exile to mexico

My Zootecnia (Animal Husbandry) class is like a class full of 12 year olds, most of whom have seem to have unmedicated Attention Deficit Disorder. Supposedly I teach adults (it is a university), thus avoiding the whole discipline situation. Tragically, that is far from the case at 6pm. I’m more likely to find these students shooting spitballs at each other than doing anything productive. Every evening at 5:57 I square my shoulders and prepare for battle.

Okay, mostly I just shrug my shoulders, reminding myself that after this I get to go home to my real children. “Hello! Good evening! How are you all?” I ask, radiating enthusiasm and positivity.  Why not? I love my job, and I even like these students. They make me laugh maniacally even when they stubbornly refuse to learn anything.

For example, the other day one of my bright goody-two-shoes biology students at noon was holding the class ball. It’s a soft little ball I use when I want everyone to participate. Students read a line from the passage, or answer a question, or whatever it is that we’re doing, then they pick the “next victim” to read aloud or answer the next question or what have you by throwing the ball to that person. I like to think it magically converts a dreaded task into something more fun, although I’m not sure my students really agree.

“Teacher, who is Alex?” this bright little level one girl asked out of the blue (name changed to protect the guilty). “I have a student named Alex in another class. Why?” I asked her. She showed me the ball, where my oddball 6pm student had indeed written his name on my class ball. I remembered that the last time we’d used it in his class he’d asked me to give it to him. “Regalemelo” he repeated about 5 times, and every time I clearly said no. “Why not?” he asked me then, as if I’d denied him something legitimate, like, I dunno, instruction in English. “Because it’s my ball for class activities. No and no. Give me back the ball.” I didn’t notice then that he’d already marked it. The audacity!

I wasn’t particularly worried about damage to my ball, but I took advantage to give my student a hard time. “Alex, my daughter is 3 years old,” I told my student, speaking slowly in English, making gestures to make sure he got it. “And she likes to color on everything. I constantly tell her, ‘We only color on paper. We don’t color on walls. We don’t color on the baby’s head. We only color on paper.’  It’s a problem because she is three years old. But you are not three years old! So why did you color on my ball?” I’m smiling but shaking my finger at him. I’m much more bemused than angry, but my entire 6pm class seems to love me scolding them.

Is it silly to find them shooting spitballs at each other and smacking each other upside the head, taking each other’s books so they get their friend in trouble for not having a book? Yes. Is it absurd that my party girl student uses her phone dictionary to look up every single word in a reading, then tries to ask me every other word during exams? Yep. Do they sometimes sidetrack me by asking totally irrelevant questions or making me repeat something that I’m pretty sure they already got? Yes and yes. But it’s also my only class where some students come to my office for extra help, including two that just want to practice more in their spare time. I love that in this class my sharpest student never gives her boyfriend the answers, making him work for it instead. I love that my party girl comes up with hysterically incorrect translations. I love that every once in a while they prove that they’ve learned something, because it feels like a much bigger success than my other classes’ learning.

Is this class full of smart asses? Yes, but luckily I appreciate smart-asses.

Sure, sometimes it irritates me to spend half of class saying things like, “Put away your cell phone!” “Please stop talking while someone else is talking!” “In English, please,” “Focus! Concentrate! We’re reading!” “Listen to so-and-so. I can’t hear because everyone else is talking.” “Do I need to separate you two?” I feel like a broken record, but some of them have some good come-backs, and they usually have the decency to look abashed when I call them out. They’re not purposely rude, they just can’t seem to hold that thought the entire class hour.

Many of them can’t stay in class the whole time, either. They “go to the bathroom” for long periods of time, sometimes multiple times in a class. (Did I mention it’s only an hour-long class?)  Nothing deters them. Even embarrassing questions about their stomach or bladder problems just make them smile and shake their heads. If all my classes were like this, I’d take it personally and assume I’m a horrendously boring teacher, but thankfully 6pm is the only one who behaves like this.

Inevitably, before class even begins, some wise-ass or the other asks if we are getting out of class early tonight. Mostly I tell them it’s up to them. “Get to work and we might get to leave early,” I say, dangling my carrot in the hopes that it’ll motivate them to stay on task. “Teacher,” they whine, making it sound like teeeeecher. I believe it might be the only word some of them know in English, despite this being a level two class.

After our exchange of greetings, I tell them our objective and then notice that only about 20 percent of them have something out on their desk. “Where’s your book?” I ask several students. Some of them take it out of their bags. Others frown sheepishly or tell me they forgot it, yet again. “Where’s your notebook?” I ask several other students. Usually they take it out of their bag, even if it’s not really their English notebook. Good enough if they have something to write on. “Guys, come on, let’s go! Let’s at least get out some kind of tool for learning, even if you don’t have plans to learn tonight! You’re in college, guys!” There’s my opening pep talk for Zootecnia. Apparently they love this routine, because we have to go through it every night. They’re like attention-starved children, and they can’t seem to figure out how this education routine goes exactly.

Just because I make them put things on their desk, though, doesn’t mean that they’re going to do anything with those items. We can spend the entire class learning our 10 new target vocabulary words and some of them still won’t have them written down. One night I made each student show me their notes in order to leave class. But that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll bring those notes in order to apply their vocabulary the next day. Sigh.

Even this level of note taking often doesn’t happen for some. Alas. 

Other creative tactics have included taking roll at the end of class instead of at the beginning, so the students who have been out roaming campus for the past twenty minutes of class are thus marked absent. Really I’m not bothered by those students leaving class, because it’s preferable to them disrupting everyone around them. Mostly I’m a natural consequences type of parent/teacher anyway, and I figure if they don’t spend time in class they probably won’t pass, and I won’t feel guilty about it.

Aside from waiting for my I-told-you-so moment of truth when they see their grades, my number one discipline tactic is rampant scolding and finger-wagging. Occasionally I have to implement rules with the consequence of being asked to leave class. (For example, “Whoever doesn’t bring their book tomorrow can’t stay for class.” “Whoever talks while other students are presenting will be asked to leave.”) For some reason, even though many of them leave class on their own for half an hour, being asked to leave class by the teacher is not cool, so it’s a pretty effective tactic, as long as I don’t use it too often.

I also get my revenge in various ways. For instance, it was quiz night and several of them wanted class time to study. “Teacher, 5 minutes!” they hollered. “No! We want to get out early!” I imitated them, cackling away about using their own complaint against them. Bwahahaha! Then, when they got the quiz, they all freaked out because they couldn’t remember how to do the grammar section. “But teacher, we didn’t practice this yesterday!” Ummm, no, but we learned it last week, and practiced it for 2 days, plus I told them they needed to study it for the quiz. And yet several of them asked me things like, “What do I put if it’s superlative again?” or “Is this right?” even though they know I never give them answers to the stuff they’re supposed to be studying. Hope springs eternal, right? So I keep hoping that my next semester’s Zootecnia class will be a little less like being a playground monitor and more like being a teacher- although it might not be quite as entertaining. We’ll see.

“Teacher, why are the other English teachers showing movies in class while we take a quiz?” My students whined. “Because I’m mean,” I grinned. I had a brief flashback to my mother telling me something similar when I’d whine about what other kids got to do and what other moms did/didn’t do/allowed. So I stuck to my guns and gave the quiz, even though I wanted to cancel it just as much as they did. I will learn from this lesson for next year, though. My boss warned me- December is pretty much a write-off. It was the day before their Christmas parade, and technically they still had a half day of classes the next day, but really their brains had been on vacation most of the week already. I couldn’t blame them; I’d also spent more of my planning time than I’d like to admit looking at cookie recipes and planning Christmas crafts for me and Lucia to do. Thank baby Jesus for this vacation! Students and teachers alike obviously needed it.

So on Friday we all had to be there, but nobody’s heart was in the academics. Even administration officials were on the cheerful side with the incredible breakfast provided for staff. This year the food included 5 different kinds of salad, plus some nicely spiced fish, chicken, and pork dishes. We got to sample all of it, and it was all delicious! I even decided to forego the cake in favor of more apple-cream-something salad. It was a big change from last years fried tacos or tamales. Best of all, after everyone was finished they handed out to-go boxes, which I certainly took advantage of to share the love with the family at home.

In the afternoon was the moment we’d all been waiting for (okay, well, some of us more than others): the university’s Christmas parade! In honor of the event (which was my first time since they’d canceled it last year), they were giving staff the option of staying for their regular schedule, till 7pm, or clocking out early and attending the parade. If you clock out early and don’t support students in the parade, they warned in their sternly worded official letter posted around the university, it will count as an unexcused absence!

Some of my coworkers opted to stay until 7, and theoretically I should have stayed to grade more godawful quizzes and be done with it. But hell, no! I was actually thrilled about the Christmas parade, thanks to having an excitable three year old daughter. There was an event the same evening at her school, where kids were going to dance and sing and such. We were supposed to buy her a red felt skirt and other femenine-Santa crap, and so I was secretly thrilled when I asked her to choose which event she wanted to attend, and she chose the parade at my work! Especially because I was going to have to go regardless, or risk losing the afternoon’s pay. And I really wasn’t excited about her Mrs. Claus-or-whatever outfit.

Plus, the parade was really exciting! “Your students are going to throw out candy?” Lucia asked, since that had been part of the selling point, and I confirmed. She doesn’t even like non-chocolate candy that much, but she LOVES the idea of it. For me, the mere idea of getting off two hours early to spend time with my family was enough to have me over the moon. So I clocked out at 5:01 and strolled down to the parking lot to check out the progress on the floats and wait for the kiddos to get there with Conan.

And it was actually exciting! Granted, typical style for down here, nothing was ready at 5. We didn’t all get out of the parking lot till about 6:30, so I probably could have graded the rest of those pesky quizzes if I had known. But my heart wasn’t in it anyway. It was way more fun to see all the (grown-up) kids working so diligently on something.

Each major did their own float with its own theme. They’d been working on it for days, or weeks already in some cases. Since some of the Zootecnia (Animal Husbandry) kids live down the street from me, I’d seen them working on theirs for a couple weeks already. Mostly they used recycled materials, too. Like a “tree” made from plastic bottles that they cut and painted white, or another major’s tree made from used newspaper and cardboard boxes. My favorite, though, was the nursing students’ float with a tree that’s torn between autumn and winter. Not that we have autumn here. But it was really pretty. Here’s my excited but just-woke-up-from-nap grumpy three year old on top of that float.

Too groggy to be sleepy, Lucia doesn’t know how

Lots of students dressed up for it, with different themes. There were fairies and elves and Mrs. Clauses and mimes- and that was just the nursing students! The biology students dressed like animals. The Zootecnia students were mostly too cool to dress up, except for a couple Minnie and Mickey Mouses on their Disney-themed float. We didn’t get many pictures, because we got caught up in walking with the parade. We walked all the way to the end, with Lucia in the stroller and Khalil in the “backpack” with me.

Khalil dressed up, too!

my favorite tree

the nursing float, PRESENTE!

They worked so hard on these adorable outfits! It made me feel young just watching them!

Lucia got some candy. I got some exercise. Khalil got more attention than he could stand, and worked a nap in there on my chest. Conan was very laid-back about it all. My students saw that I am in fact interested in what they do outside of class, and that I’m also a human outside of my mean old class (with a family and everything!). It was certainly an all-around success. There was more event happening at the end of the line, but by then it was everybody’s bedtime and we had to bow out. But we made it! We kicked off Christmas vacation in style! I’ll tell y’all about the rest of Christmas break later. Hope you’re having half as much fun as we are! Feliz Navidad!

I think Dee, my mom’s partner, might know more people in Puerto Escondido than we do. He’s fantastically sociable and when he’s here on vacation, he has more time than we do to find out about cool places and things to do. Thus, thanks to him and his excellent socializing in Puerto skills, we went to several new places during this visit, places not in our normal routine.

This particular place only he and Conan explored until yesterday. It’s now a new family hang out / get away spot. It’s more or less in the city limits and it’s totally free!

It’s a high-up spot in La Punta where you get a beautiful view of Puerto, the ocean, and the mountains. It’s a perfect spot for contemplation, or photographs, or a packed lunch with friends, or a romantic make-out session.

The kids are eternally in action

Papi and the kids

The view!

Obviously, the creators of this spot realized that it was perfect for accidental baby-making and other such shenanigans, since they felt it was necessary put up a special plaque asking you not to do so.

FYI, kids! Not for fun!

This says that this spot is for considering the principle mysteries of our faith, and as such romantic dates and all that can cause disorder are prohibited. Which instantly makes me want to cause some havoc, but maybe that’s just the rebellious reflex in me. The choice of words “our faith” is interesting, too; does that mean it’s only for Christians? Or is it merely a reflection of the reality that most of this country is Christian (and mostly Catholic)?

Whatever the case, aside from the beautiful view, this is what the creators of this spot had in mind for you to ponder:

Sorry, I took the picture from the back of it. But you get the idea. Lucia was thrilled to climb up the hill.

An intense image of mother and child. Definitely something to ponder over.

We didn’t stay and ponder long, though, because Khalil is in that point of babyhood when it’s really hard to go out with him for very much time. He’s not little and docile enough anymore to be happy in your arms all day, nor is he mobile enough to go around outside without being a danger to himself and others (imagine trying to go to the nice sandy beach with a baby who insists on crawling and putting everything in his mouth). So you have a little window of opportunity where you can expect to go out and keep him relatively happy. This was perfect, time-wise, for letting Lucia climb around without Khalil getting too pissed off about being detained.

Just hanging out….

On top of the sand pile- apparently there’s more construction in the works.

It was a perfect family outing, thanks to whoever made this semi-public spot. So thanks, Obama. Oh, no, wait, that’s not right…. Thanks, guys with money to spend on faith-inspired ponderings! We’ll be back, and I’ll keep trying to resist the urge to make out and cause a ruckus while I’m under the cross.