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.

Back to Bolivia!

Okay, first things first.  This is the first blog I've ever written, and, given my reluctance to learn anything about technology, I'm fairly confident that I will have to edit extensively.  Please bear with me.

I left Fort Mill with my dad on Wednesday night after a somewhat shocking no-crying streak to go to the train station in Columbia.  After weighing out all of my bags - for the first official and fifth actual time - and determining that I had indeed brought the exact maximum amount of things humanly possible, I settled in for a 4-hour wait.

The train arrived at 2:40 am, which wasn't ideal, but my somewhat-unacceptable obsession with trains made this okay.  And guys, this trip delivered.  Aside from discovering that exploring the entirety of the train was heavily discouraged (though I made it all the way to the locomotive before I was very kindly escorted back to my seat in the caboose), this was by far the best part of the trip.

We got to Miami around 7 pm, and I got a cab to the airport, where I entered Phase II: Wear All The Clothes.  Otherwise known as the best way to maximize carry-on space/look like a hobo.  My spiritual gifts are most likely working with children and being the most efficient packer ever.  After once again explaining that I'm not a crazy person for having 4 kilos of brown sugar in my backpack (you can't buy it in Coch), I made it onto the plane and settled in for a very boring and sleepless flight.

Once I got to Cochabamba, I taxied to Hannah and Sarah's apartment and was let in by their downstairs neighbors.  I promptly made myself a bed and napped until Sarah got home.  We spent the afternoon running around the city before Hannah got home, at which point we all crashed in the living room.

Today, we went to the hogar!  Due to a new law, we're not allowed to post pictures of the kids, so this post is about a hundred times less cute because there are no adorable baby photos.  The kids are doing so well, though, especially considering all of the recent upheaval at the hogar, and it was so good to see them again!  I ended up taking the girls to Horita Feliz (a children's church held on Saturdays) with Tía Suzy, then hanging out with the babies until after dinner.

I just realized I have no idea how to end a blog.

The train - magical.

Flying into Cochabamba.

The best friends are the ones who are okay with you camping out in their hallway . . . thanks Sarah and Hannah!

Favorite street in the city.

Horita Feliz