drama!

Our epic Family Court filing, years in the making, finally happened! Effects have been immediate and dramatic, both in the boy's experience at the other house--better, though the bar is low--and in the quantity and toxicity of emails to Anna. We've had one close call, which made my pre-filing purchase of pepper spray look wise, but since no one actually used the pepper spray (or dialed 911, though both were minutes away), we'll chalk that up as a win.

J's third parent has dragged him into the middle of the thing, showing him the court filing (WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT) and ranting about Mama's sneaky lies and dishonest tricks employed in bringing things to this sorry pass.

And I've learned things about myself!

I have always encouraged your husband Chris to be a partner in J's Parenting,

Wait...that's not true at all...

and I am hurt and a bit frightened by Chris, "grunting" at me and semi lunging across the table at me at J's IEP Meeting at School today, 4/20/16..

I did whutnow? Since when do I have the energy to lunge across a table?

This was unacceptable aggression in an IEP meeting or any other meeting involving J's Education or parenting. This issue really MUST be addressed, or I will feel uncomfortable having Chris attend our IEP, Parenting Planning Meetings or any other meeting or mediation where Chris and I have to sit down face to  face.

Those don't happen too often, but you're welcome to bring bodyguards if the fact that you're bigger than me and surrounded by credible witnesses isn't reassuring enough.

Your husband Chris makes no secret of his years of martial arts training; so I DEMAND THAT HE ACKNOWLEDGE his understanding of the basic rules of conduct in regards to what might be interpreted as physically aggressive behavior.  His has a particularly strict duty in this regard.

Yeaaaaah so it wasn't me they were about to call 911 on...

Also he hasn't bothered to learn what it is I have a black belt in. Aikido isn't that thing where you suddenly go all Bruce Lee on somebody. Chuck Norris? Jet Li? Tony Jaa? Not aikido.

Good thing he wrote in ALL CAPS, though. The Internet assures me that imbues your words with legal force.

At this point I trust you both acknowledge that his recent aggressive behavior was inappropriate.  He is, after all, a guest at these conferences. No loud aggressive growling and aggressive lunging across tables allowed!

Isn't it great that we can all laugh about it? Especially with the passive-aggressive swipe that I'm just "a guest." 

I don't want to suggest anger management because I am loathe to interfere in your domestic relationship with Chris, but You can forward this email along to Chris if you'd like.

Thank god, I just got done being sent to anger-management classes by the last cowardly douchenozzle who couldn't handle it when I stood up to his violence.

There was a follow-up, of course.

As your Petition to Modify Custody is pending, I have to take a formal legal approach to this issue.  Chris has no legal right to confidential meetings involving J, that includes Mediation, IEP, parent-teacher conferences or any other school meeting not open to the public.  I am not comfortable with Chris attending any such meeting.

I hate be the bearer of bad news, but "formal legal approach" does not mean "declaring your unsupported interpretation of the law in email as though it were fact." You know how on Law & Order the attorneys are always communicating using carefully-typeset pieces of paper stapled to blue backing? You might start by Googling that. Also search for terms like "why won't the police just do whatever I tell them" and "why can't you practice law without going to law school."

(I get to come to any meeting Anna invites me to or delegates to me, subject to rules not listed in mean-spirited emails by random guys with no legal training.)

And just in case Chris was planning on attending any such meetings, you should know that the police and the courts would not look favorably on his trying to force entry into any such meetings.

This sounds like a really bad TV show. S.W.A.T.: Parent-Teacher Meeting.

Unless your last name is "Obama," no one is standing guard outside school meetings. Because they're boring. I will simply walk in and sit down, and everyone except the author will be happy to see me.

Because I am not a "guest." I am a parent.

east coast

I was just in New England! We went to Connecticut for my high school reunion. Despite predictions, it didn't rain: New England is having what they call a drought, which is the adorable thing where it doesn't rain there for a few months. (When California is not in a drought, we call that situation "April through December.")

There's so much water in the air there, all going to waste. What a shame. We spent a lot of time being wistful for a place with such greenery that just happens, without a lot of effort. (Sure, if you slack off you might get the wrong greenery, but something's gonna grow.) I mostly don't need my sunglasses out there, which is something I'd forgotten or never noticed. Is it the latitude (41 vs. 38)? The humidity? I don't know.

We went back for my nth high school reunion, and front-loaded it with a couple of days with my parents, which was lovely. Anna's goal for the trip was to gather fascinating and tantalizing stories of Young Chris, and I suppose spend time with me in the process. She got at least a few good ones, including the time when one of my best friends decided to hang-drop off a 1.5-story roof just to prove he'd be okay: he remembered the ER, but his memory left out the part where I hauled him over to the infirmary, made up a story for what happened, and held his hand while they cut off his shoe to look at his ankle.

(I'll make no claims for having good judgment as a teenager, but I did have strong impulse control. When I fucked something up, I tend[ed] to plan it in advance.)

I identified four different kinds of people I see at reunions, which map almost exactly to our relationships while in school:

1. Actual friends. You're both genuinely happy to see each other.
2. Friendly acquaintances. You're happy to see each other and content with the limited but positive role you played in each other's younger lives.
3. People who were indifferent or hostile during school, who now feel able and compelled to greet you as though you have a shared history you can celebrate together.
4. People who honor the fact that you were indifferent or hostile to each other during school, and that our relationship probably didn't blossom into something more positive over a couple decades of not speaking to each other.

I have a lot of respect for #4, and quite a number of classmates did me the favor of not even acknowledging my attendance. (There were just over 100 of us, so we all knew everyone's name and face at one point.)

 #3 I find a little confusing, and what Anna calls the "assumption of intimacy" is not at all unique to reunions. I wonder if they just have an idea about how classmates should feel about each other, much like parents can have an idea about how a family should interact, and that idea fails to give way to the reality of the people and relationships actually involved.

It was good to see some of the old gang, see the campus in its majestic summer beauty, and see what few teachers haven't retired yet.

We went to a panel interview with the last three heads of the school, including the one who left shortly after I graduated. He's a dynamic, wickedly intelligent and learned man--when I met him as a 13-year old, something in our conversation left me at a loss for words, and immediately my mother correctly decided he was amazing. The moderator asked some question about events during his tenure, and he rambled quite a bit about the guy who had preceded him and the changes in New England private schools around that time. But in the rambling...

And then Northfield-Mount Hermon, which is, strangely enough, now in the Mount Hermon campus, having sold the beautiful Northfield campus to the C.S. Lewis Center for the Preservation of the Most Naive and Backward Interpretations of Christianity..."

It's good to see he's still got it, in his mid-80s.

you can hear the gears turning

It's common for adults to enjoy kids around age 8-11. Their consciousness expands to more and more include the world beyond themselves, and they start thinking in more sophisticated ways. They become more like adults, in other words. We're just biased, because it gets to be less work to relate to them. (This obviously ends with adolescence and picks up again sometime later.)

J is no exception, filtered through his unique brain wiring. The other day he learned what home-schooling actually means--he's heard the word many times, but the reality of it never quite penetrated. Anna is going to be watching a friend's daughter, and I was blessed to witness the discussion.

"So I'm going to have M during the day on Thursday, and I'm volunteering at school, so you might see her."
"During the school day? Doesn't she have to be in school?"
"She's home-schooled. Her mom is her teacher."
There's a pause while he processes this. If he could, he would be raising one eyebrow and giving Anna a hard look.
"But I still have to go to school?"

Yep, kiddo.

This probably won't get easier once he finds out his cousin is being home-schooled too. We've discussed it, and it's the fallback plan for any unresolvable school situation. Anna and I both had traumatic school experiences, and while we work hard not to project our memories too much onto the much safer realities of the modern public school, we're determined that he not have a traumatic school experience, whatever that takes.

His moods are much more fluid these days, and we can often redirect Angry J into Laughing J without much trouble. The other night we got him laughing and after a few minutes he said, "I wish I could stop laughing so I could go back to being angry." Let's call it a success.

One night he was grumbling about not finding a library book, but it was time to call his father. I get to do these all in a cheerful voice.

"I don't know where it was, and my parents won't help me look for it..."
"We will. Now it's time to call Daddy."
He made it about three steps towards the room with the phone when he got distracted and grumbled back to his room again.
"I don't know where that book is, I'm never going to find it--"
"J, go call Daddy, we'll find the book after that."
This time he didn't even make it out of his room.
"And my parents aren't even listening to me..."
"Less grumbling, more calling Daddy!"

That was awesome enough, but then we could hear him ranting on the phone.

"...and then Chris wouldn't let me look for it! He made me come in here and call you!"

Oh, the tyranny!

the end of teaching

I haven't been writing as much, at least compared to a month ago. Fewer things are happening, as my time here winds down. I'm cleaning things up at school and trying to force myself to plan my traveling.

• Tomorrow is my last day at school, with a good-bye party at a teacher's house at 6:30.
• Saturday I go to aikido one last time.
• Saturday night is a barbecue at Heather's in Quilpue.
• Sunday I go north to La Serena and Valle de Elqui.
• Wednesday the 25th is the WorldTeach End-of-Service, which is a 4-hour meeting followed by a party.
• Thursday the 26th is the English Opens Doors closing ceremony, which will probably be boring.
• Then I go south to Castro, Chiloe, and putz around Chiloe for a while.
• Then I go to Puerto Varas.
• Then I go to Santiago for a couple days, then home.

I have no bus tickets or reservations yet. Need to make some calls tonight.

Meantime, I'm saying good-byes to my students.

This is Elizabeth. Every time we worked with the weather cards, she'd get really excited and say she wanted "Pablo Neruda!", the Chilean Nobel Laureate who wore hats and berets like what I drew (which I copied from one of last year's volunteer's lesson plans). Following my custom of giving things to people who want them more than me, I gave her the card.

Only 1-C and 1-J have thrown me parties, which correlates with how well-organized and studious those classes are, and how well we got along. A "party" at school might involve soda, but definitely involves chips and cookies and other snack foods on plastic plates. 1-J also gave me little presents: a pencil case and little box that say "Valparaiso," and a framed print of a Valparaiso scene. They were working really hard to keep me out of the classroom while they got the plates ready: their stall tactic was to insist we needed more photos, so we have lots and lots of photos.

This is my main souvenir from this adventure: it's a sign for the 702, the bus that runs past the house. It turns out the same guy has been making bus signs for Region V for 27 years, he's really nice, and his shop is a shack about a mile from here, downtown. It was about US$22 to get it done, with both sides painted. It's huge and I don't know where it will go in a small apartment, but I'll figure it out.

I really am just mentally exhausted, and I don't know that that's interesting to read about. I'm not sad yet, because with me that comes later. Right now I'm just...done. It's interesting to watch how I am when I have no resources left: less patient with students being obnoxious, but still listening and letting them know I care. The cold a couple weeks ago really knocked me down, and it feels like I'm not physically well enough to bounce back from it.

Tomorrow's my last day at school. 26 days until I'm home.

a transplant experiment

I stayed at a certain hostel here where the manager is a middle-aged American woman. She runs an outstanding place, and has lots of interesting stories, but she's one of the majority of non-corporate expats who have...issues. Vaguely defined. It takes certain personality traits to go move yourself permanently somewhere else; for lack of a better word, expats who aren't set up by a big organization (e.g. company job or diplomatic corps) are usually somehow flakey.

She had brought her teenage daughter here some years ago and put her in a Chilean public school. I could barely conceal my shock: my eyebrows rose, as though possessed. I'm not of the opinion that you have to sacrifice everything to give your children the best of everything, but I am definitely of the opinion that you should sacrifice as much as you can to give your children the barely-adequate of everything. Choosing to put your kid in a Chilean public school, when you have better options, doesn't qualify.

I got my eyebrows under control and continued the conversation.

"Well, I wanted her to experience being around kids who didn't have as much stuff."

"That's a good idea. How did that go?"

"She came home one day and boasted that she was getting sevens." (Chilean grades go from 0 or 1 up to 7.) "I said, 'How are you pulling sevens? You don't even speak Spanish.'"

Ooookay, so you put your child into a barely-functional school system where she doesn't speak the language and there's no facilities for teaching it to her.

"So what happened?"
"I took her out of the school when she came home one day and said she had to go meet her friends to graffiti some stuff."

I say "parenting fail," despite the broadened cultural horizons. (As of our meeting, the daughter hadn't been heard from for several months, which Mom thought meant she was dropping out of college, possibly not for the first time.) What do you think?

attrition

My school maintains its academic and behavioral standards in part by kicking kids out. Usually the other kids tell me when I'm taking attendance using my popsicle sticks with the names on them--leading to the dramatic moment where I take a student's popsicle stick, break it half and toss it in the trash--but sometimes Oscar remembers to tell me.

"Hey, you teach 1-G, right?"

"Yep."

"Well, two students are gone. Valero--"

"Ah, Marcelo..."

"And Pizarro."

"Karina?" (I have no idea if Karina is in 1-G.)

"No, Samuel." Oscar draws his finger across his throat. "Gone! Bad."

"Aw, but they were getting better with me."

But Oscar is already leaving the room. "Well, good."

They were problematic. I wonder if Samuel saw this coming: instead of his usual dark countenance, he's been open-faced and smiling the past couple weeks.

It's five weeks before the end of the school year. I wonder what happens to them.

surprise

I've been enjoying my break. I went into school today because in theory a couple of girls show up at 1:30 on Fridays for "English Workshop," which is me stumbling around trying to find something English-related for them to do. They haven't been showing up recently, but over time they have, and it seemed respectful of their (slight) extra effort for me to be there.

My classroom, though, had been re-arranged into a standard Chilean classroom. Normally I have 25-35 writing-chairs in there, and twice a week there's a Spanish-language writing class in there and I have to rearrange all the chairs. Those chairs are now gone, and there's the standard rows of 2-person tables. There had already been 3 stacks of those tables stored in the room, but where did all the chairs come from? From the trash and notebooks left behind, there had obviously been a full curso in there, not just the writing workshop. Okay, that's a little weird, but while I was waiting, I stacked up the tables and moved everything around, thinking that if I didn't do it today, I'd have to do it Tuesday morning.

On my way out to go have lunch with Sara, I ran into Paloma, one of the girls from 1-A. When I went back into the room to lock up, she said "Don't go into my classroom!". I said, "Your classroom?" and we bantered a bit, and when I came back out we talked some more and I discovered that 1-A has actually been moved from their classroom into mine, and theirs is currently being used to store "papers." Since the national standardized SIMCE test is coming up and the teachers have been collating piles of photocopies, I'm guessing their classroom is being used as secure storage for the tests. (My classroom has cheap hollow-core doors and a bad doorknob lock, while the main classrooms have metal doors and deadbolts.)

So who knows if I have a place to teach next week. Plus Friday is Teacher's Day, so no classes then. Ah, Chile!

hitting the wall

I'm feeling less emotionally volatile, but with that comes the clarity that I am out of people-energy. Since I got here 7 months ago, I have been on-on-on go-go-go pretty much nonstop. First I was engaging with my fellow WorldTeach volunteers, then my students and host family and teachers...and that hasn't really let up. Nowhere do I have the kind of space to recharge that I have at home, because at home even my work (software development) provides me with a lot of quiet time.

Now I have that feeling that I used to get after helping to host my first 6-hour cocktail party at my old house in Oakland: I'm done, I need a break, I have nothing left. Pushing too much farther will be on borrowed energy.

Marcela is out for the week with tonsillitis, so there's a sub named Llorca. So far this week I've asked her to take 3 classes, out of mental fatigue and not having a good lesson ready, and leaving early for a school-related funeral today. It's not a big deal for her because taking the entire class is what she was expecting, and in fact I think it screws things up for both of us when I take half the class: Marcela plans lessons for a smaller group, and understands that I can't take the kids for 70 minutes. So I think I will actually ask her about it, with an eye toward my not teaching the rest of the week.

Then, too, it's time to give the kids a test, which is at least a 3-week project--more strategies for stumbling through the end of my teaching time.

vice, and clarity

I'm almost done with Lost, which is a relief: only 9 more episodes to go. I've watched the latter 5 seasons in an unhealthily short time, and I recommend against it, but on the other hand I don't think I would have done anything more healthy with my time. I think I'm done watching TV after this.

I'm feeling better, in general. It turns out my Chilean friend at school was not involved in any strange cultural thing that I missed: she was just being incredibly rude and aggressive and selfish. She apologized today, and we hung out for a while and had a nice lunch. That was pretty awesome.

In the liquor store the other day, looking for something to replace the thoroughly terrible Tres Palos "cognac"--I'll grant it's made from grapes, but the resemblance ends there--it occurred to me that I should give pisco another try, being the national liquor. Like all cocktails in Chile, the pisco sours here are so brutally strong that I actually can't drink them, so I've avoided pisco. Plus I think I like the Peruvian style better, but don't tell anyone, I think I can get deported for that.

(When Anna was here in August, I ordered a gin & tonic at a restaurant. They brought me a bottle of tonic and a Collins glass about half-full of gin--easily 4-6oz. [for reference, a large single U.S. shot is maybe 2oz.]. I had them bring me another glass so I could decant some gin and make it drinkable.)

The little 150ml bottle of Capel Especial costs about US$1.80, it borders on being drinkable straight, and it's absolutely delightful when mixed with Coke. I think another two dollars gets me up into the high-end stuff.

Marcela has tonsillitis, so she was out yesterday and today, and will be gone for the coming week. Whenever she's sick I have this angsty thing where I feel like I should hold class, and then I imagine trying to get 21 Chilean kids to come do English while their 21 classmates get to spend 90 minutes in the classroom doing whatever they want, and while it's possible I could badger them into it, I'm not sure it's worth the strain. Eventually I decide it's not, and admit that I am also happy to have the time free, and we don't have class, and I read a book or whatever and feel guilty about how I'm balancing my own emotional needs with some level of commitment to teaching and helping these kids learn and whatever.

Today I decided to just stop having that conversation with myself, because it turns out the same way every time. I also realized that this is one of the times where the school does not treat me like a credentialed teacher--they often do, everyone calls me profesor and very generously acts like I know what I'm doing. When it comes down to it, though, no one holds the illusion that I have all the responsibilities or institutional impact of a contracted teacher, and that's great, because they shouldn't: my value lies in being apart from the system. Neither the school nor the students expect me to hold class when there's no official teacher there, so unless it's going to be an entire week with no substitute, I'm just gonna roll with it.

Cartagena the janitor

One of the janitors at school is named Cartagena. There's something weird going on with me and the janitors, because a couple of times, one has said to another, "Heheh, that's Cartagena's friend," with a meaningful, knowing glance, and then they both laugh. Cartagena himself does seem to act a little odd around me.

Odd or not, I'm pretty sure he's lazy, based on what his boss has said and how often he cleans my classroom, which is never. If I find the boss and ask, he'll send someone by. Usually it's only a problem after school events, when my room gets used as a dressing room (which is totally okay, it's just full of trash afterward). Last week when I summoned someone to sweep up, Cartagena stopped by at the end of the day. (This is the best translation I can give. The janitors have a working-class dialect that I have a really hard time understanding.)

"Hey, the room's nice and clean, yeah?"

"Yes! Thank you, it looks great."

"You know, this room is supposed to stay locked, but you have to leave it unlocked so I can clean it." [My room is usually locked.]

"Yeah, but even when I leave it unlocked, you don't clean it."

"Well, you got me there!"

At least we've all got a sense of humor about it, and we both had a good chuckle.

(Curiously, at bemused moments like that, I feel like my father: often he will find a matter-of-fact humor in the most obtuse bureaucratic delays or maddening organizational inefficiencies. We talked a lot about government and politics when I was growing up, and at least once, when I expressed incredulity at some lunatic expression of American democracy, he just chuckled and said, "Well, no one does it quite like we do.")

finding a suitable carrot

Not intentionally. But I'd been considering what to do with 1-G, now that they've acquired The Fear[tm] and become more manageable. They're the last class on Monday, when they don't want to be there, and frankly I'm not thrilled about it either, if I'm just going to spend an hour trying to keep them acting like human beings.

At the beginning of class, I told them, "Okay, if you guys concentrate and work for a bit, we can all go home early."

There was much rejoicing, and Nicolas asked, "If we behave, how soon can we leave?".

"Hmm...forty-five minutes, maybe forty."

There was a little bit of grumbling until Nicolas did the math and helped his classmates understand that forty-five minutes is significantly less than an hour, which produced nods of upbeat agreement.

They accomplished more in 35 minutes than they usually do in 60. We all got to go home early and they got to see an immediate positive consequence for cooperation. I think they had an assumption that we were going to spend the whole hour regardless of what happened, and changing that opened up new possibilities for them. They were still Chilean schoolkids, but they stepped up to being only as much of a pain as my other classes.

Here's to more short classes in the future.

talking to the English Department

I stuck around for the English Department meeting this afternoon--recall that Jorge asked me to tell them what I told the Valparaiso English Network teachers. Here's what was different this time:

1. Mara, the head of the department (who is often very pushy, but very nice), said, "Remember how we talked about grouping students by their English level?". A fine idea, one I agree with, but no, I'm pretty sure we never talked about that.
2. "We want you to talk to the school's head of curriculum about that. We've told her, but she doesn't believe us."

Allrighty, then.

The curriculum director was very nice and very patient with my Spanish. I described how I learned Spanish, starting with basic usage and only much later learning about the grammar behind what I'd learned. For example, the teacher started by saying "Levántense!" and making a motion to stand up. So we knew that meant "Stand up!". Likewise, "Abran los libros" was obviously "Open your books." I think 3 years later I learned that those were the command form of those verbs. In the meantime, it wasn't important.

My favorite trick for these conversations is to show someone the first page of the Ministry of Education's English book, then the first page of English In Action. In her case, she doesn't speak English, so she understood how the Ministry book looks like an impenetrable tangle of text. I also said that even if you read English, the material makes no sense, and that especially impressed her when the English teachers nodded in agreement. She also wanted to photocopy English In Action, so hopefully in designing the system for next year, they'll track kids by level, and then start actually teaching to their level.

I wonder about my role in all this...in any situation, there's a lot of value in moving from a theoretical discussion (that maybe you've been having for years) to having someone from the outside come in and say, "Well, here's what my experience has been..." and hearing my stories both about learning Spanish, and about the changes I've seen in my students, how they've been able to master and actually acquire some English in our time together.

Apparently my next use may be to help convince some of the department holdouts that the essence of English is using it to communicate, rather than just abstractly learning its grammar.

fleeing uphill

My freshman year in college, I went to the male a cappella group's concert. In addition to the standard-issue egomania, they had a number of stunningly talented performers, and at one point, after some crude jokes from the rest of the group, one of the guys, in his most beautiful, liquid African-American baritone, said

"You boys are like school on a Sunday: no class."

Marcela is sick, and technically I didn't have to come in, but I figured I'd step up and do my job, but turns out the kids expect class to be canceled if she's not there. There's also a classroom-decorating competition today, as part of next week's Independence Day bonanza (more on that later), so 1-C wanted to stay in their room and decorate. If they don't want to have class, there's no way 1-H and 1-G will be interested. They all love me, but not so much that they'll have class when they don't have to.

(UPDATE: To take some responsibility, Marco asked if we were having class, and I could have just said "Yes" instead of asking if they wanted to. Apparently, I love them, but I also don't want to have class if we don't have to. Also, I didn't even try with 1-H, after Paul from 1-G saw me in the hall and said "The Miss is sick, so we're all going home early instead of having class with you.")

Rather than try and push the river, I went to the bank and picked up my stipend, and then I walked up Cerro Alegre to El Desayunador (which is literally something like "The Breakfast Place"), where I am happily parked with espresso and unfiltered Internet. I'll probably show up to school around classtime, just in case. Maybe.

Including the teacher stoppage tomorrow, that will be 6 classes canceled this week, out of 12.

that's enough of that.

1-G crossed some lines today by, among other things, refusing to talk. You'll recall that our last class (2 weeks ago!) was more than a little problematic. This may have been their retaliation for my writing up the girl who took stuff off my desk, which turned out to summon one of her parents to come chat with the school staff about it. When I started doing the choral repetition, one of the usual ringleaders (Bruno, Exequiel, Nicolas, or one of the Javieras) would say "Sssh!" and then when it was their turn to talk, they stayed silent. Anyone who crossed the picket line (by repeating what I said) got booed.

That lasted about 10 minutes, and then when class finally got going, there were 5 or 6 kids who just kept being disruptive. I put one of them outside for a little while, wrote names on the board, but they kept being uncooperative. Finally I said (with lots of silence and pauses):

Look, this is a communicative English class. I can't actually do anything if you don't participate. We can do something else, like sit in silence and write stuff down. I realize it's the last class on Monday. It's hard for everybody. But if we do the work, we can leave early. Otherwise, we stay the whole time.

That split the instigators right down the middle, with Bruno and Exequiel saying "Okay, let's do the class." Things got better still when I finally sent one of the Javieras to the inspector, but it was still a mess.

The more I think about their behavior, the more annoyed I am. It feels a little self-promoting or something, but honestly, I put a lot of energy into teaching them. I work really hard to give them chances to change their behavior, and to treat them as individuals and take the time to help them learn. So this level of disrespect really bugs me.

I have a plan. I'm changing the rules, just for them.

They don't get any more chances.

If they disrupt the class, they give me their cell phones and they sit outside the classroom. If they fail to do either of those things, or if they don't stay outside the classroom, I send them to the inspector.

I may preface this new policy by making them do some impossible, boring task that's more like what they have to do outside my class.

Either way...enough of their bullshit.

okay, that was adorable

The Prop 8 Trial Tracker folks got an actual lawyer to answer people's questions about the trial. I'm not entirely satisfied with his answer about Baker v. Nelson and other prior decisions--he dodged significantly--but the short version is "it was 38 years ago, it was a summary dismissal rather than an actual decision, and there have been a lot of decisions since then supporting gay rights and tearing down gender discrimination." We'll see, then.

Theoretically I had four classes today. Yesterday I sent Marcela a text message asking if we would split the classes like normal today, and she said "Yes"; but in fact, my latter two classes, 1-H and 1-G, were taking the test that somehow they didn't take with the other Monday classes last week. This happens a lot, where it doesn't seem to occur to her that it makes a difference to my level of preparation whether I have to actually teach the class or not. From talking to her and other teachers, I think that Chilean teachers do not do "lesson planning" as I have been taught to recognize it. My sense is that they teach by explaining things, so they just have the material they're going to explain, and how they're going to explain it. Students, for their part, are not in the habit of thinking "Oh, the teacher is talking, this might be something I should pay attention to," so an ordinary class would consist of teachers talking and students ignoring them.

One of my kids from 1-J, pregnant until a couple of days ago, brought her newborn in to visit her friends and teachers. SO TINY. She gave him to me to hold and I carried him around the classroom, eyes wide open. He was convulsing periodically, which Anna tells me is what newborns do before they get the hang of pooping: they try clenching everything, not yet used to having to clench some muscles and relax others. Did I mention SO TINY?

Because I found out 5 minutes beforehand that 1-H was testing instead of having a class, my room was still arranged in a U, so I told them to move the seats into the testing configuration (sort of grid-like, with lots of space in between chairs). Then I told them again, that they could move the seats while I wrote their vocabulary words on the board. I started writing, and heard chairs dutifully moving behind me.

I turned around, and they had moved all of their seats into a single clump in the middle of the room, with just an inch in between them. They sat there, smiling, as though I might actually start handing out the tests.

They were checking for a reaction, so I milked it a bit, with half-smiles and pauses. Finally I said, "I don't tell you guys this often enough, but...I love all of you."

Then it took 10 minutes to get them moved, but sucking up test time was their problem, not mine.

They're a sweet-tempered bunch. I like them.

the accidental nuclear option

On Tuesday there was a localized student stoppage: the third-years barricaded themselves in some classrooms all day. I wasn't up to extracting the details at the time.

It turns out they were protesting the teaching styles of three teachers, women in their 60s who have all been here at least 30 years. Apparently they move through the material too fast (or talk too fast, or both, I'm not sure), and at least one of them often teaches while seated, because she's in her 60s and standing up while talking 40 hours a week is hard.

The school's director did not provide a satisfying response quickly enough, so the students called some higher authority from the Ministry of Education, who came to the school and summarily fired the three teachers, without any review or hearing. (To answer the obvious question: no, that's not legal in Chile, either.)

The students say that wasn't what they wanted, and everyone is now having conversations about how to manage these relationships in an adult and productive way. Oops.

let's not do this again

Thursday went mostly okay. I booted Danilo from 1-A, and when he started arguing about it, I decided to experiment with shouting at him to leave, another moment of generated anger. While thoughts are completely insubstantial, and our biggest mistake is treating them like they're reality, they still leave traces in our minds, so shouting at Danilo, for lack of a better phrase, left a bad taste in my brain. Yoga helped that evening.

On Fridays I only have 1-B, and it's their last class of the week, and they're usually kind of a pill, and this week wasn't an exception. In a new twist, in addition to the class at large being uncooperative, the three problematic girls pulled out a makeup kit--which I usually ignore, by way of choosing my battles, as long as they keep participating--and then suddenly two of them start moaning "Oh, I cut myself" with quite realistic-looking blood on their wrist and knuckle, respectively.

I brought Scarlett a tissue, which she clapped on the affected area. Javiera, however, wouldn't let me look at her knuckle, so it was obvious it was fake. I'd sort of had enough then, so I got their names and wrote them down in my notebook.

"Teacher, why'd you write our names down?"

"Well, you're hurt, so I should tell the Inspector so they can help you, right?

Dead silence (extremely satisfying) as they look down at their hands.

I kept going with class, and a couple minutes later told them, "If you guys want to stay after class for a few minutes, we can talk, ya?". Jessica started groaning, but Scarlett smacked her on the shoulder, nodded enthusiastically and said in English, "Yes! Yes!". On with class, though I was disappointed enough by the whole thing that like Tuesday, a couple of kids said, "Why does he look sad?".

Near the end of class while waiting for the bell, the three of them were learning from one of the more skilled students how to say "I'm sorry, teacher." It would have been cute if it was sincere.

From a director at Kensington, I learned to call this a "come-to-Jesus." They kept trying to jump to the conclusion that I wasn't going to report them, and they could go home; that's sort of repetitive, but imagine them constantly saying "Okay, so you're gonna erase my name?" and "Great, so we can go?", and me keeping them involved by declining to make a decision.

"Okay, what's up with you guys?"

"It was a joke, teacher."

"No, right now we're talking about why you guys are behaving with a lack of respect for me and for the class."

"It's our last class of the week and we want to go home. We get bored and we just do stuff."

"It's my last class too, but I manage to come here and teach."

Silence.

"Look, I'm having a bad month. It's hard to live in another country, far away from my girlfriend and my friends, and right now I don't have any patience. I know in my class I ask different things from you than your other classes, but it's been three months and you know what to do. Every class you guys are constantly chatting, and you, Scarlett, last week"--I didn't really have the right words, so I just made bitchy snarling noises--"I tried to talk to you about it, and you weren't interested. Do you guys feel like I treat you with a lack of respect?"

"No! Not at all."

"Then maybe you can act like it. Think you guys can improve?"

"Yes, absolutely."

Reflective pause while I think.

"Okay. I'm not going to report you this time. But we'll see how the month goes. Okay?"

"Okay."

I'm free to drop the hammer on them whenever I want, without needing a single dramatic incident as a reason, so it felt like a good way to handle it.

Also learned: much like "That's what she said," the phrase "I don't need this" means nothing in Spanish.

happy Monday

The funny thing about feeling sort of burned out (being hopefully at the bottom of whatever adjustment curve you're looking at) is that I have more patience and less attachment to outcomes in the classroom. The activity isn't working? Well, that's fine, let me sit on my table for a second and think about what to do next. 1-G is being themselves to the best of their ability? That's fine, I'll just keep writing names on the board, and they'll learn whatever they can under the circumstances.

It could be better, I guess. I'm taking up precious class time with learning their names at the beginning, which is entirely worthwhile, even if I only remember for the duration of the class, because it helps me with classroom management and personal connection. And I've been taking up time with a review game, and a little bit to make a thank-you video for the people in Massachusetts who donated school supplies. But those don't feel like bad things. Teaching takes both me and the students, and while I feel like other teachers could do better under the circumstances, this is what I've got right now.

I hate meetings. so. much.

Oscar is my host dad, and also the chief inspector (head of discipline and attendance) and the sub-director, as well as being supervisor of the physical plant. He's accumulated all these jobs over the years. Sometimes he exhibits an overly strong sense of How Things Should Be Done:

Today was a teacher planning day, before classes actually start tomorrow. There were meetings, and time for teachers to plan out the semester. I didn't think I needed to go, and I asked my co-teacher Marcela, who said she didn't know what the meetings were, but that I didn't need to go. So I didn't, because any meetings would be (a) about material that didn't concern me, and (b) in Spanish at my 50%-or-less level of comprehension. (I don't go to the English Department meetings for those reasons.)

This came up at tea this evening. Oscar said I should have gone to school today, because there were "experts" there to explain how to do grades and long-term planning and other important things.

"Right, but I don't do those things."

"You don't do grades?"

"Well, I gave the kids a test, but Marcela is the teacher of record, she gives them their final grade. Plus it would all be in Spanish I can't understand."

"Oh, no, he'd be going really slow, pointing at slides on the board and stuff."

Why on earth would a Chilean, talking to a room full of Chileans, talk slowly?

The absurd sense of responsibilities is strong with this one.

gap week

I was a little worried about class today because I didn't really have a plan, except some vague ideas about games. Silly me! Here's what happened with my 4 classes today:

• I got in with 1-A, and after a little banter, I asked what they wanted to do. They said, "It's the week before vacation. We don't do anything." Well, I didn't want to be there either, so we played a Hangman-like game for a while, chatted, and I gave them their grades from my test.
• Because of Chile's World Cup game 2 weeks ago, 1-J still had to take Marcela's test.
• 1-H was delayed an hour because problems in the kitchen prevented making lunch for the kids (and me), so the school was scrambling around that. Since it was just a half hour left after that, I just left them with Marcela.
• 1-G got canceled because all the first-years were doing the show for their dance class. (It was adorable, all these 15-year olds, some of them quite troublesome, doing stuff they'd choreographed themselves.)

Tomorrow classes are canceled due to a student strike. I'm not sure what they're protesting specifically, but I do know a representative took their demands to the government today, which played its part by rejecting them; there's no shortage of things worth protesting in the educational system. No one's exactly sure what classes are canceled, whether it's just the morning, or the whole day. Eduardo, one of my most awesome students, said, "No classes all day. We'll be beating up on the cops."

"Well, be careful, they've got the trucks with the water cannons and everything."

"Aw, no, that's just to cool us off."
"Oh, because you'll be hot from running and everything."

"Exactly!"

There's a protest culture here that's alien to us now. I think we had it in the 60s, but now we're like democracy's elderly great-uncle: still mentally active, but physically, can't really be bothered to stand up and throw rocks at anyone.

Oakland Raiders fans excepted, of course.