names

[This is an old post from Chile, and I don't know why I never published it. Looks like I started writing it on August 25, 2010.]

Occasionally a student gets a little huffy that I don't remember her name. (It's always a girl, I assume because I'm a cute guy and being huffy is what 15-year old girls do. Anna says it's because they all have crushes on me.) They also complain that I have an easier time remembering the boys. I explain that not only do I have 270 students, who I see an hour a week or less, but there are fewer boys (about 5:1 in my classes), and they have a wider variety of names. Most of my girls (black hair and dark brown eyes, with a handful of exceptions) are named:

Daritza

Yarikza

Deyanira

Yanira

Danila

Daniela

Katina

Karina (3 in one class)

Katarina

Katalina

Katherine

Camila (4 in one class)

Javiera (3 in one class)

Mariela

Mariana

María

María José

María Paz

Maripaz

Marisol

Consuela

Consuelo

Constanza

Valery

Valeria

Francisca

Francis

Helen

Allen

Hellen

And Helen and Hellen get annoyed when I pronounce their names wrong.

interview day. ugh.

I had a full day of interviews at Company X in Palo Alto today. 2/3 of them did not go poorly! The other two might be enough to torpedo my chances. I realized that I'm extremely rusty at coding, something that only becomes harder when you're doing it on a whiteboard with some stranger waiting for you.

Coding problems I screwed up:

• Given a sorted binary tree, print out the values, from lowest to highest. This is called an "in-order" traversal, and it took me about 30 seconds to do it recursively. Then it took me 25 minutes to cobble together a non-recursive, iterative version.
• Given an integer, calculate the corresponding Excel column number. For example, numbers 0-25 correspond to A-Z, 26 is AA, 27 is AB, 78 is CA, 79 is CB, etc. This is a slightly different case of an ancient and well-known problem, of converting an integer to a string (itoa(), if you're curious: normally you would be converting the number 25 to the string "25." This took me the entire 30-40 minutes and I did a really bad job.

To be fair, the others were fine:

• Write some code for a build system scheduler.
• Write some Java code for a hashtable. (That was exciting. I've never actually written a hashtable, because every modern language has one that's more efficient and better-tested than anything we would cook up. The interviewer said, "That's good!". Also, apparently I can still write correct Java after 5 years.)
• Model a game of Monopoly using objects.
• Describe how to search a list of objects with given attributes. Make it faster (by adding indexing).

The two problems that I screwed up would have been hard even if I were in coding-shape. With itoa(), in particular, I've never really internalized why it works. Something about it has always blocked my complete understanding.

The Director of Engineering was the last guy I talked to, and he was wonderfully honest and direct: he wanted to talk to me and get a sense of me and my experience, because given the interview feedback, hiring me would be more of a risk than usual. He recognizes I haven't really actively coded in a long time, and they'd be hiring me based on my past accomplishments (which are more important to them), and especially based on my friend's recommendation. If it doesn't work out, the company and I part ways amicably.

Anyway, I feel crappy and incompetent. Which I'm not, really, but my competence wasn't exactly on display today. Either of the guys from those two bad interviews could torpedo the job with their feedback, so we'll just have to see what happens.

I got home late and needed to eat and unwind, so I bailed on aikido tonight. I decided to go to the early class tomorrow--completely forgetting tomorrow is the first Zen sangha event of the year--when I checked my mail and discovered the instructor asking if I could teach the class. I love teaching and she needed somebody, so in theory I'll go for the early part of Zen stuff and then go to the dojo.

Blech, what a day.

that's a wrap.

This morning we had the English Opens Doors closing ceremony over at the UN building on the far, far, far eastern edge of Santiago. It's down the street from the U.S. Embassy, located in the middle of nowhere because that's where they could find 5-10 acres. There were several speakers; it would have been nice if the Chileans spoke to us as though Spanish were our second language, instead of full-speed Chilean. (The room had about 9 Chileans and 100 native English speakers, so they weren't exactly responding to their audience.) A couple of volunteers spoke, which is totally fine, except that the Ministry of Education was filming the whole thing, "to motivate future volunteers," and the volunteers' stories were...not exactly motivating. The guy's was, more or less, though he also talked about the exhaustion; the girl's was almost harrowing, since she went through 3 host families, one of which included a father who was sending her inappropriate text messages late at night. (It's bound to happen to someone, with dozens of attractive 20-something American girls living with host families in a macho country.)

I understand that she had a rough year and it's possible she couldn't keep herself from talking about it. She was trying to put the best face on it she could, but in fact she was down in Punta Arenas or something, at the end of the Earth, in a failed school system, with bad host families. There's only so much you can do to spin it.

Listening to many of us, it can seem like the frustrations of our time in Chile have outshined the good stuff. I don't know that it has: it's just that it's easier to rant about frustrating things, and those are the things that have taken our energy and left us ready to move on. And let's face it: we want to be interesting and engaging when we talk, and that's a lot easier when talking about the negatives. Positive things are easy: my host family loved me, the people are kind and generous, I learned (more) Spanish! There's not much mystery there.

The negatives, though, are ripe for discussion. They frustrate us, they wear us down. Why don't Chileans listen and respond to the actual words you're saying? Why is the food so bad in a country awash in cheap, high-quality ingredients? Why does your host family yell at you for not wearing shoes, because that's how you get pneumonia? (Alternately, it's the change of temperature, or you haven't been wearing a scarf, even though it's almost summer. The idea that disease is caused by germs rarely comes up, though they'll allow it when pressed.)

These things are interesting because from our point of view, they're absurd and strange and inexplicable. They're implacable obstacles to the smooth functioning of our lives in this culture. Incredulous that this was for real, we probably bashed our head against the wall trying to change it--"No, I really genuinely honestly do not want fried hot dog slices in my rice"--before developing the necessary mix of acceptance and resignation. We never quite like it, though: like a stone in our shoe, eventually it causes some bruising or blisters. Even if we look back and tell the stories with humor and love, that comes from perspective on an unpleasant experience. In addition to making it easier to be funny and interesting--this is why film or theater critics can get carried away writing bad reviews--talking about the negative stuff lets us process it more thoroughly. It's cathartic, and gives us some distance on it. We can start to associate those things with laughter instead of self-control and forced patience.

I'll try to keep the stories balanced as I unwind over the coming months. Just remember, I'm not the sunshine-and-roses type. It was an excellent experience, and it was the thing for me to do and it was amazing. But: I've done a number of very difficult things in my life, and this was the hardest. I think a lot of volunteers would probably say that, so keep it in mind as we rant about the difficult things.

decompression in 3...2...1...

I'm in La Serena, a coastal-ish town (about 2km up the Rio Elqui from where it hits the ocean) 7 hours north of Valparaiso. It's desert up here, which somehow slipped my mind. I don't really care for the desert. Some people love it; I only visit when I need sensory deprivation. It's not super-interesting. The desert here looks more or less like the desert in California, Baja California, and Mexico. It seems to lack the dramatic geology of the deserts in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, but there's still that theme of rocks, cactus, tumbleweed, brutal sunlight, and not much else. I'm not a visually-stimulated person and I hate sunlight, so, yeah. Not a desert rat.

I'd thought about going to Valle del Elqui, which is the vineyard-laden center of pisco production. Then I thought about what exactly I came here to do, which is roughly "nothing" in the form of "eat food, drink coffee, and read books and the Internet," and discovered that in fact I don't care about seeing Valle del Elqui very much. I saw some pictures. It looks like a moonscape with vineyards. Not really my thing.

Having reminded myself that I don't actually want to do anything, I'm...relaxing. Decompressing, starting gently to understand what's happened the past 8 months. I think the time spent teaching was forging and quenching: you apply heat and pressure to your work, shape it with your hammer, then suddenly you sink in it water, cooling it so quickly that the crystal structure changes suddenly, leaving the steel extremely hard, but brittle.

After quenching, you temper the work, which is actually making it less hard and brittle, giving it some flexible toughness so it can absorb shocks. Heat the steel slowly so the parts you want to soften heat up first, to a certain temperature (in blacksmithing, judged by color), and then quench it again. Done by experienced hands, it's an intuitive but fairly precise process.

Anyway, to get out of geek mode: I've done the forging and quenching. Now I'm relaxing and starting the tempering.

Shouldn't take more than a couple decades, I'd think.

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.

teaching in Chile: an outside perspective

Anna has visited me 3 times here in Chile, and the first two times, in May and August, she got to see my Friday class. (The third time, various classes had barricaded themselves in their classrooms to protest some school decision or other, and the administration sent everyone home so they could deal with it.) I try to describe the teaching environment here, and while I know it's insane, this is also the only place I've ever taught. She has a lot of teaching experience, so I asked her to describe what she sees in a Chilean classroom, and how it differs from, erm, an effective learning environment.

To add some background: my students are high school freshmen, age 14-15, and they have English twice a week, once with me and once with their Chilean teacher. After sophomore year, they only have it once a week. Also, the entire curso of 45 students has every class together: there is no grouping by level, so the few students who actually understand some English are in the same class with kids who understand nothing. None of them, no matter their level of comprehension, can converse.

Chris asked me to write something about the Chilean classroom, as I have observed it on my visits. I am an experienced ESL teacher, and I would be hard-pressed to accomplish anything under the conditions Chris has been teaching in. I'll say more about that, but first a snapshot of the classroom.

The kids come in talking, moving, shoving, yelling at each other and at Chris. The noise level is very high. Six or seven want Chris's individual attention RIGHT NOW, and the other 15 don't allow his presence to disrupt their personal lives at all.

They take their seats in the little chairs with the desks attached, along 3 walls of the room in a big U. They're still talking to each other, texting, eating, writing, and putting on makeup. Did I mention the noise level?

Chris moves in to the center of the room, gets their attention, and the lesson begins.

Doesn't sound too bad, does it? But not that much really changes when the lesson starts.
The kids' conversations with each other are quieter, except when they are shouted across the U, which is not uncommon. They complain intensely if he wants them to get up and do anything, but they leap up on their own to climb on their desks and look out the window, or go to the door or the trash can or anywhere else they feel like going.

Some of them are pretty cooperative, some are totally resistant and sullen. Many of the girls have crushes on Chris and flirt with him, shouting for his attention and wilting if they don't get it. Many of the boys are "too cool" to participate, but Chris manages to make them learn things anyway.

Did I mention the complaining?

Also, they are total drama queens and very competitive. They compete for Chris's attention, for his regard, for his disregard, for each other's attention, and for the prize of being invisible in the room. When they play physical movement games, they bump and kick each other (kind of gently, mostly, except when it's not) and I have seen them body check each other more than once.

For an American teacher, their freedom with movement and noise and interruption is mind-boggling. And I'm a pretty relaxed teacher by U.S. standards. Chilean kids have their own agenda, and they allow the class to disrupt their agenda only marginally, or minimally.

So the room itself is a challenge. But when you plug the classroom into the larger framework, the challenge becomes nearly insurmountable.

Chris sees his kids for 45-60 minutes once a week--at best. Randomly cancelled classes, holidays, and other events mean that it averages out to more like once every other week. _I_ couldn't learn anything as a student with that frequency. Or did I forget to mention that they don't do homework? Teachers often don't even assign it because they just won't do it.

The classes (cursos) are dominant over the teachers. They own the classroom (with the exception of Chris's room), and when teachers come in they are on the kids' territory. Kids have gotten teachers fired this year, and taken over the school to protest something or other.

Chilean pedagogy seems to involve standing in front of the kids and telling them things about the subject, explaining English in Spanish, for example. Only remember that part about the noise level and free movement and whatnot? Guess what--the kids don't listen! Not only don't they listen, but they actually tune out when a teacher starts making mouth noises. Chris is a strange exception to their experience because he asks them to actually do stuff, repeat words, play games, and so on. But they still ignore him; even when they look like they're listening, they're not really taking much in.

To add insult to injury, their curriculum in their regular English class is WAY above their level, and getting further away from them with every lesson.

So, Chris is in a situation where his kids are being demoralized and overwhelmed in their regular English class, what he's teaching doesn't connect to what they're supposedly learning there, they're habituated to ignoring teachers, they don't do homework, he only sees them once a week at most, they resist all new activities (especially anything involving moving around) but they don't learn from him talking, they're used to not learning anything in English class, the kids are constantly talking and yelling and getting up on their own, and they feel they have the power in the relationship. I would find that extremely challenging, and I've had enough time in the classroom to get over all the initial angst and classroom management stuff.

That actually sounds grimmer than the experience usually felt, but I think that (a) I quickly became desensitized as a matter of maintaining my sanity, and (b) the students learned to continue their accustomed behavior only when I wasn't looking, so I only saw one facet of the classroom, which showed me a reasonable fascimile of classroom flow.

The classroom videos Anna took on her second visit, in August, are on YouTube and below.

back on the beat

Having stayed home resting yesterday, I went in to teach my three classes today. I'm definitely feeling stronger, and the day off was a good idea. Those three classes are so different.

1-C - These guys are just so unbelievably nice. They're calm, patient, smart, sweet-tempered kids. I had a pretty half-assed lesson plan, but it never matters because we just like each other, so it's no problem to just hang out for however long. And we had fun even with the lame directions game I made up.

1-G - I figured this group would be a harder sell, and they sort of were. They're a lot calmer now that Samuel and Marcelo got kicked out of school for fighting each other. (I asked what happened. Apparently Samuel spelled guerra ["war"] as gerra in some context, and Marcelo started making fun of him for it, including asking the teacher what gerra meant, and some other kind of mockery I didn't understand. Samuel clocked him, and the rest is history.)

I told them to stand up, and about half the class stayed seated; I tried for about 10 seconds, then shrugged, said "Okay," and sat down at my table and started peacefully reading my book. This confused them.

"Are you angry?"

"Nope."
"Annoyed?"

"Nope. I was really sick all last week and I still don't feel great. I have 9 days left here. If you guys don't want to do the thing, I'm not going to fight you."

A couple of kids asked me to keep teaching, but I decided to continue on with the chosen course. I had some nice conversations with smaller groups of kids, and I spent a lot of the time making them laugh (which also amuses me), with all sorts of strange behaviors they've never seen before, certainly not from a teacher.

I explained cognates and false cognates to one group I was talking to. They got a kick out of a couple of the best false cognates: embarasada is "pregnant," preñada is "pregnant" but only used for animals, and perhaps best of all--and let me tell you, embarasada is hard to beat--is excitado, which one might think is "excited" but actually means "horny." (You probably want emocionado.)

1-H - These guys. I did the review for their test next week. They weren't terribly interested. I tried to make sure they knew that they have to actually understand the words they learn, in order to pass the test. Instead of writing stuff in their notebooks, most of them took pictures of the whiteboard with their cell phones. We finished in a half hour and then it was herding cats inside the classroom for 30 minutes. Nice to reconnect with them, though. Well, sort of. They don't sit still long enough for much connecting.

To be clear, I have no teaching energy left. I realize that many times in our lives we strive and work and we discover our limits and we surpass them--see Outward Bound, my black belt test, various other things--and I passed that point a few months ago. So now I'm navigating the experience of being utterly mentally exhausted.

crawling toward the finish line

I'm down to about 2 weeks left here in Valparaiso, now having lost a week to being sick. I'm feeling about 85-90% since yesterday, but on Saturday I still wasn't up to doing aikido in the heat.

I haven't been sitting this past week, but I started again because first, that's what discipline means, but second because I have a lot of thoughts and emotions going on right now and there's a lot of things worth watching.

• impatience - I have spent all these months not looking forward to being home, but now it's a bit over 5 weeks left, and I'm mentally very tired. It's called "get-home-itis": when Kelly and I did our epic road trip in 2006, we'd planned to hit the coast at San Luis Obispo or Monterey and then head north over a day or two. Dinnertime conversation revealed that after 2800 miles of curvy back roads, we were both done, so we plowed through and got home that night. I don't mind being impatient, as long as I don't neglect what's really happening right now.
• frustration - Really? I'm sick again? Really?
• sadness - I like Chile, and I don't know if or when I'll ever see these people again. Especially my kids: even keeping up with some of them on Facebook, I'll never know what effect I had. Right now, I think they don't know either.
• satisfaction - I made it. I learned a lot. I changed in ways I wanted to change and in ways I still don't understand. I did a useful thing. I learned that working with hordes of people all day is, indeed, probably not what I should do for a living. Certainly not in a Chilean school.
• eagerness - I'm studying to turn myself into a better, shinier software engineer. I love learning new stuff.
• fear - It's daunting to imagine going back to U.S. culture, where the money is all green and prices are familiar and I understand all the conversation around me and holy crap what? Living in a foreign culture leaves you spending a lot of time inside your own head, isolated from the lack of information. It's just shy of overwhelming to think of having all that information again.
• understanding - There's a self-indulgent reassurance in having people miss you when you leave, but it's also scary to realize how much I miss everyone else. The support of our relationships isn't just a matter of what we're used to, although certainly we're all inter-habituated (I like that word). Looking over the gallery of friends, lovers, teachers, my Zen sangha, my aikido dojo, the tutoring kids at the library, they're all communities I'm in because I fit, because I find them nourishing and interesting and (mostly) relaxing. We listen and share and help each other according to what's needed, to what's happening now. I have...almost none of that here.

This round of being sick has knocked me pretty well on my ass, and I'm only getting back up slowly, because I'm not what I consider "healthy" at this point. It's been 8 months of crappy food (the family cooks almost exclusively with soup mix, for example) and minimal exercise. I have a whole constellation of things at home that give me energy and support and it's all been missing here. Today I did two classes' worth of testing, then I taught a simple review class, and while I did that I realized that I'm not so much "running on empty" as I am "coming to a stop as the engine sputters on the last of the fumes." I already drew on my deep reserves, and I don't have any energy left that I can put into teaching. I'm done.

11 more days until the end of school.

testing and tears

1-J had their test scheduled for today, and yesterday they started campaigning for me to delay it. They claimed they had my test, another test, and a Biology project due all today, and the rules said they don't have to have more than two tests in a day. We had a similar rule in college about exams, but of course I don't have the language skills and contextual knowledge to know when the kids are trying to con me--although they usually are. They were genuinely distraught; yesterday I told them I'd think about it, but they should be ready for the test. I said they should talk to the U.T.P., the Unidad Técnica Pedagógica, which is literally something like "Educational Technique Unit," and I translate as "Curriculum Director," because they're the school's academic overlords. A couple girls said they'd do that.

Today they campaigned harder, and of course no one had actually talked to the Curriculum Overlords (perhaps thinking they had a better chance with me alone), so when they came to my classroom, I said, "Okay, let's go talk to the U.T.P., the rest of you hang out here." I don't know the rules of the school very well, it'd be a pain for me to delay the test, and I didn't like the power dynamics of me making the decision--of either giving in to a silly student demand (they knew the test was coming and we prepped for it last week), or of their perceiving an injustice if I remained hard-nosed.

Funny enough, the three students went in to talk to Uberlinda, the Power-That-Is, and when I showed up a few steps later, her assistant Claudia basically blocked the door and asked how she could help, so I had to say "I'm with them" to get in to watch the conversation.

Uberlinda told them they were SOL: that yes, they can only have two tests in a day, and that's all they have, the Biology project is something they're supposed to do at home, well before the day it's due. So we went back to the room and crushed everyone's hopes and started the testing.

The test was two parts, equally weighted: give me the English words for 10 pictures, and then ask me 3 of the 4 questions we learned (things like "What do you do for work?" and "What's your favorite food?". I'm pretty generous by American standards, and I try really hard to help the kids get at least partial credit, by prompting them with initial consonants and stuff. Even so, we had a few bad results and one set of tears, and several requests for a way to raise their grade.

In a school where their learning experience were reasonable (especially if I were creating it), I'd say "tough," but...a lot of these kids already have lousy grades in English, and if they don't keep their grades up, they'll get booted out to another school. I know for a fact that these are smart kids, and most of them aren't any lazier than normal 15-year olds; and I know that between the huge, untracked classes and bad curriculum, their overall English-learning experience is crap.

Maybe they'll succeed under the Chilean system, maybe they won't; but I think I want to help them as much as I can while being fair to everyone and still insisting that they be assessed on what they know.

what are we doing here?

Greg, a volunteer down in Punta Arenas, has a wonderfully-titled and well-written post called "The Novelty Has Simply Worn Off."

In this situation, I never expected to be an afterthought. At that point, it feels like we're all kind of missing the point of me being here. I came to make kids excited about English, to expose teachers to new ideas of how to teach and to exchange cultural experiences and traditions with my family and community. As we press on through these last weeks, I feel that much of that has been tossed out the window. I'm not the new, exciting person that just showed up one day. I'm just part of the scenery now which certainly represents my cue to find an exit.

I see what he's talking about: I've been part of the routine at INSUCO for a while now. Two things strike me about that:

1. It's inevitable. Novelty is unsustainable by definition.
2. It's a good thing.

The lack of novelty means that everyone has changed and adjusted. My kids are used to me! I'm pretty offbeat even for a North American, so it took some time. We have really good relationships, where they like me (with one conspicuous exception) and know I care about them. I've adapted to them, sure, but I didn't have as far to go, because I have no experience with large groups of 15-year olds, so if they happened to be Chilean, well, whatever.

They, on the other hand, had to adjust to me, who:

• Required them to participate: to talk and stand up and move around.
• Forbade cell phones and eating in class.
• Checked to make sure they understood stuff.
• Took time to make them say things when they had trouble.
• Didn't make them--didn't let them--write anything down.
• Had no compunction about doing silly dances or making chicken noises in class.

That's all completely different from their experience, where they have to shut up and copy stuff down all the time and they get to check out and eat and wander around the room. And Chilean teachers do not, as a rule, make chicken noises.

And I got to be the Non-Parental Adult Who Cares. I tried to see them and accept them for who they are, while I push them to do things they were embarrassed about, and encourage them to act as adult as they can manage.

The WorldTeach orientation set my expectations pretty well. English education here is broken five ways from Sunday, and I had no illusions that I could fix it, fight it, or even teach a whole ton of English. This, for example, is what we've done this semester: 41 words and 4 questions/responses.

What they learned with me won't help them on their standardized test, the SIMCE, which is unfortunately the government's metric for success. Even if they gave the authority to rewrite the school's curriculum--which would include revolutionizing their structure so that students could be grouped by level instead of a random set of 45 kids all having the same classes--I don't know anywhere near enough about ESL/EFL education to know what to do.

I don't know that any of my kids are more motivated about English now; honestly, I doubt it. But they know they can learn at least a little bit of it, and that some random person from far away showed up and cared enough to help them do it, and to me that's the important thing.

aspects of comprehension

Today's English sentences I'm glad my students can't understand:

"Jesus Christ, stand up, you lazy bastards." (1-G)

"Holy crap, you guys are assholes." (1-A)

Don't get me wrong, both classes have been far worse. The rough-housing from 1-A is easier to deal with than more disruptive stuff.

I do get surprised. Students have varying levels of ability and comprehension, but I have to teach to the beginner level, because even the ones with better comprehension can't say much. In a more functional system, there would be assessment tests and students would be sorted out by level, but Chile's not there yet.

Gisselle rattled off something in Spanish for me, and I said, "Mas lento [slower]. If I say something long and fast in English, you're never going to understand it, are you?" And of course she got the wide-eyed complete-confused look that I had after her Spanish.

Suddenly the girl next to her, Jennifer, leans over and translates.

"Wait, you speak English?!"

"Mas o menos." More or less.

"No wonder you're always bored."

"Que?" What?

We chatted after class, and apparently her mother has always spoken to her in English and Italian. "No wonder" was beyond her and she wasn't inclined to demonstrate her speaking, but her understanding is obviously pretty solid, especially for Chile.

Who knows what else my kids know? And I'll never find out.

the news from chrisland

I thought the week would return me to normalcy after my week off, which it has inasfar as most of the week is canceled: Monday was a holiday, today was a half-day due to a teacher meeting (I haven't seen that half of 1-H in 5 weeks), and Friday is off for Teachers' Day. Plus tomorrow night is the Teachers' Day dinner, and then Friday night is another asado at Bennett's in the country, starting at 9pm. I'm hoping to rent a tent, actually, so with my sleeping bag I'll have a place to crawl into away from the party, and go to bed before 5am.

It has been more or less nice to be back in the classroom. I'm essentially teaching the same lesson I figured out last semester, with different material plugged in. The kids were getting bored with it, but having some time apart cleanses the palate, and reminds them how much more fun I can be than their regular classes. It helps me to have a lesson plan that I know works; the kids' response combined with my lack of training has generally discouraged much innovation.

Rodolfo in 1-G is one of my favorite and most talkative students, and started chatting when I went to get them from their room.

"Hey, how come we didn't have class last week? Were you stressed out or something?"

"Kinda, yeah, I was tired, so I took a break."

"You can do that? Just...take a break? For being tired?"
"Well, it was only because Marcela was out. Technically I don't have to work when she's not here." [Not exactly true. I don't have to take the entire 45-student class. I'm supposed to work if there's a substitute or if I can take half the class with Marcela gone.]

He told this to Marcela, who just chuckled.

"But Rodolfo, I have different rules than the regular teachers. They don't actually pay me: I'm a volunteer."

Bafflement. "Wait...what? How do you support yourself?"

Which led to a conversation about my savings, small stipend, host family, and then he asked:

"What do you do in the United States?"

Someone else said, "Duh, he's a teacher."

"Actually, I'm a software engineer."

More bafflement. Rodolfo: "Uh...uh...how did you end up here?"

A conversation for another time. I'm good enough at teaching that they have a hard time imagining I'm not a teacher by profession, which is kinda cool, though it barely survives my self-criticism.

All of Chile is united and obsessed with the miners: people actually got up at midnight to watch the first of them get out, and stayed up watching for hours. I don't follow Chilean news much, so I only know what I get from the newspaper headlines on the street, and from Chileans asking me if I've seen the news. For the past couple of days, the house grandmother has had "Los mineros" as her muttering-of-choice as she goes about the house talking to herself. (She's always muttering something.)

My second aikido class yesterday went pretty well. It's really hard without even one really experienced person. Also, I was teaching in Spanish. Also, a new guy showed up mid-way and wanted to know about the art and then wanted to join the class. That worked out well because whatever his story is, he's ready for aikido in a way that not everyone is. So he fit right in and I think he'll stick. Maybe I should give myself some credit.

Updates are sparse this week because the "wireless" part of the house's wireless router has died again. It turns out I've been pretty dependent on it for feeling connected and busy; hopefully it fixes itself like it did when we got here. Otherwise, I'll see if Anna can bring my spare router when she visits in a couple weeks. Meanwhile, there's...uh...whiskey. And pisco! And cookies.

Oh, fine, I'll go read a book.

aikido class

I taught the aikido class yesterday, as planned. I had my usual nervousness around teaching, plus I was doing it in Spanish, which is...harder. I got good feedback from people though: everyone at their different levels felt it was useful, and appreciated the step-by-step clarity, which Jorge doesn't usually do.

One thing that's nice when teaching is to have some experienced students who you know well enough to predict how they'll respond when you throw them. I had one guy who I knew would respond smoothly, Blas, and then a visiting black belt from the other aikido group that uses that space. In order to do a convincing demonstration, though, I brought up Rafael, who's only been training for a month or two, but he teaches Shotokan Karate and he's built like a truck. He's easily got 70 pounds on me, and he's really, really, really strong (he showed me a photo of him destroying a 5-high stack of bricks at a demonstration last week).

I sometimes feel like the class watches Jorge, who's my height but obviously much more muscular, and they have trouble imagining how they can do what he does; and they know me, and I'm pretty strong even though I'm lightly built, and I see a lot of frustration. I wanted to remind them that there are people far stronger than me, and I can still do aikido techniques on them.

I did chuckle when Rafael grabbed my arm, and I said, "Well, let's see if I can do it." It was actually better than planned, because he was really trying, so by the time he fell down a few times, he was pretty tired.

I'm glad I get another class on Tuesday, to work on some different stuff.

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!

downtime

Llorca agreed to take the remaining 5 classes for the week, since it didn't matter much to her, so I had yesterday and today off, and I don't teach again until Tuesday because of the long weekend. Much like unemployment, I have to be sure to leave the house, but in general it's clear to me that I did need a break, and arranging to take one was the right thing to do. I didn't need lesson-planning time; I just needed to not be teaching. Somehow 6 weeks sounds a lot more manageable than 7 weeks, plus I should give the kids another test, which is at least a 3-week project, so I think I can go back on Tuesday more relaxed.

I'm still really jazzed to teach aikido on Saturday and Tuesday. I really enjoy it, and from the feedback and results I've gotten over time, I think I'm pretty good at it. There are definitely some things I want to help the beginners be more clear about, that Jorge doesn't touch on explicitly.

Finally, I found a way to spew the past 6 weeks of photos to Flickr. Sorry, they're not labeled yet, and who knows when I'll decide to spend the time on that. Not this weekend, certainly.

English Opens Doors in the news: full text

Normally I would never reprint the entire text of an article, but the original Guardian link is gone for some reason and the piece is highly relevant to me. I found the text here. My original post, with some comments, is here.

---

Chile's Drive for English Faces First Test

2010 marks the first formal assessment of Chile's six-year campaign to raise English language skills: English Opens Doors. At the end of October 240,000 students in their third year of high school (aged 16-17) will take the TOEIC(r) Bridge test to demonstrate that their comprehension of English is equivalent to B1 on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) scale.

An informal test in 2004 revealed that only 5% of Chilean students reached this level, but the ambitious target set by Opens Doors is that all students going into their final year of high school in 2013 will have achieved the equivalent of B1.

The programme, created in 2004, promotes English learning through teacher training programmes and scholarships abroad, inviting native English speakers into Chilean classrooms and giving students the opportunity to participate in public speaking, debates, and English camps.

"I had a great year while perfecting my English. I think study-abroad grants have helped improve teaching levels a lot," said Victoria Cuadra, who returned last year from the UK after spending 12 months as a teaching assistant in Hull, on a grant from the Chilean government. "There are still problems like teachers' salaries being too low and some schools not having enough resources to teach English."

The Chilean government awards scholarships to university students on track to become teachers. These students spend either a term studying English abroad, or a year working as assistants in English-speaking countries. In return the students must work for two years in state-funded school after they qualify as teachers. Many though, like Cuadra, are not planning to stay in the state system. "I think two years is enough. The money is much better in private schools, not to mention the better teaching environment," she said.

Currently 8,200 English teachers work in establishments that receive state funding and 5,400 of these teachers have participated in courses designed to develop and update their language skills. The courses are offered on Saturday mornings, sometimes with an additional weeknight, and teachers contribute about $ 160 towards course fees with the government covering the remaining 85% of costs.

The government is hoping that the first formal assessment of teachers' English skills, which is scheduled to take place in 2011, will show that the training has delivered results. Next year all teachers in government funded schools will be expected to have reached B2 on the CEFR framework. The fate of teachers who do not achieve the level has still to be revealed.

Isabel González, director of the Opens Doors programme, says its rationale is simple. "English is imperative to Chile in terms of business investment. Raising the level of English in schools will ultimately lead to a higher-quality workforce which will in turn attract foreign investment and increase economic development."

But she acknowledges that Chile's relative isolation has been a major challenge in the drive to improve skills. "Chile's geographical, economic and cultural characteristics have limited communication between the majority of our population and English-speaking communities. This isolation makes the quality of English learning and student motivation quite difficult."

In an attempt to connect students and teachers, English speaking volunteers have been invited into Chilean classrooms, in an exchange project supported by the UN Development Programme. Since 2004 almost 1,400 volunteers have been placed in schools.

"The students benefitted from having the presence of a native speaker in the classroom," said Emily Edwards from the UK, who worked as a British Council language assistant in the southern Chilean city of Concepción in 2008. "Many of them just needed the push of believing they were dealing with a non-Spanish speaker to spur them into talking in English in the class."

However not everyone is happy with the way in which native-speaker assistants are used. Katty Kaufmann, a leading English interpreter and former director of a major US study and volunteer-abroad programme in Chile, is critical of the lack of training. "Neither the volunteers nor the teachers receive sufficient instruction on how the assistants should be used in the classroom. Most teachers simply don't know the capacity in which they should use the volunteers. The assistants could be helpful, but an effective policy needs to be implemented."

Kauffman, who works with high-level government personnel across the southern hemisphere says Chile is far behind its stated goals. "English in Chile at international standards? We're not even in the neighbourhood of international standards," she said.

That view is shared by Jorge Cuevas, who supervises English language teaching at Bolivariana University in Los Angeles, near Santiago. "The government feels pressure to conform to international standards because of Chile's new political standing in the world, for example as a recent OECD member, but the reality is we are very far from achieving these standards," he said.

"Although it is possible all teachers may reach level B2 in the national testing, I think it is highly unlikely students will reach the goals that have been set. Even if they did, the TOEIC(r) Bridge test the government is planning to use only tests passive skills, so speaking levels will still be substandard."

Government expenditure on Opens Doors is approximately $ 10m annually, but while the investment is welcomed questions remain about how the programme is being implemented. Kauffman cites bureaucracy as the "greatest shortcoming of the programme".

"You have tremendously valuable ideas buried in paperwork. The programme could succeed if they get rid of the red tape, start to analyse and come up with quantifiable means to ascertain the programme goals."

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.

English Opens Doors in the news

[UPDATE: Bizarrely, the article has been deleted. I've re-posted the full text here.]

This article is about English Opens Doors, the Ministry of Education program I technically work for. It's a well-nuanced article talking about the ups and downs of the volunteer program. The goal is for all high school seniors to be basically conversant by 2013--level B1 is the first level of "Independent User"--which I hope no one is taking too seriously.

The comments about how no one knows how the program should work to be most effective are spot-on. Every school and every teacher have different ideas about this; unfortunately, some teachers just view it as a way to lighten their workload, for example while having the volunteer teach their classes while they read a book. I've been extremely fortunate with Marcela and INSUCO, who are very supportive and very open to my ideas of how and what to teach. I guess "open" doesn't quite cover it, as they've generously assumed I know what I'm doing and let me have complete independence.

I wonder how successful the program is in terms of the Chilean system, though. My kids are definitely learning and retaining stuff, and feeling more comfortable saying things in English, and (with a couple exceptions) enjoying a good relationship with a caring adult from another culture, and I think that's the most important thing. But what does the Ministry of Education think is the most important thing? I'm skeptical that my kids will do better in the nutty Chilean English curriculum, or on the standardized tests that will measure their progress.

That's not why I'm here, though.

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.

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.