The Kiddos

I had the weirdest epiphany while cleaning my white board last week before heading home. There I was, standing there wiping off notes on the "web of life" and this quiet voice peeped up breaking my trance, "Oh Hi Leanne, You know, you could do this teaching thing". I stopped erasing for a moment and there the voice was again, a little stronger, "Yeah, you could be a teacher Leanne, you even like this." Wow. Ever since graduation I've been contemplating whether or not teaching is for me. I haven't been certain I want to make a career of it, and quite frankly I still haven't decided, but that small voice was so encouraging as I was in the midst of my first full week teaching my own class. That reassurance that this is where I'm supposed to be right now. You want to know why? My kiddos. It always comes back to them. Maybe I'm not crazy about teaching biology, but I'll tell you what, I'm crazy about my students. Sometimes they make me crazy but at the end of the day they're just teenagers that want to be loved and accepted and when I boil everything down at the end of my day I just want to love someone and make them feel important. I'd say it works about pretty well.

Alright, enough sap and onto the topic of the blog: the Colombian Student. I've only spent 8 days with my kiddos, but I've observed enough to fill pages of information. For your sake I'll try and

 First and foremost they like to talk in Spanish. I will draw your attention to 2 parts of the statement: #1 “THEY LIKE TO TALK” and then the later #2 “in Spanish.” Before I had arrived at my school I was told that Colombian students like to talk, but I really didn’t take it seriously. Now I understand.  I’ll be talking and there will be about 10 side conversations. In American culture, this is rude. In Colombian culture, this is normal. You can even see it in adults. At our staff meetings there will be several side conversations happening while someone is in the front talking. It’s awfully inefficient because the same things have to be repeated a hundred times, but it’s expected. I can’t handle this for 2 reasons: #1 I hate repeating myself a hundred times and #2 I already speak quietly and don’t like to raise my voice when I teach so then the students who do want to listen can barely hear me. I call students out all the time; they get a little embarrassed, and are less likely to do it again. Less like = they will still talk, but do more multi-listening.  

The second part of that statement was “in Spanish”. Spanish is their first language, so they like to talk to each other in Spanish. I probably say “English please” over 20 times a class period. Most of my kids don’t know I speak Spanish though and it’s quite comical at times. Earlier this week when we were taking notes some girls were talking in Spanish and said, “ah, this class is so boring right now.” One day I’ll drop the bomb and just start talking to them in Spanish. They will be shocked.  I’m trying to come up with a way to keep them speaking in English. I think I’ll have a competition between the classes to see which class can go the longest without using Spanish once in class. I bet my longest class lasts 3 minutes.

I’m sitting here grinning as I’m thinking about this next topic: their English capabilities. Some of them have decent English and some of them have awful English. Sometimes I can’t even understand what they are saying. Last week one girl was trying to tell me about a “bear” and all I could here was “eagle”. I’m not joking. Those words don’t even sound alike! It was so awful. After about 20 seconds of back and forth trying to figure out the word, another student chimed in: “BARE”. Oh….wow. This happens frequently. Some of them know they can’t speak well and are kind of shy about it. Some of them think they can speak well and rattle something off really quickly and I can’t pick out one word. I think most of the time it would be easier for me to just switch to Spanish. That doesn’t help them with their English though, so we will continue struggling. Speaking may be challenging for them, but at least they can understand me.  Most of them have great listening comprehension, so at least they have that going for them.

Another area of speaking that is difficult is my name. Leanne is not common in the Spanish-speaking world. Therefore I have a new name: Leeen. They see my name on the board and it looks like the “e” should be a long sound, so that’s what they say. On Friday I wrote under my name “Li-an”. Finally, one student called me over and said my name right! Score!  Another name they like is just “miss”. Except it’s more like “meeese” (rhymes with geese). We wrote paragraphs on science articles last week and about every 3 seconds someone would whine, “meeese I need help, meeese. Meeese” Ah! Enough to make me crazy. They sound like little mice squeaking at me. I just chuckle to myself. Next week we are going to practice saying both my name and miss. Practice makes perfect? We’ll see.

Something that really impresses me about these students is their attention to detail and how things look. They love to color-code things when they take notes and they make everything look perfect. We had a warm up where they had to draw a globe and label the North Pole and the Magnetic north. I just wanted them to draw a circle, put 2 lines through it, and label each. Well, what I got were students tracing circles so they were perfect, drawing in the continents, coloring the water blue and the land green, getting their rulers out to make perfect lines through the globe and then labeling it. Yeah it looks nice, but it takes about 10 times as long! Alright people, let’s go. Quickly. I don’t think they understand that word. I will teach them.

This happens with boys and girls alike. Last week one of my boys asked me for a blue pen. I though he forgot something to write with so I grabbed a pen and told him it was black. He showed me he already had a black pen but wanted a different color so his notes would look nice. Really? Lol. It just makes me laugh.

Okay, the last thing I’ll share today is their notebooks. This just shocks me. We were warned about this in advance, and I’m very thankful. I would have thought it was really inappropriate, but like the talking thing, this is culturally normal.  Here it is: several of the boys have notebooks with women in bikinis/sexy outfits. Ya know, the kinds you see on posters? Yeah. Again, not joking. I walk around my room and probably 1 of 5 notebooks has some sexy girl on it. These kids are like 13. Really weird for me to see, but I’m told it’s not really a big deal here. I don’t think I’ll get used to that and I don’t like it much. Our director is trying to make policy to make these types of notebooks inappropriate. I think that would be good.  One of the other teachers told his boys to, “take that back to your bedroom where it belongs and please don’t bring it back.”  It’s just strange.

Whew, I’m reaching the end of what I wanted to comment on today. I want to leave with one thought: my students are really pretty wonderful. It’s only been 2 weeks of school, so I’m sure they will get more testy as time progresses,  but really I’m pleased with what I’ve seen so far!