The First Week of School

Sorry this post is so late; I told some people I'd post on Saturday and others on Friday afternoon. Well here it finally is.
I want to write about the first "real" days of school, Tuesday through Friday, and I'm gong to do it first by talking about the week in general, then by explaining some of the highlights of the week. Here it goes.
I should probably write something about this weekend too; that'll probably happen.

We were supposed to spend the week observing. What we ended up doing was running from classroom to classroom doing activities with the kids to give the national teachers a break, all while the other international teachers were trying to decorate their classrooms (painting, pictures, etc.) and I (not having a classroom to decorate) had to scrounge around for things I can use in gym class. My current list of resources includes: the basketball court with soccer goals, a basketball I found that had been in a ditch for a couple years and needs to be re-pumped full of air twice a day, three kickballs (one of the four I brought has already popped), and nine tires. I'm actually really excited about the tires; there's a lot that can be done with them relay-race- and spontaneous-activity-wise. I spent the week realizing that these kids are almost all younger than the campers at Procter, and so different games and activities spark and maintain their interest. I also learned that on the whole nothing at this school is ever going to be very organized. Except the international (aka USA) part of the team. Some of my activities worked well and some of them were "learning opportunities" for me. The two oldest classes of kids both love me and a lot more of the games to which I am accustomed work with them. I also learned a lot about how I can incorporate children with special learning/visual/physical needs into gym class. I'll write more about them in the highlights section. Which I guess is going to happen right now.

This isn't a very well-thought-out blog post, if you can't tell. I'm really just winging it. Unfortunately, that means I'm going to miss a few things from the week that I really wanted to mention. I'm sorry I waited so long to post.

First things first. The Razorback football team is 1-0 and is coming off of a bye week to play Georgia at home this coming Saturday. It'll be a sellout crowd, it's always a sellout crowd, and even though Georgia will be in the top-25 we'll be the favorites and we ought to beat them. I'm really excited.

My fantasy baseball team is gasping for air in the first round of the playoffs (though I must say, I'm impressed that in the first year I've ever cared about professional baseball, I made the 4-of-14-team playoff and had the second-best regular season record). However, my pitching is turning around and if I can pull out a few offensive categories by next Sunday I should be able to make the championship round.

My fantasy football team looks ready to win this first week. I'm the defending champion in this league, so it better win this week. My drafting strategy seems to have worked very nicely and I'm already scouring the free agents for good pickups and getting ready to offer some trades. I'm not going to give away my "in-season team improvement" strategy yet, because at least one other person in the league reads this blog occasionally. And if you're reading this, and I do offer you a trade, it'll still probably improve your team. It's just that I have a plan to use a combination of waiver-wire players and trades to make my team better.

I still don't care about any professional US sport enough to call myself a fan of any professional team. I still just follow the Razorbacks wherever they make it into the pros.

And regardless of whether or not you're reading my blog for sports updates, they're a very important part of my life - even here in Cuenca - and in my opinion definitely worthy of making a weekly highlight post.

Also, Leslie and I are looking into opportunities to go to the Ecuador-Uruguay World Cup Qualifier in Quito on Saturday, October 10th. We're going to the game, it's just a question of how and how much we want to pay for our seats.

Back to school. I'm not sure where to start. Okay, got it. There's a girl in the 2nd-grade class who has a crush on me. Her name is Tatiana but everyone calls her Tati. She has very little control of her body - she has a lot of trouble walking and using stairs and really only has one steady arm - and I think she has a crush on me because on Monday during recess I saw that she was sitting alone on a bench so I went and introduced myself and sat with her and chatted until she had to go back to class. She's incredibly bright, but incredibly shy when it comes to people who only speak to her in English. She understands us, but doesn't want to interact with any of the other international teachers. Whenever she needs to go somewhere and the national teachers don't have the time to walk her, generally I'm the one who helps her down or up the stairs. She's fiercely independent, but she wants you to sit and slide with her and she scuttles down the several staircases at the school. The school is definitely not handicap-safe on US standards. But we'll manage.

Another boy named Josue (Joshua) made my day one day when we were playing Simon Says in his 3rd-grade class and he was Simon. He's blind and his English isn't very good, but he's very eager to learn and to do everything everybody else does. And the class is willing and eager to help him. He'd been playing the game with us very well because each Simon said very clearly what they were doing and he could hear them and follow along with the actions. When it was his turn to lead, he would think for a second, yell out "SSSSSSimon says!" then he would think for a second, and he'd shake his body and flail his arms and jump up and down and everybody else would follow suit and laugh about how funny what they were doing was.

In the second grade class, a boy named Santi (Santiago) led the ABCs song for the class. He has Down Syndrome and is very socially awkward though all the kids in his class like him. He's really funny and clever. The best part was that after the song everybody clapped and shouted so loud that the national teacher came running back to the room to see what had gone wrong. Santi's face lit up in a way that adult's faces just can't. He was happier than anybody over the age of 15 ever will or can be. I'm almost in tears now just thinking about how happy it made him to sing the song and have everybody sing along with him and clap and shout for him. He was so happy that when Leslie and I had to leave the room he said "no vayan" repeatedly and tried to pull us back into the classroom and keep us there so that he could sing again. I wish we could have let him sing again.

I learned not to play soccer with the kids because they are better than me. Well, mostly I learned that I'm now a terrible goalkeeper even though that's almost all I ever did when I played on soccer teams as a young kid. I can play defense and handle the ball well enough to be better than these 4th and 5th grade kids, but not better enough to maintain that "I'm the teacher, you're the student" power relationship. Give me a couple weeks and I'll be able to work these kids like I'm drinking water. Every once in a while I can take the ball all the way down the court (we have to play on a cement basketball court), swerving around a couple or three kids and making the cross right in front of the goal to one of my teammates. I do it just to remind them that I'm still the teacher and they're still the kids. But I lose that power any time I try to be the goalie.

The kindergarten class (of 20 kids, which is WAY too many 4- and 5-year-olds for one class) will copy any motions I make, which makes entertaining them on the short term very easy. I got to read "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman (they have it in the school library!) to them, and I just scrapped the words and went around showing the kids the pictures and saying "Is this the little bird's mother?" and they'd all yell "Noooooo!" and sometimes they'd giggle when I pointed at some piece of heavy machinery. And they were all excited when the bird finally found its mother. That was awesome. "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman was by far Caldwell's and my favorite children's book growing up.

I read "Los Tres Cerditos" to the 2- and 3-year-old class. Which means I flipped through the pictures and said "Oh no! The big bad wolf is going to blow the house down!" and other things like that. The kids just stared pensively at the pictures, with their mouths hanging down and theirs eyes wide open. Every once in a while one would say "Lobo!" or "Casa!" It was cute.

The fourth-grade class loves me, and we think it's because they're just simply more responsive to guys and I'm the only male teacher at the school. They also had a male international teacher last year. As of now they're the only class that calls me "Tio Loco," just them and Tati.

The 5th grade class loves me too. With them, I use activities that inspire inter-student competition because they are mature enough to handle winning and losing. They're also capable of enough patience to play games like Hangman and Wax Museum.

Finding the basketball was a highlight. Teaching the kids not to kick it will also be a highlight.

Seeing Ecuador beat Bolivia 3-1 was also a highlight, because it put Ecuador back into position to qualify for the World Cup in South Africa this coming summer. Now the game at home against Uruguay is incredibly important because Uruguay sucks and the only other match left is at Chile and Chile is awesome. Ecuador needs to beat Uruguay in convincing fashion to have a chance to make the World Cup, and Uruguay has nothing left to play for, so the atmosphere in Quito should be electric in a way that no other continent can handle and the timing is just right for Ecuador to put a whooping on Uruguay. That's why we're going. Right now we know of a cheap way to go and get "General Admission" aka bad seats, but that's where the real (rowdy crazy noisy flag-waving drum-playing chanting screaming) fans will be which makes it where I want to be. The lower-level seating has a roof in case of rain and your ticket actually has an assigned seat so you know how good your seat will be when you buy the ticket. We'd have a better view of the game, but the atmosphere won't be nearly as powerful and exciting as sitting with the real fans. Mom always hated sitting next to me at important Wittenberg men's basketball games, because I was loud and rowdy and sometimes taunted the refs and the other team. She just wants to sit quietly and spectate a sporting event. That's one of the reasons why she likes the Witt women's team better.

That may be it for highlights from the week for now. Saturday, every football team I was rooting for lost. At least that means Georgia will still be in the top-25 when we beat them this Saturday. That'll look better for us. Today (Sunday) Leslie and I made our lesson plans for September and went to Mark Odenwelder's (director of CEDEI) for the CEDEI staff party and to watch football. He has NFL Sunday Ticket so I spent most of my time watching football and some of my time watching the nationals and a few foreign staff play Ecuadorian drinking games that don't seem nearly as fun as what we do in the US. All the teams I was rooting for lost, just like Saturday (but Arkansas didn't play, which is probably better considering my luck this weekend), but my fantasy players played well enough that I ought to win this week. We won't know until after Monday Night Football.