On Tuesdays the coffee at school is ready when we get there at 8:00 instead of at about 8:45 or 9:00. I´m not entirely sure why... I was discussing it with my teacher this morning but I didn´t entirely understand, other than that the woman who opens the school in the morning (who also cleans, and maintains the coffee/tea/bread supply) arrives at like 6:30 instead of 7:30 on Tuesdays. She told me why but my Spanish remains bad enough that I didn´t understand why. I think I´m slowly beginning to internalize enough of the conjugations of the two different kinds of past tense verbs, as well as present tense verbs that I can begin to speak the occational coherent though, but I´m super, super slow. It doesn´t help, of course, that I have CJ which means that I don´t get to dedicate all that much time to studying outside of school. Other people spend a ton of time studying which means that the move faster. Also, much like in Italy, the parents in my host family speak very good English, and because CJ understands so little, the speak to us a lot in English which is nice because we can have actual conversations about real things, but not nice in that it means I get less practice with the Spanish. The verb forms, really, are what is killing me, and as I understand it, that is what kills most people, but that once you get past it, you can make much quicker progress. For an example, if you want to say ¨I go to school.¨ you could need to conjucate the verb ir, which means ¨to go¨. You would use the first person form, and would say ¨yo voy a la escuala¨. If you wanted to say that you went to the school yesterday, you´d have to use a differnet conjucation for the past tense that pertains specifically to actions that took place at a defined time or for a short duration, so you would say ¨yo fui a la escuala ayer a las oche de la manana.¨ If, however, you wanted to say that you went to the school every day, you would use an entirely differnet conjucation, ¨yo iba a la escuela todos los dias¨. And of course you have to keep in mind that those are only for actions in the first person. For ¨you went¨, ¨he/she went¨, ¨we went¨, or ¨they went¨you would have to use a different conjucation for each one depending on whether you´re talking a past tense, the present tense, the furture tense, or of course, there is a whole other tense and sent of conjucations for ing words, like I am going right now. And of course it´s not enough to be able to struggle through and occationally check your notes to figure out which forms yoú´re supposed to be using, but you actually need to be able to know it well enough to be able to say it off the top of your head in a conversation. People typically don´t sit around waiting for you to think for three or four minutes or consult your notes before completing a though, I´ve found, so as a result I´m rarely able to say much of anything. As my teacher noticed yesterday, I´m able to follow and minimally participate in conversations about deforestation and ecology in Guatemala, different eduational systems, etc, but I can barely tell you that I usually go to the bank on Friday. It´s rather maddening.
Anyway, today the most intersting thing that happened was that at the end of class, the director of the cultural center came up to me and asked me if CJ and I would be willing to teach the English class for kids today at 2:30. I said sure, as long as it wasn´t a problem that I barely could speak any Spanish. We showed up and she basically said that there were some kids who spoke some English and some kids who spoke absolutely none, and then more or less left. So we were in a classroom with about ten kids, some of whom were excitedly shouting out pratically everything they could think of English and talking and laughing and some of whom were sitting there smiling unable to understand anything in English beyond ¨hello¨ perhaps. I had to translate ¨what is your name¨to English for them. So we had an hour (I guess... the kids told me the class ended at 3:30 though I never had confirmation on this) a cracked dry erase board, one semi-functioning marker, a bingo game, an a set of cards where you could match opposites in English and Spanish (up-down, etc.) It was interesting. Had we at least had materials I suppose I could have come up with something... I could have done an art activity or something, but I didn´t have art supplies (or paper for that matter) or picture cards or really anything that I would need whatsoever. So we played the bingo game for about fifteen minutes and then we did things like put stuff up on the board (colors, parts of the body, numbers, fruits, etc) and practiced them while some of the diligent little girls copied everything into their notebooks and some of the boys yelled and bounced out of their seats. I honestly wonder at the fact that they just ask random people to do this and then dump them in there will no supplies and no clue what to do. I have a bit of an advantage in that I do something at least remotely similar to this pretty often, but it was a a stretch even given that. I am not too surprised that she seemed somewhat hard up for volunteers. We´re doing it again next week, but at least we´ll have time to prepare... I wish I knew where I could get some games and activities in Xela. I would be happy to buy a few and donate them but I have no clue where. Perhaps we´ll buy some art materials and think of an activity to do with them that way.
Anyway, that´s really about all the excitement. Not much else going on. Tomorrow we´re going on another schoo trip which is no doubt ill-fated, so I´ll update you all on the craziness of that one after it happens, and hopefully add some pictures to this post, as well, of the school, home, and general goings-on, since I don´t have any pictures of our English class specifically.
Anyway, today the most intersting thing that happened was that at the end of class, the director of the cultural center came up to me and asked me if CJ and I would be willing to teach the English class for kids today at 2:30. I said sure, as long as it wasn´t a problem that I barely could speak any Spanish. We showed up and she basically said that there were some kids who spoke some English and some kids who spoke absolutely none, and then more or less left. So we were in a classroom with about ten kids, some of whom were excitedly shouting out pratically everything they could think of English and talking and laughing and some of whom were sitting there smiling unable to understand anything in English beyond ¨hello¨ perhaps. I had to translate ¨what is your name¨to English for them. So we had an hour (I guess... the kids told me the class ended at 3:30 though I never had confirmation on this) a cracked dry erase board, one semi-functioning marker, a bingo game, an a set of cards where you could match opposites in English and Spanish (up-down, etc.) It was interesting. Had we at least had materials I suppose I could have come up with something... I could have done an art activity or something, but I didn´t have art supplies (or paper for that matter) or picture cards or really anything that I would need whatsoever. So we played the bingo game for about fifteen minutes and then we did things like put stuff up on the board (colors, parts of the body, numbers, fruits, etc) and practiced them while some of the diligent little girls copied everything into their notebooks and some of the boys yelled and bounced out of their seats. I honestly wonder at the fact that they just ask random people to do this and then dump them in there will no supplies and no clue what to do. I have a bit of an advantage in that I do something at least remotely similar to this pretty often, but it was a a stretch even given that. I am not too surprised that she seemed somewhat hard up for volunteers. We´re doing it again next week, but at least we´ll have time to prepare... I wish I knew where I could get some games and activities in Xela. I would be happy to buy a few and donate them but I have no clue where. Perhaps we´ll buy some art materials and think of an activity to do with them that way.
Anyway, that´s really about all the excitement. Not much else going on. Tomorrow we´re going on another schoo trip which is no doubt ill-fated, so I´ll update you all on the craziness of that one after it happens, and hopefully add some pictures to this post, as well, of the school, home, and general goings-on, since I don´t have any pictures of our English class specifically.
pictures of are of school, including one CJ took of Eduardo, my teacher from last week who is extremeley cool
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