Proud Parent 2

Hi guys! It’s been a while since I last posted, buuutttttt here’s a vlog about the second time that I felt like a proud parent. If you’d like to find out why I was proud the last time, then check this out. Enjoy! 🙂

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.

Curiosity

“Where are you from?

“I’m from London.”

“London?”

“Yep.”

“In England – really? That’s great! Why are you here, in Guaymas?”

That’s pretty much how my first encounter with Mexicans goes, word for word. Well, that’s if they didn’t already ask me if I was from Cuba or Brazil. And this conversation happens quite often, well, less so now here in Guaymas. Guaymas is a small town, especially when compared to London, so I’m pretty sure that most people in the town have already seen me going about my daily errands to ask me whatever questions they may have for me. Therefore it’s definitely not the best place to be if you are trying to avoid somebody, and I’ll talk about that at a later date. Guaymas isn’t even listed in the Lonely Planet Mexico guidebook. And you can see the confusion in people’s faces when I explain that I left my job in London to live and work in Guaymas, a place that they consider to be more ‘boring’ and less prosperous in comparison.

As I’ve already explained in an earlier post, my TEFL teacher friends and I stand out when we hang out together, because we are very clearly not from Mexico and because there isn’t much of a mixture of different ethnic groups here. Since my group of friends mainly consisted of females, we would mainly attract attention from males. Much to the annoyance, or amusement, of two of my friends, because no matter how much the guy persisted in his efforts to win one of them over, they wouldn’t budge, because my two friends are an item.

Quite a few Americans come and go through my area as it’s pretty close to the border and I am pretty sure that Mexicans assume my friends are from the U.S. Mexicans however, don’t have a lot of face-to-face contact with black people, so I’m told, and my friends have pointed out to me the fact that I get a lot of stares. People do come up to me and start speaking to me in Spanish. But when they see the blank expression on my face, they change tactics. So they’ll try and practice their English on me, or they’ll make gestures to try and communicate. For example, someone would gesture for me to dance with them if I was in a club, or gesture for me to take photos with them and all of their family members – as a group and individually, or one time a mother beckoned me with her hand towards her daughter and said (this was translated to me) that her young daughter wanted to hug me. …Yes, you read that correctly, she actually just wanted to hug me… I’ve been told that Mexicans don’t generally point fingers at people because it’s considered rude behaviour, so people haven’t necessarily pointed and stared at me. But you can obviously still point at people by using your words, as one man did, when he walked past me with his daughter in a touristy area in Guadalajara. This is the English equivalent of what he said: “Look child, an African!” I laughed out loud at this father’s statement; that moment couldn’t have felt more surreal.

Then there’s curiosity in the form of hair touching, which can be a pretty touchy subject for black females. Most black women I know would not allow anyone to touch their hair, full stop, no questions asked, because we are not exotic animals that you can stroke and because our hairstyles get easily messed up if someone runs their fingers through our hair. Heck, it even gets messed up if we run our own fingers through our own hair. But how would you know this golden rule if you don’t come in contact with people to tell you this? This is where I personally make exceptions. As much as my eyes twitched when the first kid in the school reached for my hair, I let them do this now without feeling the need to clench my teeth together out of apprehension; just as long as they ask me first. I give a bit more leeway with the younger kids in the school, as they can’t really form the sentences to ask me yet.

“Teacher – muy suave,” one girl excitedly exclaims every single time she touches my hair. Literally, every single time without fail, with the same intonation and everything. “Teacher – very soft,” she means in English.

And I don’t mind adults asking to touch my hair, as long as they ask. It’s actually a nice feeling when people tell you that they like the way you’ve styled your hair, when you know full well that it looks crap, but people don’t know any better because they haven’t been exposed to people with the same hair texture as you. Whereas if you left the house with that same hairstyle, your family and friends would probably die from not being able to breathe as they are laughing at you so much. Yes, I am the ‘you’ that is so often referred to in the above scenarios, and yes, I do get away with a lot of hair offences, unless I decide to film a vlog. Damn technology. But I’m very low maintenance with my hair, and I don’t care too much about it. What I do care about, however, is if I have given you permission to touch my hair and then it’s very noticeably messed up after you harassed it. That happened one time, and I was pissed off. Or, the worst is when no permission is asked at all and I feel my hair being tugged from behind me. That’s happened to me, twice. That really pissed me off. They are lucky they did that to me; they definitely would not have survived if it was another black woman.

All jokes and exaggeration aside though, from the people that I’ve met so far, I can honestly say that Mexicans are generally very friendly and I have never experienced any racism while I’ve been in Mexico, from a Mexican. The only racism I have experience was from a young American teacher on the bus one day. She said: “Don’t people get scared of you and move away because of your darker skin?” I really had no words to waste on her and my conversation with her ended abruptly. But that has not been my experience so far with Mexicans; they have just been very curious.

Discipline

Hi guys!!!!! So this vlog is about discipline at my school, more in my classroom more specifically. I talk about how sometimes this may be hard to carry out, especially if a child has done something that is quite funny.

Kids can be challenging and they can stress you out at time. But you should NOT be a teacher if you think disciplining kids involves throwing objects at them, as one teacher did in another school. This was caught on camera, and she was rightly sacked. I forgot to mention this in the video, so I thought I’d post it here instead.

Enjoy! 🙂

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.

Re-introduction

“Ok, so guess which one is the lie,” I excitedly told all of my soon-to-be new kids after I quickly introduced myself.

“My first fact is that I have danced in front of millions. My second fact is that I am in a Hollywood movie, which you will be able to see in cinemas in two years’ time. My third fact is that I have three sisters,” I said, as I stood in front of the class, three different times, for three different grades.

“The first one!” said one girl.

“No!! The second one!” said another.

Others chimed in, and it was amusing to hear their reasons for why they thought their selected ‘fact’ was a lie.

“She can’t be in a movie – come on!” shouted a boy.

“But she has not danced in front of so many people!”

Once I told them that the lie was in fact the third one, that I had three sisters, their mouths dropped and their eyes popped out of their heads.

“You Teacher Miss Monique???!!! What film are you in? Where have you danced in front of millions?” and their questions abounded along those lines. In particular, there was one kid from that day onwards, who persistently asked to see photos and videos of my performances during every. Single. Lesson.

This was the second time that I had to introduce myself to some school children within the space of about two weeks. But this was the first time that I said this to anyone at the school, mainly because my younger kids wouldn’t have really been able to understand the activity.

As mentioned in a previous post, I agreed to teach the 4^th, 5^th and 6^th Grades because a teacher had gone AWOL. And although I was excited about the opportunity to teach older, and hopefully better behaved, kids, I was genuinely sad about abandoning ‘my babies’. I even took photos of their nametags and everything just before I left, like a reminiscent parent who was about to release their ‘child’ into the big, wide world. Or like a sad lonely person; whichever simile you prefer.

I had about an hour to introduce myself and to get to know the kids. I was free to just play games with them, so that’s what I did, and they loved it! I warned them that my classes wouldn’t always be like that. In fact, they would hardly ever be like that. They said that they understood, but I’m not sure if they took heed.

From the time that I introduced myself, I could tell that I would have a lot more fun with the older grades, mainly because I would be able to do more activities with them. And I also thought this, because they seemed “less wild” than the younger kids.

I did have fun with the younger kids though, and as I have already said in an earlier post, I bonded with them in such a short space of time. But because I only taught them for a short time, I thought they would’ve pretty much forgotten about me. But to my surprise, for a good long while at least, most of them, in particular the more ‘challenging’ kids in the class, would run up to me, to greet me with the biggest smile they could put on their face, or with a hug, or with the words, “I love you, Miss Monique”. And although that doesn’t happen so much now, every now and again, a couple of them still run up to hug me, just because.

The Book

As I’ve already explained in a previous post, as a British citizen, it is weird for me to see a saluting the flag ceremony conducted in a school. So that in itself is something foreign for me to witness; to line up with my students and watch them go through the motions. Whenever it happens I still feel slightly out of place because I really don’t know what I am supposed to do.

So imagine the first time I saw this. Once they finished singing their various songs, the head of the school stepped up to the microphone and began to talk about God knows what. It was all in Spanish and I didn’t have a clue about what he was saying, apart from recognising the obvious “Good morning” at the start of his speech. So I zoned out a little, until I saw a book being thrown to the ground by a boy.

I quickly snapped out of my reverie. ‘What the….?’ I tried to ask myself as my mind attempted to process what was happening. The boy began to stamp on the book to his heart’s content; he was clearly very excited about being given the opportunity to do so.

Then the head of the school took the book and started to talk to the boy. I thought he was going to tell him off. Instead, the head teacher demonstrated what he wanted the boy to do with it. He began to tear it apart. He gave the book back to the boy, and then the boy finished the job, with pleasure. The head clearly received the attention that he wanted from everyone.

‘What the hell is going on?’ I thought to myself. I looked around, and I seemed to be the only one disturbed by what was unfolding right in front of me. I had never imagined that I would witness something like this; this was only something I read and heard about in my history classes, but to a lesser extent, of course.

My facial expression must have expressed the shock that I was feeling, because immediately afterwards the coordinator came up to me and proceeded to explain what had just happened.

“It was just a book we found in the library that shouldn’t have been there. We were telling the students that not all books are good. Just because it is a book, it doesn’t mean that you have to read it,” she said, or something to that effect.

“What was the book about and who was the author?” I asked.

She told me that “some crazy person” wrote it, and that it was some sort of communist or socialist book…

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…

First steps

My first day of school got off to a brilliant start on Monday morning. Either I was too jetlagged to hear my phone alarm, or it didn’t go off at all; maybe it was more the former rather than the latter. Either way, I woke up the time I was supposed to be there, so I was in panic mode.

I got washed and ready in record-breaking time and power walked all the way to the school. Well, almost all the way as I quickly discovered that it definitely was not power walking weather; I was sweating bucket loads!

Once at the school with my sweaty self, I was given some time to acquaint myself with my classroom. Now remember this; it was completely bare. No materials, no books, nada.

    

    

This was definitely in stark contrast to the neighbouring classrooms with their appealing, colourful and thoughtful displays and lay outs. I was given a while to read through a load of rules and regulations.

‘I really have a lot of work to do,’ I thought to myself.

Then entered Elsa with her beaming smile. She answered the many questions that I had.

“Right,” she said, “are you ready to start with your kids tomorrow?”

‘What?’ I screamed in my head. I did not feel comfortable teaching at all, not in the slightest and my classroom hardly encouraged the kids to want to learn English. That question was starting to become a regular occurrence. And I’d later find out that I would ask that question on at least a weekly basis.

In the end, I was given an extra day to decorate my classroom and to familiarize myself with the children’s syllabus. I can just about draw a stick man, much less make a variety of art displays for a classroom, so that was a huge challenge for me, but I was quite proud of my efforts in the end. Even though I was given an extra day, I still didn’t feel ready. Nevertheless, the next day was show time, regardless.

The first day with my first, second and third grade kids was quite nerve-racking, but it was a lot of fun. I was introduced to them in Spanish, I guess to make sure that they behaved. I distinctly remember their beaming faces and how quiet they were as they listened intently to Elsa’s every word. And I definitely remember how quickly that stillness disappeared by the end of the week!

Anyway, so I had them for one period instead of the timetabled two, so that we could get to know each other through games and activities. They loved the games – score! And they were angels, well in the first lesson anyway, but that declined a bit (ok, quite a bit) during the second week.

But anyway, as I was told not to follow any curriculum for the rest of my first week, it was a little difficult to just think of games and activities to keep them occupied for the time that I had them. It definitely is a lot harder than it seems, believe me, but I managed it in the end.

It was over the following week where I had to be a lot more creative with my activities and displays, because of a distinct lack of resources…