My hour and 23 minutes at school....

Another colossal waste of a day. I got to school a few minutes before 12 p.m. to pick up my paycheck from Lourdes before my Coordinación (prep) period with Anotonio, the 3rd and 4th grade science teacher. We don't have classes next week, so there wasn't really much to plan.

Instead, he had gotten his hands on one of my passover worksheets. He had read the sheet and wanted me to explain some of the words on the sheet, along with details I had left off the worksheet. We had a great conversation: he eagerly took notes while I explained the seder plate.

Afterwards, I was supposed to be in his 4th grade science class for half an hour, but the students were taking a test. Instead, I moved my 30 minute coordinación with Ana up to the first half hour. We chatted for 20 minutes (we don't have school next week!) about upcoming units. The four year olds are going to be learning about foods. Their workbook has 30 words for them to learn. These include the meals of the day, dishes and silverware, foods, drinks, and feelings (hungry and thirsty). Ana doesn't think we're going to talk about all of the words, but I should prepare more coloring sheets for a lot of the foods and the dishes.....ahhhh, coloring. Ana's favorite activity.

A beach mural for the four year olds

The four year olds are learning about the beach. Words like splash, shell, pail, umbrella and sun are part of this unit. For whatever reason, Ana thought it would be wise for them to color (her favorite activity!) pictures of seashells that came with the ridiculous sticker-happy book we use. They then had to cut the shells out and glue them to a huge piece of brown paper. It took two class periods for the kids to do all of this (even after 1.5 hours some still weren't done).

Most of them were able to do this by themselves (even the cutting and gluing). One child, whom Ana and Erin (who went to this class from October to February) had nicknamed Juan Antonio "wild animal" because he is constantly disrupting the class, had finished coloring before today's class. He's really active so I had him help me put the other student's work into their cubbies (Ana though I could do this myself....I don't have any idea which kid's stuff goes where - I've only been to three classes). Then, she wanted me to help him cut his shells. I swear the kid was so excited about cutting that he almost took my fingers off with safety scissors.

She also made me supervise the gluing process which turned out to be hell because the kids don't understand anything about personal space. To get to a place around the poster kids were trampling others and flat-out stomping on the poster. One girl almost cried because a boy put glue on the H at the end of "The Beach" which she was supposed to be coloring pink. I told her to color around it and not to worry, but still, tears formed. At this point, Ana was out in the hallway chatting with the other preschool teachers.

The lesson was a large waste of time, especially because Ana had made me print out other pictures for the kids to color (these were tossed aside on the desk). I'm also pretty sure that I didn't speak English the entire time I was in the classroom. I'm not sure why I even went.

Passover with 3rd grade=failure

Ana decided that I could only have 15 minutes to teach the third grade about Passover. This wasn't nearly enough time because 5 minutes was wasted on telling them that the language on the board was Hebrew (they were convinced it was Chinese). The kids weren't that interested in the material because it was 1:48 and school ends at 2. They just wanted to get out of there and had already sat through 48 minutes of Ana and I telling them a story about a butterfly who goes from the USA to go south in September because of migratory patterns. By November, Mora the Monarch is in Mexico. She's happy because she has butterfly friends there. I'm not sure if they learned anything, but I'm pretty sure they're going to bring it up with their religion teacher tomorrow....I wonder if I'll get any feedback from her...

Want to see a bunch of 4th graders get so frustrated they fall off their chairs?

Today in 4th-grade English I wrote Passover (Pesach) on the board in Hebrew. This caused a lot of distress among the students who couldn't figure out which English letters I was using.

Ana told them I wasn't writing in English, so they started to guess what language I was using. No, it wasn't Arabic (that was a really good guess though). It wasn't French either (duh! - the girl who said that never pays attention to anything in class).

They listened attentively as I explained Judaism, the Hebrew language and the meaning behind Passover (a very basic version). They had seen a movie (in religion class I think) version of the story so they were pretty familiar with the ideas in Spanish. We looked at picture representations of the plagues and a drawing of a seder plate. I tried to explain matzah, which, in this bread-obsessed country, caused a lot of gagging noises and horrified faces.

The lesson was pretty successful: I maintained their attention and was able to teach them something they would not have otherwise learned. Tomorrow, I'm going to repeat it with the third grade and do another version with the sixth grade.

Butano....

We heat our water and cook on our stove with gas (butane) delivered to our apartment by the "butano man" (okay, this is really just a guy who works for Repsol, the Spanish gas company). Our hot water heater runs out every three to four weeks. Our stove gas had been going strong since we moved into the apartment in October. We were worried that we might run out during our cooking extravaganza on Thanksgiving, but it kept going....until this week.

It ran out Friday afternoon while Erin was trying to make soup. We called to have the tank replaced, but they don't do deliveries Friday afternoons. We had plenty in our hot water tank, so I decided to try to switch the two. It's a really easy mechanism to get the hose off the tank, but when I tried to get the semi-full hot water tank to attach to the kitchen hose, I couldn't.

Cecilia and I spent at least 20 minutes trying to attach it (this is after I had already spent 30 minutes trying it myself...and googling possible solutions).

Christine came over to use our internet and popped the thing on in two seconds. She did the same thing Cecilia and I had been doing; she just seemed to have the right finesse or something. We were pretty pissed that we couldn't get this to work, but she did it instantly. (We were also really happy to have our stove back.)

Anyway, bright and early Saturday morning (we're talking 8:15 a.m.), the butano man came to our rescue and brought us another tank to attach to our hot water heater so our apartment could go back to normal. At least we're getting better at guessing when that one is going to run out (unlike that time Cecilia was partway through a shower....). Needless to say, all butane tanks are staying attached. Although, next time we run out on the hot water heater, I'm going to try again....I'll just leave the functioning tank alone.

Now it's your turn, mom!

Hey mom, this one is for you.

When I was home, my mother told me she wanted Chinese food because they had a "Chinese cooking demo" on the Today Show. What they did was take leftover rice, veggies, an egg and soy sauce and turn that into fried rice. Tonight, I decided to give it a try. I had made brown rice last night with steamed carrots and sauteed onions with garlic and ginger. I took the onions and some raw asparagus and put it in the sauté pan. I quick steamed/stir fried the asparagus (not letting it cook all the way) with the onion mixture. Next, I added the egg and stirred that around. Then I added the carrots and rice and kept stirring. Finally, I added a splash of soy sauce.

It came out really yummy. Okay mom, now it's your turn!

Jaen

Friday afternoon Maricarmen (Cecilia's coworker) drove me to Jaen where a friend, Jolinda, lives. We met at orientation; she works at an elementary school there (same job as me).

I got to Jaen at 6pm Friday and we went out for a walk around the "city." Jaen has a population of around 100,000, which makes it a small city, but four times as large as Priego. To me, this was a much larger place than where I live, so I thought of Jaen as huge. They have a train station (with service to Madrid, Cordoba and Sevilla), a Corte Ingles and museums/theater events/CULTURE!

We went to Corte Ingles where I bought chocolate soy milk (juice box sized for travel) and corn tortillas. We also went to Jaen's library so Jolinda could return, and take out new, CDs. Their library was small, but made Priego's look doll-sized. Saturday we went to a farmer's market and made soup during the afternoon. Then we walked around Jaen and tried to go to the hilltop castle. We never made it because it got too late (the sun was going down) and our Lonely Planet directions were pretty terrible. We spent that evening watching Mad Men.


While walking, we stumbled upon this group of people practicing for Semana Santa. During Holy Week, brotherhoods get together and parade through the streets with floats/statues on platforms supported by the people's necks and heads.

Sunday I went to a few museums and restored arab baths. The baths were cool, but looked like similar ones I had seen in the Alahambra (in Granada). The Museo de Arte Naif (Museum of Naive Art) was interesting because it had a small collection of paintings from the 1960s-1980s which were colorful, some even had purple mountains with pink trees. They looked like something a child would do. Additionally, there were framed cross stitch and needle work pictures on display, which I had never seen before in a museum. Another thing that struck me was that most of the art was donated to the museum by the artists rather than by donors or art collectors.

The other museum I went to housed a special exhibit of Eugenio Chicano's paintings. He takes traditional still life paintings and adds computer icons to them. In doing that, he mixes art history and modern technology. I really enjoyed the exhibit and asked the guards if there were any brochures with more information on the artist. They only had the exhibition catalogue (a decent sized-book), which they gave me for free! I was really surprised and excited about this.


One of Eugenio Chicano's paintings.

That afternoon, Jolinda and I went for a walk to a new park. Everything was really colorful: the track was red, blue and orange. Purple fences separated different play areas. It was very architecturally modern, but not so well-built. As we walked, we noticed the track was inclined slightly (literally we went downhill on onside and had to come uphill on the other). There were also exercise machines on either sides of the fountain (in the middle of the track). Next to the fountain was a big balance machine. It was almost like a bridge where people stood on one cable and held onto another. The entire contraption swayed depending on how the people organized themselves. Basically, adults and children were on either side of this contraption and could have fallen at any moment because people kept getting on and off shifting the balance. (This would never fly in the US.)


We stumbled upon a place serving "cerveza sin gluten" (gluten-free beer), which was odd for such a small city.

All-in-all it was a good weekend. I wound up eating healthier than I normally do because Jolinda is basically on a raw foods diet. She prefers to eat raw fruits and veggies, as well as sunflower seeds, only. She doesn't eat anything with preservatives because she doesn't like what they do to her body. I ate well, but had a big bowl of cereal for breakfast when I got home this morning!!


I finally tasted chirimoya, which was a pain to eat because of all the seeds (think watermelon seeds on steroids).