every time a door closes, you better notice before you try to walk into a closed door.

There's a lot going on behind my eyes these days. Sadness, loss, integration. I still can't read the news, really. One thing at a time, or, at least, as few things at a time as possible.

Through a complex sequence of events outside my control, I find myself between jobs again. It's not the worst thing: I have much more energy for doing errands or projects when I'm not spending my days being diplomatic to people who are making bad decisions. I'm not worried about finding another job, this time with an earlier-stage company where I can have an impact on the culture as it's ramping up. I've been able to pick up some tasks around the place, since it's Anna's turn to be working a lot.

Something I never really appreciated about machine tools is that they can just be their own project. I tried some test cuts on the lathe, and of course it was uselessly rough, but that was because the lathe bounced a little on its rubber feet, and the trailer bounced on its suspension and tires, and machine tools have to be as rigid as possible. So I go to take off the rubber feet—which I had put on when I unpacked the thing, and that sucked—and there's this whole challenge of lifting something on the bench, and it's 100 pounds, but focused in a small area, and it comes with a sheet metal tray to catch chips (the metal bits removed by machining) and cutting fluid and such. The tray isn't rigid enough to lever the machine up with. What you can lever it with are the feet of the cast-iron frame, but you have to lever the lathe up just to get to the Allen-key mounting screws holding the rubber feet on, then get the tray out of the way, the lathe on blocks and moved down the bench, then drilling mount holes through the bench, then...

I am famously terrible at this particular task of drilling holes using only measured distances. Anna is amazing at it, but even she couldn't make progress on this. I'm resorting to a brute-force tool called "transfer screws," which are literally sharp points that you screw into all the holes you want to transfer from a source workpiece to a matching workpiece. It's me saying "yes, I understand that I have the exact measurements for the mount holes, but I'm giving up and I'm going to stab my way to success."

As a DIY project, this has already held my interest more than any other DIY project ever has, and I haven't actually been able to make any parts yet. Once it's mounted to the bench, and the shed is installed, and the trailer is jacked up off the suspension, then I'll be aligning the lathe properly, and then...I can make more tools. For the lathe. You see? It's very satisfying. I could use a machinist's hammer. And some clamps. Maybe some keychains or beads or something. I dunno. I don't normally learn stuff to accomplish something; my primary hobby is learning stuff.

you should have been more specific.

If the three humans of the household had grown up now, we would all be labeled what is now called "twice exceptional" ("EE" or "2E" for short). I know that I've always been super smart, and also I get over-stimulated or overwhelmed and I shut down and retreat inward. And I have ADHD, and it turns out the old joke isn't actually a joke.

"Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

"ADHD kid."

"ADHD kid wh—"

"LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!!!"

Anyway. I have to keep learning things, not from any kind of principle, but because it's who and what I am, and I could no more stop learning than you could stop breathing. I once sought out boring podcasts I could fall asleep to: histories of Byzantium and philosophy, two topics I find hyper-detailed and dull. They stopped putting me to sleep after one or two dozen episodes, because my brain adapted and started the process of enthusiastic learning. It's who I am. I have to roll with it, or suffer needlessly.

Luckily, the world has more stuff than I could learn in a thousand lifetimes! I've long thought it would be fun to know (at least a little bit) how to fly a plane, but I do not want to actually fly a plane. It's grotesquely expensive, the radio protocols are not friendly to my brain which often blips on audio, and the noise, vibration, and sickening motion of small planes hit me pretty hard. The most intensive flight simulation rigs can have VR, an eye tracker, and several monitors, enough to qualify for real-world training, and still be a fraction of an actual plane. So I bought the best-cheapest flying hardware (a Logitech joystick) and X-Plane, the biggest simulator for Macs, famous both for being cross-platform, and for having a physics engine enabling users to create the Space Shuttle, or the enormous wings of an airplane on Mars. Maybe someday I'll upgrade to more complex hardware, but for now I'm enjoying a light involvement, at the Indiana Jones level.

an odd bit of wisdom.

Growing up as I did in the pre-Internet age, I learned to program in grade school, but then found a complete lack of documentation for every system I tried after that. I didn't like it enough to type, then hand-write, then re-type hundreds of lines of code every time, so after I'd exhausted every futile permutation of "SAVE FILE" on every kind of computer I had access to, I stopped.

In high school, I discovered I fit in, or as close as I'd ever come to that point, with the theater folks. A strange and alien species at the time.

A couple of the older students there described getting some stage experience by showing up to work on load-ins/load-outs for summer concerts at the local amusement park. To this day, I have no idea what exactly they had done, because I called ahead and people were like "lol no." I did somehow make my way to the professional theater in town, and I thought I was volunteering, but they paid me, which was a nice surprise. So I met professionals for the first time.

The first shock was destroying an entire set and throwing it away. Not the kind of abstract minimalist sets you build when you're combining artistry and thrift, either, made of eminently reusable platforms and walls. This was the interior of some Victorian or Gilded Age mansion, with moldings carved from styrofoam, and the sort of paint jobs that make you realize that scenery painters are just working with this whole higher skillset that, rightly or wrongly, gets almost no use in real buildings.

This was also the first time I'd ever even heard of the aptly-named "sawzall," let alone seen them deployed with such joy and abandon. Cutting down piles of cheap softwood filled with nails and screws is really where they shine, especially if someone else is buying the blades. "Sometimes Mike brings in his chainsaw," said Peter the Technical Director.

The TD runs the tech side of the theater: scene shop, lights, sound. In smaller theaters, they often take on design work, as well. They usually have a vast amount of experience in all things theater-tech, and they're in charge, so, as happened one day, they're who you go to when something goes wrong and you Need An Adult™. A journeyman carpenter--not growing up around the trades, this was also the first time I learned that "journeyman" was still a real thing--screwed up.

Peter didn't miss a beat. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Just cut a new miter block on the radial arm saw, and toe-screw it in."

Someone chimed in, "Wait--didn't we screw this up on the last show, too?".

"Sure," said Peter. "We keep making the same mistakes, but we get better and better at fixing them."

connections.

Here is the sort of thing that happens if you learn stuff for fun:

I finally started in on Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London excellent series of paranormal/urban fantasy police procedural novels. The protagonist is an African-British police constable, who among other things was training to be an architect, dropping out when he discovered he couldn't draw, but with a practiced eye, he guides the reader through the centuries of British buildings. The fourth book, Broken Homes, focuses on a failed modernist high-rise building built when architects thought they could build a better society by separating living space from retail or work space, raising people up, literally, by building upward.

(The astute reader will notice this is the exact opposite of the "mixed-use" standard we're currently working with, where homes and shops and businesses are all together; this is not an accident, as all of these projects failed in pretty much the same ways. Nobody bought into these ideas when they were introduced in the 1920s and 1930s; it was only World War II's destruction of Europe's housing that provided an opening.)

At the same time, I was reading J. G. Ballard's novel High-Rise, which takes place in a modernist skyscraper, and whose first paragraph hints at a dystopian narrative:

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension.

While that was all fresh in my mind, I suddenly had a yen to listen indiscriminately to episodes of the fabulous 99% Invisible podcast, which I'd previously dropped because a lack of commute also means a lack of podcast-listening time. And I just happened to hit a two-part episode about--wait for it--an enormous modernist tower project in the Netherlands, called the Bijlmermeer. You can guess what happened to it, although it has its own Dutch spin on things, like the role of Suriname, the project's pragmatic and seemingly effective redevelopment, and then there's the thing where a 747 crashed into it.

I actually found a podcast devoted to hunting down this kind of inter-relatedness, though mostly from the Renaissance and earlier: The Endless Knot, brought to us by a pair of delightfully nerdy history/language professors.

Buddhism: lost in translation

I've been listening, often repeatedly, to some talks by the teacher/scholar Stephen Batchelor, and I've decided to eventually learn Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts. It's kind of a spoken form of Sanskrit, and in fact the word Pali just means "text," so someone in the early days saw the words "Pali language" and didn't get that it's just "the language of the texts".

Pretty much all of Batchelor's talks are awesome, but I recommend "The Life and Death of Siddartha Gotama" and the ones on "secular Buddhism" to get a sense of what struck me. Essentially, he's looking at the earliest Buddhist texts with the rule of thumb that anything in the canon that could have been said by anyone in 5th-century B.C. India probably isn't a part of what made the Buddha's teaching special even at the time, and has enabled it to continue to the present day.

Why bother with Pali when I'm not interested in learning Japanese or Chinese--Japanese especially being the liturgical language of Soto Zen? (I'll learn some eventually.)

For one thing, I think Pali will be easier. It's Indo-European and written with an accented Roman alphabet. I should say "can be written": Pali, as a spoken language, doesn't have a native alphabet, and everyone has always written it using their own native alphabet, like Brahmi, Sinhalese, Thai, and now Roman. Unlike Chinese and (literary) Japanese, though, it does have an alphabet, which is already a big step in comprehensibility.

The other thing, and the root reason for learning it at all, is that Chinese and Japanese are often additional layers of translation, and learning Pali will let me look behind the curtain of translation a bit and judge for myself what a passage means. Here's an example:

In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the "Discourse on the Noble Quest," the Buddha gives a little backstory of his awakening experience. After his realization, he hangs out for a bit, then thinks

This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise. But this generation delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment. For a generation delighting in attachment, excited by attachment, enjoying attachment, this conditionality & dependent co-arising are hard to see.

From Stephen Batchelor I learn that instead of "delights in attachment," he actually says "people love their place," where "place" is "alaya," as in "Himalaya": "place of the snows". Thanissaro's translation isn't wrong, but it takes the Buddha's metaphor and substitutes the more direct Buddhist terminology that everyone has standardized on in English (which I deeply dislike, and being able to write about that more clearly is another reason to learn Pali). There's a lot of flavor lost there, like how the buddha views home and place, and why they thought of "going forth from home into homelessness" as being such an unusual and good thing. That context matters, if, as Batchelor suggests, we want to identify what parts of the Buddhist canon are timeless and speak to our situation now, and what is just a sort of hangover from ancient India.

The older the English translation, the more rewarding to look closely at the original. The final words of the Buddha, according to Rhys-Davids (late 1800s):

"Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!"

In researching this I found it quoted a fair bit by Christians explaining why every other religion's idea of "salvation" is wrong (in this case, that salvation can be achieved by works). Except that line is actually based on Philippians 2:12 (Revised Standard Version, my emphasis):

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling...

And the word "salvation" doesn't appear in the Pali. Vajira and Story's version:

"Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!"

The Christian apologists quoting the Rhys-Davids translation don't look too hard to see that they're using a translation benighted in 19th-century colonialist projection. (Although they might not notice: most conservative Christians themselves seem quite comfortable benighted in 19th-century colonialist projection.) That's sort of an egregious example, but we're stuck with many longstanding bad translations made by people who didn't understand the material: any time you see the words "Void," "suffering," and "enlightenment," you're looking at a bad translation that barely scratches the surface. (Those are shunyata, dukkha, and either nirvana or bodhi.) The very name "Buddhism" comes from that old Western worldview: Buddhism isn't an "-ism" in the sense of a system of beliefs, but that's all those scholars could imagine. We have to be somewhat cautious about taking the translators' word for it.

It seems well worth the effort to read past that.

on teaching math

From Ben Blum-Smith commenting on Dan Meyer's blog (my emphasis):

The real test of whether a math problem is "relevant" is not "do you use this in 'real life'," whatever that means, but "do you want to solve it?" It's not that you want to solve it because it's relevant; wanting to solve it is what it means to be relevant. The solution to the problem of relevance cannot be aimed at any location in the process of education other than what the students want. We can access various natural processes in causing students to want to solve problems: they are naturally curious, hungry for understanding, they want to resolve cognitive dissonance when it comes up, they want to feel accomplished and mentally powerful, they're drawn in by story, attracted to the perception of a grand scheme, to knowledge surrounding things they're passionate about, etc. Curious is the big one. All these forces are amplified by a sense of comfort and orientedness in the face of a problem, and inhibited by any sense of helplessness or disorientation.

The whole (very long, multi-page) comment is worth reading. I don't quite grasp the full scope of the word pseudocontext, but it represents the pointlessly-contrived nature of textbook math problems, compared to things like this.

it works both ways

I had a nice couple of classes today, where I tried teaching articles ("a" and "an") in a couple different ways: 1-B had already learned the jobs vocabulary ("lawyer," "carpenter," etc.) and I added the articles onto that, and then 1-C hadn't learned jobs yet, so I taught them articles on top of the new words. I learned two things:

1. Learning articles, as such, doesn't take very long. I break the "no explaining things" rule because with 3 sentences of Spanish, they get it, and then it just takes practice.
2. It's really challenging for them to learn both the articles and the new words. 1-C is really focused and good at school, and they had to work pretty hard to learn both at once in 45 minutes. 1-B is kind of disorderly and learns more slowly, but they had articles down in 30 minutes.

Hopefully I can design an effective one-hour lesson with that.

The other interesting thing was that I almost cracked my most obnoxious Javiera in the head.

(UPDATE: I just remembered 2 of the 3 Javieras in 1-G. 1-B's Javiera doesn't come close.)

Now, I'm a little twitchy sometimes about my personal safety. I had really violent childhood relationships with my brothers, and then I went to a violent junior high school, where my quality of life suffered from the delusion--common in my family's demographic--that fighting is never the solution to conflict. It's true that there's almost always a way not to fight, but that's a complex and mature set of skills, and if you take fighting off the table entirely for all time, what you get is being punched in the nose. Aikido has brought on a lot of changes, but I still have pretty deep-seated reactions.

I was passing out candy to 1-B for having an awesome class and for the two teams tying the game we played at the end, and Javiera made a full-body lunge for the bag. Even though I knew she was going for the candy, this set off my safety alarms, and I:

1. Dropped my arms, pulled the bag away, and guarded my body.
2. Threw an elbow towards her oncoming head, in a combination block and strike.
3. Realized what was happening and stopped my elbow a couple inches from her head.

Obviously a good thing for everyone that I didn't clock her. What's really striking for me is that the same training that gave me the "elbow to the head" response also gave me the awareness to notice it wasn't appropriate and stop it.

I guess that makes sense

Steve, the other volunteer in my house, is a much more diligent student of Spanish than I am--or is trying to be--and has started watching TV, such as The Simpsons (dubbed) or subtitled things like movies, with a notebook to write down things he doesn't understand or has just learned from the subtitles. I haven't been watching anything with Spanish audio unless I'm on a bus or whatever, because it's been too much work to be any fun.

I was pretty startled to discover how much more of the Simpsons dialogue I could understand than five months ago. I'd noticed the same was true of the English Department meeting (which I last attended in April).

Anna says it's cute that I'm surprised.

talking to Chilean English teachers

On August 25th, I went to speak to the local group of Chilean English teachers. Stephanie, from the 4-month WorldTeach group, spoke first, but she's only been teaching a week and she's kind of quiet, while I've been teaching for a few months and I am...not quiet. This is, more or less, what I said, speaking unprepared, after Marcela introduced herself and me. It's long and rambley, because I made it up as I went along. I'm pretty sure I sounded more eloquent than this at the time.

Hi! My name is Chris Doherty, and I teach at the Instituto Superior de Comercio. I teach six cursos of primero medio, and we split the cursos in half, so I have twelve classes. I'm from the same program as Stephanie, WorldTeach: they have two programs that coordinate with the Ministry of Education's English Opens Doors, a 4-month program and an 8-month program. I'm on the 8-month program, so I arrived in Chile on March 17th, and in Valparaiso April 7th, so I've been teaching here for...four months.

I teach six cursos [classes] of primero medio [first-years]. We split each curso, so I have twelve classes. They're all at a very, very basic level: some kids know more stuff than they get to use with me, but often they're not able to make sentences, or if they can, they're not willing to. A lot of them believe they can't, because the English they've had is impossible. For example, Page 1 of the Ministry's English textbook is completely covered in long paragraphs of text with big words and complicated sentences; I have a couple of books from the United States, where Page 1 says "Hi, my name is ______. What's your name?" and nothing else. My students may or may not want to learn English, but many of them think they can't, because they see these pages filled with complicated text. It's like if you showed me a page filled with Russian--I'd give up, too. That may be the biggest problem: the students have little to no English, but the classes don't teach to their level.

So a lot of what I do is just to have a relationship with them. In reality, the amount of English I can teach them is very small. I see each student for an hour a week or less--classes are canceled for one thing or another. I can't bring them up to a conversational level in the time I have. But I can show them that English is possible for them, that if we start with basic things, like introducing themselves, they can learn. I treat them as individuals, and even with the students who cause problems, I take the time to help them pronounce and understand things. So even with the problem students, I have a good relationship. To see them for who they are, and to show that we think they can learn, might be the most important thing we can do as teachers--the most important thing any adult can do for a child.

I have only basic training as a teacher: in the United States, I'm a software engineer, so this is a little different. The way I teach is by having them use English. I don't explain anything, I just teach them the words and the meaning and then they practice using them. Explaining things doesn't work: with the educational culture here, if a teacher is talking, they don't associate that with something that might be important to them. In the United States, there's a real sense of hierarchy, with the teachers and then the students. Here, the students are much more on a level with the teachers, in a way that I think interferes with learning. I don't mean to say "No, Chile is bad," because it's a complicated question, and it deserves a complicated answer. The educational culture here doesn't come out of nowhere, it's very tied in with Chilean culture and history, how Chilean families are structured, and the effects of the dictatorship. You all face that every day, and you know more about it than I do. But I think it doesn't work very well for helping kids learn.

How do you deal with discipline in the classroom?

I have three boxes in the corner of the whiteboard, with one, two, and three frowning faces on it. The third box says "Inspector." This mostly works because it provides a predictable ladder of consequences: their name is up on the board, so they can't forget. It helps them to remember what I expect of their behavior. It mostly works...some kids only behave when they're a step away from the Inspector's office, so I've learned to put them there earlier in class. Also, I'm very lucky in that my school, the students want to be there. They may not want to work, but they want to be there, so if they behave really poorly, they might get kicked out.

calling a time-out

I stopped class with 1-G today. The speaking exercise was getting sort of disordered, which is normal for them, but a couple other things happened.

A major part of my classroom management is a corner of the board that has three boxes, with one, two, and three frownie-faces in them. That last one also says "Inspector," the last step on Ye Olde Ladder of Consequences. The inspectoria is the school's disciplinary arm, and because this is a select school, the inspectores have a certain amount of power that they don't necessarily have elsewhere--too much disciplinary trouble and they'll be kicked out of a school they tried reasonably hard to get into. Kids usually take the board reasonably seriously, especially if they're one step away from getting booted instead of two.

As happens occasionally, one girl went and erased her name off the board. It's one of those signs of the lack of hierarchy and authority in schools. I'm not sure what they're hoping will happen, but I just kick them up to the next box.

Then I noticed that another girl, instead of holding one index card, was holding a stack: she'd taken the cards for the next exercise off my table. She also didn't give them back immediately, like a really obnoxious child (which, for this particular moment, she was).

Clearly we all needed to have a chat. I had everyone sit down, and I thought for a minute, and then sat on my table. This is unusual, and gets everyone's attention.

"Okay. I don't know exactly how it is here in Chile, but in North America, taking someone's stuff is disrespectful. Here, too?"

Nods and murmurs.

"Good. Now, do you guys know why I have that box in the corner of the board? Why I don't just send you to the Inspector immediately?"

"To write down who's bad?"
"Hmm. Not exactly."

Bruno speaks. Bruno, who's usually a step away from the Inspector, every class. Last week he came up to me after class, looked me in the eyes, and shook my hand, and he's done it since, every time I see him in the hall.

"To give us an opportunity."

Awesome.

"That's right. To give you a chance. Now, all these activities we do are ways for you guys to practice and use English. The way English is taught here--"

"It's really bad."

"Right. You don't learn a lot of English in your classes here?" Nods and murmurs. "That's why I'm here. To help you guys practice so you can learn. A lot of you say 'I can't, I can't,' but I know you can, because I gave you a test and I talked to each one of you, and I'm really proud of all of you and everything you worked hard to learn. Think you can keep going with class?"

Nods and murmurs.

And off we went.

I like my kids.

Also, I appear to have the patience of a saint.

heck if I know

We humans are pattern-finding machines. This has obvious survival advantages, but we're so good at it that we find patterns even where they don't exist, like the Bible Code, conspiracy theories, and intelligent design. At Tassajara, in the winter a creek runs almost outside the zendo, and apparently during the practice period, as you're sitting 9 times a day, you start to hear voices in the creek. That sort of thing.

This leads us to strange competencies. My favorite story: one day at my first house in Redwood City, I was chatting with the mail carrier. Suddenly the dog next door barked.

"Ooh. Rottweiler."

The dog barked again.
"Oooh. Big one."

I can't recognize a 100-pound dog from its bark, but I have similarly arcane fine-grained judgement in other things, like software, aikido, and people's faces.

Naturally, that kind of judgement exists for teaching of all kinds: it's legendary in Zen teaching, to the point of myth, but classroom teachers develop it, too. Good classroom teachers seem able to see where the students are learning and where they need help, how to best handle student disruptions, what they can say or do to move the enterprise in the right direction.

On the eve of giving my kids an oral test, I don't feel like I've got much of that sense. I see each group once a week for an hour, and after two months, I'm basically hoping they can remember a list of body parts, a few moods like "happy" and "sad," and introductions. How well do they know it? How could I respond to them in more helpful ways?

I have no idea. I kind of have to settle for letting them know that I care about them, and that I think they can learn and I want them to do so.

Then again, maybe that's not "settling."

up, down, center

My new schedule adds 8 AM Mondays to 8 AM Wednesdays, so I don't really have time to do zazen in the morning and still have enough sleep to maintain my sanity. This is unfortunate, since I have curso G on those days, and I could use the extra centering practice before I meet with them.

I lost Monday to Students' Day. Yesterday was just B and C; B is okay, and C is like a teacher's dream, focused and interested and calm and mature.

This morning, it was cold and dark and early, and I wanted to be anywhere with Anna rather than going into school. But I had the other half of C, and I stepped up, knowing they would. Then a free period, and then curso G.

Curso G is...challenging. It's not just me. All the teachers acknowledge it whenever they come up. I don't get it: these are all high school freshmen, and since they haven't gotten any grades or chosen a specialty, they're assigned into cursos randomly. Somehow, the chemistry can turn out really well, or not.

After G, I was right back into wanting to be anywhere else. But...hey, that's kinda weird. Why would I feel differently? It's not like I had a brain injury from one class to the other; the mood change was my response to the experience. It's all in my mind, a reaction to the world not being the way I want it. So what do I think should be different, that prevents me from allowing the current situation to unfold however it will?

I didn't get a clear answer, but it's a helpful way to look at the situation. And my afternoon class was C, which left me feeling better.

And then I had English Club! Which is apparently English Club, and not (yet) "Let's prepare for the English 'debates' the Ministry sponsors". I had no idea what to do with them, and they have no idea what they want: they just want to learn more English than they can learn in their regular classes. So there were 8 of us, with no sense of direction, but it was entirely up to me to provide some. Plus, I have no idea how to teach English to motivated, focused students: they can handle all kinds of grammar and structure stuff that I don't know anything about. There are 3 kids who can do free-form conversations, and then the others seem to have understanding above the "Low Basic" level that's about the average. We went a few rounds of me asking them questions like "Where are you from?" and "What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?" which went pretty well, and on request, I explained the future tense, which turns out to be the easiest thing in English. (Take the "basic form" of the verb, which we don't bother learning as native speakers, and put "will" in front. That's it.)

I was glad for the day to be over, but at least my mind was interesting to watch.

I think I'm a teacher now

I had my first good teaching day! Here's what happened.

Yesterday, I ended up with 45-minute classes instead of 90 minutes. My co-teacher and I met and talked about needs and concerns, and decided that next week we could try 60-minute classes (which I'm far more comfortable with), and we'd just consider Monday a awkward, strange mistake in the past. Yesterday's classes were okay.

I busted out the Curso Competition chart: if a class section behaves well, they get star for the week. At the end of the semester, the section with the most stars gets a "surprise". (To be determined: I'm thinking a party with cake, Heather is thinking cookies.) The class gets one warning, where I write "CLASS" on the board if they're in peril of losing the week's star. Monday's G section were bad this week, but I also forgot to tell them about the chart, so I'll offer that if they can do 4 straight good weeks, I'll give them the extra star so they can catch up.

This chart turns out to be the secret sauce. Chilean kids are competitive by default; even when you don't set something up as a competition, they really want to be first. I've been running a matching exercise this week and I've almost gotten knocked over a few times by pairs of kids running at me to show they're done. The Curso Competition combines their natural worldview with positive reinforcement, so the class polices itself: if you can get their peers to tell them to shut the hell up, instead of you, that's way better.

Anyway. After a week of teaching, I have a better sense of how to present material, how to move around the classroom and keep them working, and how to respond to the flow of the class. I'm also remembering my Performance Mode of years past (now new and improved by actually being at ease in the world), and the kids buy into it. Seriously, I've spent 5 hours doing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" and the Hokey-Pokey this week. Some of them take some time, but I keep looking at them periodically and they warm up to it, and then usually start enjoying themselves. I think they respond really well to my smiling lack of shame and the fact I care about them.

And then they learn stuff! I teach stuff and they learn it! And if they're not learning it, I slow down and they learn less stuff, but they still learn it. It's amazing.

There was one girl who couldn't remember "ears". I modeled the difference between just sitting there saying "ears," and actually grabbing your ears when you say "ears," so she started grabbing her ears just like I was (it gets the whole physicality kinetic memory mumble mumble engaged). Then, when they were leaving, I was doing a "ticket-to-leave," blocking the door until they identified a body part or its name from the card I drew. I happened to pull the picture of ears for her, and she looked frustrated for a moment, grabbed her ear and then said, "Ah! Ears!" and smiled before leaving at top speed. It was awesome.

Maybe I'm over a hump, maybe not. I still have to plan for 60-minute classes next week. But I think I know what successful teaching feels like now! Sweet.

teaching: day 3

I had two classes yesterday, cursos B and C, who are the most mellow, focused ones, and then I had the other half of C today. (Well, "half". Marcela divided the class into a group of 18 and a group of 26, though 26 is really too big for my classroom.)

It did suck less. I explained the rules first of all, using just a bit of Spanish to explain to them that I was about to lay out the rules, and they're important for making this class be different from their other classes, and maintaining the classroom as a place where we can learn. I really, really should have done that with G and H, the rowdy classes, but I was too much on edge. I'll start over with them next week.

(Actually, I'll be starting with an apology, both to the class and to one kid in particular. I live with the sub-director of the school, formerly the head of the inspectores who maintain discipline, and he asked if the kids behaved well. I said no, and unfortunately I named the one kid who got his name written on the board. Oscar, trying to help me and thinking that my class is like the other classes, hauled him in and scolded him: the consequence that should only have happened after repeated incidents. So I have a ruptured relationship with that kid, and a not-great relationship with the rest of the class. At least I didn't name the kids whose cell phones I took. I have some apologies to make, in Spanish, and then we'll talk about the rules, and then it'll just have to be how it'll be.)

It sucked less, but it still sucks. I'm still experiencing massive anxiety outside the classroom. I guess "anxiety" is the word. I'd label it more "ancient, paralyzing fear", probably left over from junior high school, which was pretty traumatic. It's the giant mound of emotional stuff that I've been able to feel around more and more over the past 3 years, but never been able to penetrate or unravel it. It's all fear and tension and...something. Old, old habits, things I've gotten so used to thinking of as a part of myself that I don't consciously recognize them, or think they can change or disappear. (Which they can. Don't ever imagine anything, inside or outside your head, is permanent.)

Of course, I'm a different person now, far more integrated and capable in every way. When the moment of crashing reality comes and students walk in the door, I seem to do okay. I spent so many years performing that I'm not really self-conscious about looking stupid; it's easy for me, and I look stupid and the kids laugh and get embarrassed, and I'm not embarrassed, so they eventually (mostly) go along with "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" or the Hokey Pokey, or making faces to express moods.

It's the in-between times that kill me. Waking up at 4 AM, wondering what to do for the next lesson to meaningfully follow up on this mediocre one, imagining that I'm doing this another 7 months. It's hard to stay in emotional contact with the situation when there are so many options for avoiding it: TV, Internet, 950 remaining pages of Don Quixote.

I'm extremely grateful my school's annual anniversary celebration has cut my first week in half. I don't know if that was intentional on Marcela's part or not; I know she is often looking out for my interests without telling me. (And occasionally she isn't, and she doesn't tell me that, either. It is a never-ending parade of surprises here.)

It's hard to remain convinced that the brute-force exposure route was the right one, but it's what I'm doing, so here we go.

end, week 2

For my week "assisting" in the classroom, I created a lesson: different responses to "How are you?", since the kids sort of seize up around anything other than "okay/so-so/bad". I didn't know what to do to work with 45 kids, but I made up a sort of relay game to play after they learned the words, where I'd cover a word on the board and a pair in each team would have to do the dialogue. They liked it, overall: I think they're game for being engaged, and having someone expect them to try.

After the first class, I realized I'd made the classic mistake of assuming they understood the words, without checking their understanding. Won't do that again, although I'm pretty sure the first class to experience a given lesson will have a distinctly less effective experience than the eighth. As I learn how to teach, the starting baseline will go up, and I think it'll all work out.

By the fourth and final class, I disliked this lesson intensely. I realized how much I slacked on it: I didn't want to spend time and materials on making up cards or anything, for what I considered a throwaway, an obligatory sort of thing. I wanted to limit my effort when it wasn't going to be my classroom, a smaller group where I could more directly manage the environment. I probably could have done a full-on charades game, that would have gotten more kids engaged, and they would have learned better. I could have been more effective, and here's how. Go big or go home.

These are the kinds of choices I get to make as a teacher. I control the vertical, I control the horizontal: what they learn, and how many of them learn it, and how well, all depend on how I construct the classroom environment. I didn't have to do more with this lesson, but the consequence was in the students' experience--which alters my experience, because of what I want for the students and what kind of teacher I want to be. It sounds paradoxical that "student-centered learning" depends so entirely on the teacher.

Blaming the students is such a massive refusal of responsibility. It's us. We're it.