Earthquake! (And other natural disasters)

Before I came to Mexico, my only experience of an earthquake was in an earthquake simulation room at the Natural History Museum in London. It felt pretty ‘cool’ to feel the ground shaking underneath me and to see the walls and the items on the shelves swaying to and fro. I spent a little bit too much time there, which would be fine if I was with a family or if I was part of a school group, but I was a vertically-challenged adult all alone on a half day that I had from work. But little did I know that I would actually experience an earthquake for myself… kind of.

It really was the most uneventful occurrence. I just remember hearing some rattling as I was teaching my 5^th Grade kids. I thought it was just a really heavy vehicle driving past along the road, so I didn’t even bat an eyelid. That was until a student asked me if I had just felt that.

“Felt what?” I asked. “That was just a really big truck or something dri-“

“No, no – teacher! That was an earthquake!” they all pretty much said.

As I quickly rewound what happened in my head, I realised that I heard the door shaking, but even then I kind of dismissed the idea that I had just experienced an earthquake, because according to the earthquake simulator that I was in, which must be true, (and the information desks around the display, of course), I thought that earthquakes were more dramatic. But a friend of mine likewise reported that her students also confirmed we had all in fact experienced an earthquake. Unless it was a really, really big lorry that made its way down to her side of the school, too, which I think is still a strong possibility.

Even though nothing happened during that incident, thank God, and I haven’t experienced anything similar since, it was an eye-opener. I am living in a country where earthquakes take place pretty regularly (well, more so than what I’m used to), where in previous years they have been pretty destructive. This information fed my fear monster that I’ve already spoken about on numerous occasions, and my imagination ran wild… until I forgot about it… and now that I’m writing about it, I’m reminded about it again. Curses.

Two weeks before I arrived in Mexico, I remember hearing about a hurricane that slightly damaged the area that I would be living in, and that freaked me out a bit. I have experienced strong wind, but the only damage I have personally seen the wind do was blow down a tree outside my classroom, which was the school news story of the day.

Speaking of other natural disasters, I had always found it amusing that Mexican schools have a rain day. So whenever it rains, schools and parents are on the lookout to see if the government will suspend classes. And it’d always be a running joke on a Sunday night that the teachers at my school would wish for rain so that they didn’t have to go into school on a Monday morning. I thought it was funny, because if that were the case in England then there wouldn’t be any school, ever. Ok, well maybe for about a month, but that’s it. But then I understood why that happened when it rained heavily in September last year. Certain areas of my town were flooded, and school was suspended for about two weeks. Teachers at my school still had to go to school, even though no students were present, so be careful for what you wish for. But this incident will be explained fully in a later post.

And I just want to mention one more thing that happened as recently as this week. I know, I’m so behind, that this is actually surprising. As a teacher of the primary school, we have to escort the kids to their cars. But one day this week, I saw what looked like some sort of huge dust cloud blowing towards the school. But a teacher with a petrified look on her face told the teachers to get the kids inside the school – immediately.

It turns out that my ‘dust cloud’ was in fact a massive swarm of bees and they were hovering around the school gates. I’ve never seen anything like it before and we had to rush the kids safely into the closest classroom. The bees finally settled in a tree right by the school gates and formed a nest on one of the branches of the tree. It was a horrible ordeal because there were so many flying around the young kids. And I tried my best to look calm and collected even though I was screaming in my head, as only one bee terrifies me, much less a whole colony of them. I think I held it together though, so I’m giving myself a pat on the back.

This is an example of what it looked like…

I guess the point of this post is that these personal experiences with nature has opened up my eyes to how I’m no longer living in my little bubble in London; I’m becoming more respectfully aware my natural surroundings.

European invasion

Most people’s exposure to the English language in Mexico has been through the U.S., through films, music, tourists and teachers, etc.

And since people, especially in my town, are used to seeing U.S. foreigners, they naturally assumed that my housemates and I were also ‘gringos’ or from some other country until we opened our mouths. Then they were pleasantly surprised to hear that we were collectively from the UK and Spain, Europe, and that we were all English teachers at a local school. They would then say that we’ve travelled far to live and work in Mexico. Going out together as a unit, we obviously stood out and we received a lot of attention, as though we were Z-list celebrities or something. They loved Sara’s Spanish accent, they loved Martin belting out karaoke songs, and they loved the fact that I was black; I’ll go into this in more depth in another post.

I know that there have been a couple of English teachers from the UK at the school that I teach at, but I’m pretty sure that most of the TEFL teachers have been from the U.S. Even so, our merry crew grew bigger when two more TEFL teachers arrived from England – Laura and Jen. Well actually, they dramatically escaped from the clutches of a draconian Chinese school to arrive in Mexico apparently, but that’s neither here nor there. The fact is that they added a distinctive British flavor to our European mix, with their tea-sipping, curry-cooking ways, and it was just refreshing to have some more fun people to hang out with. Every single one of us in the group had a different accent from England, and our eclectic mix was music to my ears. There’s a common misconception around the world that there is only one British accent, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, and I’m trying to change that one classroom at a time. I’m useless at accents though, so I just use a video instead to demonstrate this.

  

If they have the budget to do so, schools around the world often desire to hire native English-speaking teachers, and you can find many of these adverts online. According to this article a few years ago, approximately 250,000 native English speakers work abroad as English teachers in more than 40,000 schools and language institutes around the world. There are a number of advantages for getting native speakers in the classroom. But it doesn’t mean that non-native English-speaking teachers are ‘less superior’, and Sara is an excellent example to demonstrate that they are just as good.

Even though some people become TEFL teachers because they have a genuine desire to teach, I would say that most become TEFL teachers so that they can immerse themselves in another culture and earn money while they travel. And because of this short-term outlook, there is a high turnover rate of TEFL teachers. In my school alone, there were five different teachers over the course of the school year for one post. In general, some teachers leave without warning, as I’ve described in an earlier post, and this can be very disruptive for the children’s learning. Some have unrealistic expectations of what TEFL teaching is all about, and then they decide that they no longer like it. Some people aren’t meant to be teachers, as I’ll discuss later when I talk about how I heard one teacher ‘disciplined’ their kids. Some find better opportunities elsewhere. And even if teachers stay till the end of their contract, most move to another country or city, or they go home; few stay for another year, but this depends on a number of factors, such as your region and your pay. And schools are put under pressure by parents to fill these gaps, especially if the school is a private school. But some schools also treat teachers badly, forcing the teachers to leave. Or they can get rid of teachers at a moment’s notice if they suddenly have alternatives to choose from.

As a group of TEFL teachers, we’ve been on a number of memorable adventures together. A particularly memorable one involved the Mexican police, which was actually my second encounter with the Mexican police, and this will all be explained in another post. As a group, we have also gone through a number of changes, numerically speaking. Sara left, but then a new Irish girl arrived. Her name is Shauna and she has some crazy artistic talent. Laura and Jen left, then our European group declined to three again. Two more people from the UK are due to come in October, so we’ll see what happens then. After umming and ahing for the longest time, I’ve finally decided to stay for another year in the same place. I’ve been told that it will be a lot easier, and that I’ll notice the children’s progress even more. Watch this space.

  

  

  

Proud Parent

Hi! In this post, I talk about the first time I felt like a proud parent as a TEFL teacher. Who knew I’d feel like this? Maybe my family knew because I cried during The Lion King, and for every sad film since that film they would look in my direction to inspect if my eyes welled up. That’s not to say that I cried or anything, not this time. But anyway, I digress. My kids had to recite English poems in front of a ‘large’ audience.

Learning curve

The notion of non-English school kids being disciplined and well-behaved is a myth; whoever came up with that idea is a liar and should be punished! In fact, it probably came from some schoolteacher in a desperate bid to try and install some discipline in the classroom.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the picture-perfect image of smiling kids, who eagerly cling on to a teacher’s every word, quickly dissipated. To be fair, my 1st, 2nd and 3rd Graders weren’t children from hell, but they definitely were challenging, particularly the 3^rd Graders.

I learnt so much while teaching them during that first full week. I learnt how to think quickly on my feet. For example, if an activity wasn’t working, then I had to change it up a bit on the spot. And who knew that the ABC song would have a pied-piper effect on the 1st Graders? Whenever they heard the song, no matter what activity they were doing at that point in time, or how noisy they were, they would stop immediately without fail, and chime in at the top of their lungs, as if the song triggered some kind of hypnosis.

I’ve already explained in a previous blog post that I don’t have the best memory when it comes to names. During the previous week, I got them to write their names on the board, write their name cards for their cubby holes, and then I wrote their names on a piece of paper. I learnt the names of, shall we say, some of the more disruptive kids in the class first, because of the amount of times I had to say their names. But by the end of the week, I had learnt the names of all 37 of my students, which really was an amazing feat for me as it usually takes me an age to learn just one name. So to learn people’s names in the future, I now know that I not only have to see it written down, I also need to repeat it several times for it to be etched into my brain.

      

I learnt that I’m not actually as bad at drawing as I thought I was. I was pretty much forced to be more creative with my hands, as most of the learning aids that accompanied the course books had apparently been destroyed by a hurricane around five years ago.

   

                                        

I learnt that despite my preconceived idea that younger kids are ‘harder to handle’, the youngest grades weren’t actually that badly behaved; it was the older kids who posed the biggest problem.

I learnt that I apparently only really became a teacher when I was inundated with so much work that I had to stay behind after-hours just to try and catch up with everything. One late afternoon as I was stuck behind my desk, I heard a cackle outside.

“You’re a real teacher now,” Yudith, the 2^nd Grade teacher, playfully said with a cheeky grin on her face as she made her way home, because I was still working.

Yudith is quite a character; she makes me laugh and I know that her comment wasn’t malicious. She was one of the first “Spanish teachers” to start talking to me, and she let me borrow her paint so that I could decorate the windows in my classroom, but anyway, I digress.

I learnt about how loving, thoughtful and generous kids could be. I received love from them in the form of a gift, such as a sweet, a flower or even ‘just’ a hug. Teenagers tend to be ‘too cool’ to show this kind of affection and appreciation, but I discovered how unashamed ‘my kids’ were to express these feelings. I learnt about their capacity to ‘forgive’. I would tell someone off for doing something and they would huff and puff about getting into trouble, but the very next day they would act as if nothing happened and that everything in their world was bright and rosy, until they got into trouble again.

And finally, I discovered that I could bond with the kids so much so, that I felt as though I was their parent. I genuinely felt proud and happy for the children once I could see that ‘aha moment’ in their eyes and their expressions – the moment that they understood what I was teaching them. I had to stop arguments and then get them to ‘make up’ or at least tolerate each other. I saw them at their most vulnerable points, such as when I consoled them as they cried; I had to do all sorts. And even though at times they got on my last nerve, they were my kids. And I didn’t fully realise that I had this feeling until I had to think really hard about leaving them, when I was offered to teach the older grades, as an opening suddenly arose…

Let’s talk about Alba…

Hey guys!

So here’s my latest Vlog on my experience in Mexico. This episode is about my landlady, “la jefa/the boss”.

Enjoy! 🙂

My epic journey: added extras

‘Ello, ‘ello!

I thought I should start doing some Vlogging while I’m out in Mexico as well, so here’s the first of what I hope to be quite a few.

Enjoy!

Monique 🙂