Carnaval Weekend

Carnaval!
This weekend has been great, long, relaxing, and exciting. There is something about being here in Buenos Aires that enables us to stay up with the locals until the wee hours; it is the subtle rush of seeing new things coupled with surprises around every corner. This weekend has been our opportunity to get to know our area well. We used all of the public transportation available to push our territory that we are comfortable traveling to by taking the bus, train, taxis, hired cars, walking, and my favorite the catamaran. Public transportation is what we have found to be our best option for getting out and sightseeing and doing the things that we came here to do. A train ride from place to place will cost us around .80 pesos or twenty cents American, the bus is the same but it has more stops and although they go to places off the beaten path of the train it can be much more time consuming due to frequent stops and traffic. Taxis are easily hailed especially around tourist hot-spots and we have had great experiences with our cabbies working with our in-expertise with the city and Castillano. Now that www.Globalearn-IT.com has provided us with a cell phone (and a nice one, Sony Ericson Walkman phone) we are able to take advantage of our most luxurious mode of transport, the car service next to our apartment. Our driver Herman is super nice and we can call them 24 hours, or just walk over there and talk to them about where we want to go or return from. It has been advised to us to avoid trains and buses at night so we take a bus or train somewhere in the afternoon for .80 pesos and then call the car later from wherever we end up at and a return trip for up to a 40 minute car ride has not been more than 25 US dollars. We are getting to know Herman and he has proven to be one of our many new friends that we can depend on. Last night we went to a spot for pizza close to our apartment and I noticed our first new friend Victor, the waiter that took great care of us the first night we arrived. I told him that it has been a week since we got here (it has been wonderful) and how excited I am to find our first new friend hanging out at our favorite pizza place. He remembered us well and insisted on buying us our pizza. We spent the rest of the night with Victor and his “future wife” learning new Spanish words and helping Victor practice his English. This is just one example of the locals opening up to us and genuinely wanting to bridge our cultural gap. Every where we go we find people who are excited for the opportunity to share intimate details about this beautiful city, the City of the Sun. I found the sandwich that will become my staple for the remainder of my stay as well. It is lomo, or sandwich del lomo… A tender steak on a large hamburger bun with a fried egg, sliced tomatoes lettuce and roasted sweet pepper. It is so delicious to use a knife and fork to eat for a late breakfast or lunch. Stay tuned for my slide-show of our catamaran tour of Tigre. Chao.

Friday, March 4

Our first week of school has gone by very quickly. It was the students’ second week of school for this year so today in the morning they finished with some pre-evaluations. The evaluations were in Spanish, one was math and the other was reading comprehension and some spelling as well. The next round of evaluations will be at the end of next month. In the afternoon today (during the English part of the day) our students completed their writing projects about their first day of school. During the last couple hours I went to the junior 5 group to discuss carnival (the holiday this weekend similar to our mardi gras) and to give them a chance to practice English and to ask some questions about America. After that I went to help the literature teacher with library time by reading some books aloud to a junior 2 class and then rejoining my students for their library time and reading aloud to them as well. The library of English books that the school has is a couple of large boxes that they bring up to the cafeteria where the students sit and listen to a story and then pick out a book to check out for the week. This period is very similar to what my American students do for library time but they do not have as large of a book collection to choose from. After these read-alouds I went up to the junior 6 group to talk with them about our family traditions in the United States. The are reading the book The War With Grandpa so the discussion was mainly focused on family life, but we also talked about family traditions such as Thanksgiving. This completed our tour of each class so we have had a chance to talk with all the classes and answer questions that they have about us and our lives in America. Next week we will continue to work with the upper grades on some different writing projects as well as our daily routines with our Junior three groups. Next week carnival is on Monday and Tuesday so we have a long weekend. From what we learned from the Junior 5 group today it seems as though carnival is a big multi day celebration with lots of food in the streets, decorations made out of old cloths hanging all over, live music, dancing in the heat, and people throwing lots of water around to cool off. It sounds like fun to me and I will post more about the details after I experience it.

Thursday, March 4

We are getting close to the end of our first week here and the school routine is beginning to fall into place. Today the book sale was in the lobby of the school for the students to buy the books that they will need for classes throughout the year. Our junior 3 class is going to be reading a Penguin Books version of Rohld Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was exited to see this book choice (and to pick one up for 35 pesos) because it is one that I remember well from my elementary school days (and a good addition to my library for future students.) Today our class had physical education in the morning for an hour during which the boys and girls had separate classes. They wore different uniforms to school today for PE class. Our boys were doing line drills with a rugby ball and then they played team handball. The PE class for the boys was in the courtyard where they play soccer during their breaks throughout the day and the girls were upstairs in the drama room which is like a multipurpose room with a stage. We had lessons as usual with math in Spanish in the morning and English in the afternoon. The students had drama as well in the afternoon and during this time Stephanie and I went to the junior 4 class to answer questions that they prepared to ask us. We were happy to have the opportunity to answer questions that they had about us and our culture, they are especially interested in learning about our families. The next time we meet with the junior four class we will be helping them to do some English writing about their lives, an autobiography of some sort. We shared Girl Scout’s Thin Mints with the faculty today and they liked our American cookies. I found the best appetizer I have ever eaten tonight at dinner. Cerviche, a mix of salmon and langusitna (small lobster) cooked cold with lime juice mixed with tomato, onion and cilantro which you eat on toasted bread like bruschetta, me encanta.

Tercer Dia

Our third day in school was great again. I think that I have learned all of the names of my students, remembering the difference between Julia, Julieta, y Juliet was the hard part. We did not have a special today and I was with the junior 3 class for the entire day. In the morning we worked on math in English. Our students are practicing counting by tens and hundreds as well as adding two digit numbers in the context of story problems. Our school does not have a photocopier so the teacher does not use as many work sheets as we do in our US schools; instead the students must copy all of their work in what they call their “copy book”. (I will try to post some pictures of students’ work in the future) I think that this procedure is beneficial for the students because during their math lessons they are working on dictation as they are expected to write neatly in cursive the story problems that the teacher either writes on the board or reads out loud to them. The students have a copy book for math with and a copy book for writing (Spanish) and a copy book for English. They are not spiral notebooks, but hard cover books with blank lined pages. During our Spanish writing time after math in the morning our teacher read a story out loud. The students were working on their comprehension as well as writing as they were asked to re-write a summary of the story in their copy books. Some students finish with their writing sooner than others; after they are checked by the teacher they were asked to draw a picture to accompany their summary. This is how our morning was spent and me and Stephanie went back to our apartment for a leftover cold pizza lunch. Last night we went to Pizza Mundo for dinner, a pizzeria that has eighty different pizzas on the menu. During one of our breaks I asked another teacher what is their favorite kind from Pizza Mundo and she told us it is napoletina, which has huevos duro (hard boiled eggs). After lunch the students must use only English. We talked about family and they asked me questions about my family and I asked them questions about theirs. I gave them as much vocabulary as I could and then the students wrote a paragraph about their family which they then read out loud to the class. After that I read a story aloud that they have been working on called The First Day of School, and then the students took turns either reading parts of the story out loud or retelling the story in their own words (depending on their confidence in English). Today was a good day and it was hot in the sun after school at the flag lowering. Tomorrow we are going to spend our last hour talking with the junior 4 class to help them hear and practice speaking English.

Segundo Dia

Our second day at the school was great. The students are so bright and curious about us and our culture. In the halls the students from other classes all want to practice their English on us by saying "hello, and how are you?" We are working with what they call junior 3 (third grade)throughout the day and taking the last hour to work with some upper grades. The first part of the day is all in Spanish, and the second half is all in English (including break time outside in a beautiful courtyard where they jump rope or play futbol or cards) Today we went up to junior 6 and the students had prepared some questions to ask us. They are working on interviewing skills like taking notes which are collected and graded by their teacher the following day. The students' questions were great and their interest in our lives in America was flattering. The only confusion I had was when one young man asked me how did I get up this morning? I told him I have an alarm set on my cell phone, to which he re-stated his question, did I feel good this morning (como te sientes hoy cuando levantes?). This is just one example of the type of kindness that we have found to be typical of our new friends in Argentina. Another friendly exchange worth mentioning was our adventure for helado a noche (ice cream last night) where we were welcomed to try small spoonfuls of each flavor, nothing like some taste testing to break the language barrier, and for a minute I felt like I was at 31 flavors until we sat outside to enjoy a lovely patio seat and to watch the tall palms that line the road sway in the wind.

Arival

We got to Buenos Aires after our plane was delayed for twelve hours in Houston. The first day at the school was great. We met our students and also had a meeting with the English Headmaster do discuss what other types of things that we can do to help the school. At the end of the day the students wait in lines outside in the courtyard as the flag is taken down. It was windy today and the flag was wrapped up so I was able to help right away in retrieval; as I did so the headmaster said that what she needed was a man to do the job. The students told me that I am the first male teacher that they have had. I hope that I can be share my positive attitude an enthusiasm for learning with them in these next couple months. Our supervising teachers are very nice young ladies who's classrooms are much simpler than what we are used to in the states. My first impressions of Buenos Aires are great. We had a nice dinner late last night. From what we understand it is normal to eat dinner around eleven pm but our bodies are not used to that quite yet. We just shared a frozen pizza at our apartment and are going to go out for ice cream (helado). Hablaremos con mas detalles manana.