El juego de las llantas

Monday
October 1, 2007

I realize it’s been over a month but I’ve been busy. I’ve been adjusting. I know it’s no proper excuse but that’s the one I’m going to give. The hardest adjustment I have had to go though, beating out a change of country, a change of home, language, and climate, is that for the first time in my entire life I actually have a 9 to 5. It really sucks. I actually get up at the same time every single day. I haven’t even mastered the alarm function on my clock since there is no need to change it. When I go to the supermarket, it’s packed. I rush home in time to get to the bank. When I think about planning a trip to Six Flags, my head aches at the thought of the lines because I can only go on the weekend. I’m extremely grateful for something very important, though. I’m thankful that I am a teacher and that my days go by relatively quickly. Who am I kidding? The days and weeks have been going by extremely quickly. Now that I am in a rhythm of making sure every minute of class is productive, classes go by fast and I never get bored. Things get the most tricky when I find myself in a lull and can’t figure out what to do next. 75% of the material in my classes is predictable but the other 25% is due to changes based on the class size and the behavior and level of productivity of the class on a particular day. Today, for example, I had a killer time with my 3rd graders. They are the worse behaved class and what adds to the stress is that there is a strong gap in English proficiency among the students.

This week each student will be reading a story. Today I started with an introduction to the new vocabulary. Well, I had to break up my 3rd graders into groups because some are reading a more advanced story than others. It was a disaster because the minute I leave one group to work alone, they go crazy. We got nothing done. It was so annoying. This was obviously poor planning on my part and I suffered as a result. But, when I plan successfully, class is a breeze. It’s really quite amazing how one class can fly by while another can be a nightmare that never ends. At least now I know something important about my 3rd graders.

In my last entry, I wrote about how I was just about to move into my apartment. well, I am indeed in Polanco – home of “fresas,” “ricos,” and most importantly, Jews. Lots and lots of Jews. People call my area of Polanco “little Jerusalem.” It’s awesome. I feel so much closer to home. Today I went down the street to eat at an Israeli restaurant I had seen. It turns out it was just a poster for take-out, but my search will continue. I am excited though because today I found a market specializing in Arab products and the Catalan owner told me of a good restaurant about 15 minutes from my house. Later on in the week I’ll check it out. I’m dying for Middle Eastern food.

My apartment is great. It’s 200 square meters and as I mentioned before, I have my own full bathroom. The kitchen is awesomely big and I have all the knives I could possibly desire. That, my friends, is the huge plus of living with a married couple. They have the house-ware hook-up. It’s great. They even have a juicer. I’m still not thrilled about my neighborhood in general but I’ve been spending a lot of Saturdays in the neighborhood where Mauricio lives so I do get to buy groceries at the tianguis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianguis).

Until mid November my roommate, Flora, will be taking me to Santa Fe in the morning. She teaches at 7am in a school near Westhill so I get a ride every morning. In the afternoons I have been doing a few different things. On Mondays and Fridays I get a ride from the 3rd grade Spanish teacher. She lives in Polanco and drops me off near where I live. I enjoy these days because she is good at making conversation and we always find something interesting to talk about.

On Tuesdays I go home with Marisa, the art teacher. She is closer to my age and is a huge mountain bike rider and all around athlete. So, on Tuesdays she takes me to Chapultepec to go running. On Wednesdays and Thursdays I tutor a 4th grader from Colombia. Her family pays for my taxi home so I go home alone on these days. I’m hoping to change my tutoring days to Monday and Wednesday so I can run with Marisa on Thursdays too. Marisa is definitely one of my favorite Westhill employees. She is half American and half Mexican and we are very similar. Every Thursday during 4th – 6th grade lunch, we have recess duty. Last week some 6th graders found three tires and started playing a jumping challenge game with them. Everyone formed a line across the playground from the tires. Two boys were in charge of setting up the tires for the “runner” to try to jump over. Any other teacher would have prohibited this but Marisa and I have similar tomboy backgrounds and both understand that risking getting hurt is the only way some can really have fun. Plus, we understand the fact that the playground for the elementary school is really quite pathetic and the fact these boys were able to have fun with a resource they found is quite commendable. Fortunately nobody got hurt and I was left with quite the lasting impression. Initially I designated myself as official tire alignment checker. I wanted to make sure that these boys didn’t attempt something so hard that it would only result in broken bones. So, upon seeing an absolutely impossible arrangement of tires I told the boys to make it easier. They assured me that it was a proper challenge for the boy next in line and so I braced myself to run to the nurse to call an ambulance. Well, what in my mind was surely an impossible figure to jump over was absolutely feasible for some of these boys. From then on I let them set up the tires however they wanted. I just make sure they didn’t jump them with lollipops in their mouths.