oh no.  It was not.  It was a sincere tribute to the current state of the country.  And it was delightful in every possible way.

To start off, the board ran backwards (which Tasha found incredibly stressful), was oblong, and was made of a folded piece of cardboard.  Instead of dollars, there were bolivianos, and there was a stack of cards simply entitled “Luck” to put in the place of Chance/Community Chest.  Oh, and a bag of rocks.  Because, as we found out, you can draw cards that institute blockades on the board.

We started playing, reading the rules on a kind of need-to-know basis, and quickly discovered that every “Luck” card would either be the best or worst thing you could think of.  Within four rounds, we had a blockade in progress, those with businesses had been commanded to pay non-business owners 100Bs each (socialism, remember?), and the bank had started demanding bribes (which wasn’t in the instructions, but Kevin felt that he should strive for verisimilitude in that area).  One of the cards pulled early said, “If any player is a smuggler or a drug trafficker, they are hereby arrested.  The bank takes everything they have, and they go to jail.”

For a little while, the game progressed mostly normally, but we had to keep switching directions because of the blockade.  A mudslide occurred, which took one die out of the game for three rounds.  We made some trades, bought some properties, and laughed at the increasingly Bolivian Luck cards.  People went to the hospital for drinking tainted juice and getting beaten up late at night, politicians gave bribes, and then, suddenly, I became a drug trafficker.  After seeing the earlier card, I was pretty nervous, but the immediate 1000Bs I was given and the bonus 300Bs every time I passed Go were fairly nice.

My three favorite Luck cards:  You were caught urinating in public and have been fined (Top Left), you drank a drink off the street and have severe diarrhea; go to the hospital (Top Right), and you fell off your bike on Pedestrian Day and broke your nose; go to the hospital (Bottom).

After becoming a drug dealer, I drew a card saying I’d been caught smuggling sugar into the country and was being fined and sent to jail.  I mean, I guess better to get caught with sugar, right?  I got out after waiting three turns, only to be IMMEDIATELY sent back for smuggling gasoline into the country.  Apparently, I’m only good at hiding the drugs.

Tasha and I came out ahead by the halfway point; she had a lot of properties, and I had my drug money.  Lydia went out, and Seth looked to be going the same way when, suddenly, Tasha became a smuggler.  She was heartbroken, but collected her bonus all the same.  We made an alliance to get Seth out of the game so we couldn’t be taken down by another lose-everything Luck card.  By this time, he was down to his last 50Bs and a monopoly in La Paz (of which he had declared himself king).

Then, Tasha had to draw a Luck card.  She picked it up, read the first few words, and then looked at me with shock and horror.  She turned the card around.  “If any player is a smuggler or a drug trafficker, they are hereby arrested.  The bank takes everything they have, and they go to jail.” 

And with that, Seth sprang up, jubilant.  “I AM THE ONE TRUE KING!!”  And so he was.  Don’t do (or sell) drugs, kids.  You’ll lose at Evopolio.

The  [very humble] photo Seth celebrated his victory with, stolen from his facebook.

Cows and Pirates

Yesterday was a weird day.  Apparently, our school thinks that teachers like the adrenaline rush of having completely unannounced activities in the middle of classes that we’ve meticulously planned for.

In the morning, upon arriving at school, I was told that they were going to have a 5K run for the kids who wanted to participate, and that it was taking the place of first period, and that I was going to be helping point the kids in the direction they should go.  What?  Okay, fine.  I will confess to muttering angrily to myself and anyone who cared to listen, but okay.  Then I was told that this whole there’s-a-race-so-we-cancel-classes thing is going to happen at least twice more this semester, and I decided to go hang out with the middle schoolers because they at least have hormones and a still-developing prefrontal cortex to blame for the fact that they’re crazy.

About 10 minutes after hearing about the race, I got dropped off on a godforsaken back road next to some cows.  Also, I was given a broom for, and I quote, “beating off the dogs if any should try to bite you.”  Let’s be clear, I teach at one of the best schools in the city.  I teach entirely in English to intelligent, motivated, upper-class students.  And I was given a dog-beating stick.  I’m just as confused as anyone.

Wasn't joking about the cows.

I did manage to grab a book on the way out, so I started reading (keeping an eye out for bloodthirsty dogs).  Ten minutes later, the wave of runners from 5th to 12th grade came by.  At the end of the group came three girls walking along arm-in-arm.  I’m not totally convinced that they’d been told it was a race, but they were hilarious.

I was positioned at the top of the loop, so I stayed to direct runners back to the school when they’d completed the big circle.  I read for a while and chatted with the lady whose cows I was standing beside, then the clear winner of the race came sprinting along.  He whipped by, followed by the second and third place guys.  Students trickled by, and a surprising number of them chose to update me on how many times they’d thrown up along the way.  Charming, guys; move it along.  Toward the end, I was also told that “Niki’s dead.  He’s in a truck.”  (Spoiler alert:  Nicholas wasn’t dead, just tired.)  When everyone had passed me (including the walking girls, still very happily in last place), I walked back to the school.

You can kind of see the kids' backs.  I'm still awful at taking pictures.

Because of the fact that none of the new teachers knew about the morning interruption, we did some quick class-swapping because the 10th graders had a test today.  I ended up with my students taking a math test instead of a Much Ado About Nothing quiz, which was a little weird considering that I still struggle with long division.

My 8th graders just finished reading Treasure Island, so, in an effort to be the kind of teacher that Pinterest tells me I should be, I planned a treasure hunt.  I divided the kids up into pirates and good guys, came up with a different set of clues for each group, and I cast Rosa as the parrot because she never shuts up.  I told her she had to come in costume and, to my delight, she did.

Setting up for the treasure hunt was slightly stymied by the fact that the 8th graders were in PE (which is held on the soccer field) and therefore could clearly see five of the twelve total hiding places for clues.  I did what I could, then ran around like a crazy person in the 5 minutes they get to change.  When the treasure hunt began, I had a moment of panic:  what if the kids got through all of the clues in like 5 minutes?  What then?  Fortunately, everything went according to plan.  When the pirates finally found the place the treasure should have been, they stopped dead.  “Miss, there’s nothing here!”

Now, for those of you who haven’t read Treasure Island, the treasure isn’t where it’s supposed to be in the book either.  Ben Gunn, a half-crazed man marooned on the island, had already found it and hidden it elsewhere.  And I, of course, had cast one of my students as Ben, thinking it was totally obvious that there would be a twist to the game.  It was not.  While the pirates and good guys ran around looking for their clues, Cami had found the treasure, moved it to her locker, and then followed her instructions to “run around looking suspicious” brilliantly by standing in very small bushes and poking walls.

Back to the bewildered pirates.  “Miss!  Why isn’t there a treasure!?”

I raised my eyebrows.  “I don’t know.  Why might the treasure not be here?”

They were silent for three seconds, then I saw the same look of shock cross every face at the same instant.  “BEN GUNN!!”  And they took off running, Rosa’s “wings” nearly falling off in her haste.

Thirty seconds later, the good guys came hurtling out of nowhere.  “It’s over by Mrs. Hodge’s room . . . wait, did the pirates just find it!?”

“No, the treasure wasn’t there.”

“Why wasn’t the treasure— BEN GUNN!!”  For the second time in under a minute, I watched a lightbulb simultaneously light up in every face.  They sprinted off.  It was a race to find Ben/Cami, who at that point was strolling around and around a pillar.

The good guys got to her first.  “WHERE’S THE TREASURE!?”

As instructed, she asked them to bring her Ben’s coracle first.  Last week was Día del Mar (when Bolivia mourns its lost ocean), and I’d put boats of various colors on one of the big posters of the sea.  The good guys ran off — but in the wrong direction.  The pirates then found Cami, and she repeated her request.  They went the right direction, and came back with all of the boats, just to be safe.  So the pirates won the gold, which no one seemed to mind because they shared with the good guys.

The pirates and Ben/Cami.  It took an embarrassing number of tries to get a good picture . . .

. . . because José and Pau were busy doing this.

Teaching at Carachipampa

Well, after teaching for 5 months, I finally thought about writing a blog.  And then I procrastinated on doing so for 2 more months, but I guess better late than never? 

To be honest, teaching is hard.  Way harder than I thought it would be.  Sometimes I just come home and contemplate how an entire class of 12-year-olds can be so wholly incapable of writing a single sentence.  Other times, I wonder what the legal ramifications of duct-taping a student to his chair would be.  I remember that I’ve made literally hundreds of vocabulary worksheets for students that—every. single. week.—seem shocked that they have to learn words.

But then there are other days.  Days when my students draw me cartoons and fight over who gets to sit with me at lunch.  Days when I see the light bulb finally go off in a 7th grader’s head on what a direct object is.  Days when my homeroom christens themselves the Boxtrolls and runs around collecting recycling from the entire school.  Days when we reenact scenes from Shakespeare and the boys fight over who gets to play the corpses.

And I realize that the good days outweigh the bad.

A very old picture of the 8th graders in the Reading Corner-That's-Not-A-Corner

This school year was made especially interesting by the fun fact that it was never supposed to happen.  At training last summer, Carachipampa’s teachers were called to a meeting where we were informed that the school was possibly not going to open again this year, or ever.  Throughout the year, there have been meetings based entirely on the idea that we shouldn’t leave our stuff in our classrooms because we could be shut down by the Bolivian Department of Education at a moment’s notice.  I made a spreadsheet of job opportunities at various other schools in the city and updated my resume just in case.  Last week, though, we finally received the license and Carachipampa is a legitimate school!  This is the first week in 7 months that I know that my job will still exist a week from now, which is a huge relief.

9th grade is a time for bromance.

A DAY IN THE LIFE:
7:30:  Get to school and have morning meeting.  To be honest, this is the worst.  We sit around for half an hour and repeat the same announcements as the day before and the day before that.
8:00:  Frantically print off last-minute worksheets or whatnot.
8:15:  Homeroom with the 9th graders.  We are in charge of recycling, so the back corner of my classroom is the home of an enormous, messy box of unsorted paper at all times.  I tell myself that this is part of my sanctification because otherwise it would drive me insane.
8:25:  First period:  Today this was 8th grade.  They came in, complained about doing the DOL, then they did the DOL, then we went over the new vocabulary for the week.  They complained about the Works Cited that they have to turn in tomorrow as Step 2 of their research papers.  We discussed MLA format for the 74th time this year.  Then we reviewed the last two chapters they read of Treasure Island, and Pau got up to wander around the classroom.  I threatened to make Pau sing a song to the class, and he returned to his seat.
9:15:  Second period:  Free block!  I spent it plotting how to teach 7th graders about commas and how to tone down the overtly sexual remarks that Mercutio makes in Romeo and Juliet:  Act 2.
10:20:  Third period:  10th grade.  We’re in the middle of a short story unit dealing with irony and ambiguity, and today we went over “Notes from a Bottle,” a story in which the world floods.  My students showed a flagrant disregard for the tragedy inherent in the story by proclaiming that such a flood would give Bolivia back its sea (a very big deal; we as a nation are very upset with Chile for stealing the sea from us 134 years ago), and there was much rejoicing.  There was more vocabulary, and one of my students asked if he could “abscond” from the classroom because he needed a “respite” from learning.  While I was proud of his vocabulary word usage, I denied his request.
11:10:  Fourth period:  Free block again!  I made vocabulary worksheets.
12:00:  Fifth period:  7th grade.  We began with new assigned seats, carefully engineered to put each of my problem students in a bubble of solitude and order.  It will not work, but one can hope.  We then moved to vocabulary worksheets, which were completed quickly* and quietly* in a totally not-chaotic* way, after which we discussed how to write a sentence like a non-toddler.  Highlight of the conversation:  “Miss, when are we ever going to use this in real life?”
*These words are all lies.
12:45:  Lunchtime.  I eat with the kids most days because it’s a fun way to connect with them.  It also cuts down on food fights and children pretending to snort Fun Dip like cocaine.
1:25:  Seventh period:  9th grade.  We are still working on Romeo and Juliet, which is a terrible play about terrible people for those who are lucky enough to have avoided it.  We discussed Romeo’s interaction with Tybalt, and my students asked why it wasn’t called “Romeo and Tybalt” since Romeo claims to “love thee better than thou canst devise.”  Teenagers.  After a brief flash of pride that they were at least using quotes from the play to back up their loony ideas, we got back on track with the “ghetto theater,” where we very loosely interpret how certain action-packed scenes went.
2:10:  Eighth period:  11th grade.  We’re in the middle of The Scarlet Letter, and this class is actually awesome at discussions.  They have very different opinions on Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, and they are able to discuss those differences in a mature fashion.  They’re wonderful.

That time Pau got chased by a goat (he's very proud).

My 7th graders embodied in a single image.

I brought a tiny friend from the hogar to school one day.  My students got fairly attached.