I'm Starting to Talk like Your Students

"Jack Nicholson" and the girl who always brings her drums everywhere. I actually hamg out with him a lot more that I like to admit!

My final semester at Aliarse is turning out to be pretty easy. I am teaching my fancy gerentes at Transelca, and a group at ITSA, a continuation of one of my last semesters’ classes. These are the more advanced students, and I suppose accordingly the curriculum has a sort of deconstructed quality to it. This is what I have to work with:

Module 6

Indirect questions

Question tag

Get used to/

accustomed to

be used to

Get + adjectives, get + prepositions get + past participle.

SECOND TERM

Phrasal verbs ( COME / GET / GO / PUT / TURN)

Linking words expressing:

Condition ( despite of / in spite of although / Thought )

Purpose: ( so that / in order that /

Cause and result: ( Because / because of / due to; for this reason, as a result, that’s why )

Adding, Emphasizing, Listing points: (also / Besides / finally / in addition / fist of all / what’s more / last but not least.)

Contrast : ( but / however, although / on the hand )

No books, no course packets, just this meager list. And the brilliant minds of my students and myself. My brilliant mind is bored by the prospect of a whole term of “get used to” and “....isn’t it?”, so I’m back to my old ways of inventing what I think we should learn. The problem is that I don’t usually know much about what I’m teaching until I start teaching it. Yesterday, I thought it might be useful for the students to learn phrases like “although”, “in case” and “as long as”. What a can of worms! I was calling them conjunctions, but I really don’t even know...and I forgot that in Spanish, you have to use the subjunctive with adverbial conjunctions. I think I just made a random vocabulary list, and tried to teach them as a grammar point. There was a little confusion. So much for ignoring the syllabus.

There are certain mistakes that all of the students, from my fanciest energy company gerente to my most timid electro-mechanics adolescent, make. Would, could, should and must get mixed up a lot, and my students always say things like, “It must be nice to go to the party tonight.” or “It should be scary to travel by yourself.” Then there are possessive determiners. It doesn’t matter is it’s my, her, their, our; to my student, everything is your. “Last night, I watched TV with my boyfriend at your house.” Or, “My mother is pregnant, and your stomach is getting really big!” I’m happy to be so involved in my student’s lives, but unfortunately, I hear this mistake so often that I’m starting to use it myself! Another one, which is kind of awkward in this unquestionably homophobic culture, is that the boys always say boyfriend instead of girlfriend. I don’t want to assume that the boy with perfectly painted eyebrows, a tight pink shirt and shining fingernails means girlfriend when he says, “Next year, I will marry my boyfriend.” I usually don’t correct them (the other boys will do that for me, between peals of hysteric laughter: “Yes, your boyfriend, marica, hahaha!!!!)...I’m trying to get them to consider the word “partner”, a word I myself have never really gotten comfortable with in my own life. But in this situation it could/should/must/would be useful.

A mysterious fire always elivens the bus ride home.

All in a Days Work

It’s 7:06 am. I’ve just finished watching the sun rise: at 5:45, the different blues and greys of the night sky (the madrugada sky, actually) define into clouds, and the Sierra Nevada mountains, 200 km to the east, are silhouetted by the sun rising beyond. My schedule here demands that I wake up at 5 am four days a week, and I feel well acquainted with the Barranquilla sunrise.

Today, as I was walking out of my building at 6:30, my phone rang. The caller ID informed me that Cecilia, my 7:00 student, was calling, but the voice that greeted me was definitely masculine. Does Cecilia have a manly morning voice? “Hola?” “Good morning, Eliza” “Good morning...” What language do I speak to this unknown voice, at this unfavorable hour? We shared a moment of silence and I started worrying that I was very late- sometimes I unaccountably lose 15 minutes somewhere in the morning. “Estoy en camino, Ceci! I’m running out of the door...” “Eliza, Ceci is still sleeping. She is very tired.” Aha. Ok. This must be the mysterious, bohemian hospital executive husband who turns up in so many of my student’s colorful anecdotes. Class canceled. I turned around to return to my apartment, and before my phone was in my bag, it rang again. “Eliza, I’m going to my farm at 10:00 this morning. Would you like to go with me?” Cecilia and her husband have a little coffee farm up in the cool Sierra Nevadas, a completely different world from this city, with rivers and waterfalls and fresh fresh air. Of course I would like to go, but not alone with Cecilia’s husband...I guess the sun rise today was just for the sake of it.

Anyway, my students in Soledad are waiting for me. Today we’re going to discuss gender roles in Brazil, and think of reasons why the percentage of woman heads-of-household is so much higher in the Northeast of that country. This half-quarter-trimester the gringas are running the show at ITSA, and I’ve decided to raise my standards. I made up my own test for the mid-term, and the students did very well! At least the ones who studied/cheated did. I’d like to give you an example of the test I was supposed to give these guys...the listening part is the most ridiculous. I didn’t listen to the recording, but judging from the questions, it’s impossible.

Choose True or False for the following statements:

a) Fay has a hundred glass horses.

b) Ron thinks elephants bring good luck.

c) Ron got tired after the dragon dancing rehearsals.

Keep in mind, this unit has nothing to do with Chinese culture or festivals from around the world. Barranquilla doesn’t have a Chinatown, and dragon dancing is not something people do here. Imagine if you were learning a language, and you listen to something of which you only understand 20% of the words. Would this topic make any sense? No! Poor students. On my test, there was no true or false, no multiple choice. They had to write and they couldn’t guess. It took the class 2 hours, but I gave them cookies afterwards. And they did well! I am really happy that I raised the stakes for them. They say that the class flies by...I am by no means a very good teacher: the class “flies by” because I have this impulse to entertain them, and so I act a little kooky. Still, I think that they’re learning something.

On another note, the bus ride to work has been depressing recently. The posture of the street people, the look in the addicts’ eyes, it’s so sad. I see so many spines, covered in dull, greyish skin, exposed as the body bends over a bag of trash. The other day, on a corner where the saddest prostitutes usually sit, I saw a teenage girl. She wasn’t sitting, maybe she was just there coincidentally, maybe the other women aren’t even prostitutes. But a man on the bus looked at her and said something to another man sitting ahead of him, punctuated by a salacious laugh. A tiny old woman with dried-apple skin got on, and no one but me got up to offer her a seat. I think that life is really hard here, so hard that small hardships go unnoticed sometimes. The impact of this on me, nothing more than a witness, is cumulative, and these lives I see from a bus are only now reaching me. I have no idea what can be done, though.

Am I turning into a bitter old ex-pat?

Still riding Motocarros

Blogging on long-term life just isn’t the same. The bus rides, the encounters, the animal in the street, the music and the heat just don’t llaman mi atención anymore. This is not to say that I am used to living here, or that I don’t experience things every day that shock or delight me. It’s just that shock, delight (along with bewilderment, frustration and occasionally joy) are just the emotions that I find myself grappling with on a regular basis. I usually can’t even remember the sources of my numerous emotional highs and lows. Thank goodness I’ve figured out how to do yoga at home. Without this, my heart might have hardened a little bit here with the many sudden attacks of anger that I go through when something doesn’t go my way.

This weekend is election weekend in Colombia. People are voting for their governors, their mayors, and all of the comities and assemblies that get behind them. Although the streets of Barranquilla don’t resemble the crime-nest that some stories of Colombia might conjure up in your mind, politics are still a sort of dicy game. For example, Soledad has way more voters than residents. Dead people vote in Soledad! I think some ridiculous percentage of the senators of the past couple of decades are serving time. And, people are still killed, kidnapped, and threatened during their run for office. The numbers of homicides, kidnappings, and attempts that I read for this year on the Caribbean coast alone alarmed me.

It still floods everytime it sprinkles

Perhaps for this reason, this weekend is a dry weekend. “Ley Seca” went into affect around the country at 6 pm this afternoon (and the grocery store was swamped with people purchasing their emergency alcohol rations). Last night, my roommates and I went out for a drink to get ready for the crackdown, and I had a frustrating experience where, after 10 months of living here, I ordered a vodka tonic and could not be understood. The words for vodka tonic in Spanish are “vodka” and “tonica”, so I really don’t know how I kept on ending up with Old Parr mixed in ginger ale and who knows what. It took three tries! And the worst thing is that the waiters here have to pay for their mistakes, so once I realized that I decided to forfit my free “happy hour drink” to pay for the misunderstanding. But I swear, people look at me and decide they won’t understand before I even open my mouth. Vodka. Tonica. Vodka con tonica. Vodka y tonica. Dos ingredientes. I don’t have a great accent, but how does that sound like “Old Parr”? It’s embarrassing for me sometimes!

Now I’m waiting for my friend who is a boy. He’s only about 2 hours later than he said he would be (which is actually very unusual for him). I hope that my readers can sense my “This is totally normal and I wouldn’t expect anything else” air...I am not writing these frustrations out of weariness. I still like living here, and learning how to deal with vexation is great. I’m writing this for you because it’s funny! Next time I’ll write something nice...but I guess I’ll have to admit to you that I might be acquiring some of that irritating ex-pat sardonicism. If that is the case, it’s a very good thing that I’m leaving in 2 months.

Cumbia in Palenque