time spent with people.

Last night I finally met up again with my Chilean pal Karen (she's been sick). I met her at her workplace, but then she had to recover her house keys from a friend and we ended up back at her apartment, where there were her housemates and boyfriends/girlfriends, all university students, including Jaclyn, an exchange student from Michigan.

It was awesome. Chilean university students tend to be 4-8 years older than American college students, so they were mostly closer to my age; and they were far easier to understand than the teachers at school (I think they were speaking more clearly for Jaclyn's benefit). There was a lot of good talk about Chile and cultural differences and the manifold problems here--one girl, Cristina, is studying to be a math teacher, and the entire group has a pretty keen sense and interest in social justice.

(Interesting side note: Claudio was saying that the 90s were all about students' rights, and his generation came out of that, but the current generation has grown up immersed in its rights, but without a clear sense of its responsibilities. That certainly fits the WorldTeachers' experience of our students, but we don't have the history and cultural context to make that generalization.)

Karen and I did get some solo time to chat while retrieving french fries from the snack shop up the street, which were fantastic and exactly what the doctor ordered. I left the group at 11:30pm when they headed out to the nightclub.

Today I wound up having lunch with Joan, the math teacher who's also in charge of 1-G, whose Monday section is far and away my worst class. He's pretty cool, and also listens much better than the group of women teachers who adopted me. (They've gotten better, but still don't change their speech much to make communication easier.)

All of this makes me think I should drink cheap rum and Coke with my own age group a bit more often.