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.