"Do You Cry?!"

Mondays are my longest days of the week. I mean this both literally and figuratively. Literally, I work from 9 am until 9 pm. Nine to four at school, then private lessons from 5 o'clock until 9 o'clock. Figuratively because I usually didn't do enough on Sundays to get ready for the following day. Plus, who loves Mondays? No one, that's who.

This Monday was no exception; I still had trouble mustering the motivation to leave my cozy bed and I still had to teach the extra lessons. This morning I got out of the house relatively on time and caught the 8:45 bus, which drops me off at school about 3 minutes before class. Today Eimear and I talked about how we don't really feel the need to show up 15 minutes early so we can sit around and do nothing; which is mostly true. I don't have to prepare for the day so much as mentally get ready for dealing with the children.

When I arrived at school I began my Monday routine of reading Oxford Reading Tree books with the kids. They each have a book that they take home and practice along with the CD. I've come to notice that many of the children have memorized the sounds of the CD and don't actually know what they are saying to me. I'm supposed to ask them simple questions like, "what is it about?" or "did you like the story?" to check if the understand. Based on the looks I got today one would have thought I had asked them to analyze the impact of Hemingway's interpretation of Spanish culture upon American perceptions, or something equally as difficult. Fully discussing impact of The Sun Also Rises would take a few pages to write, "did you like the book?" takes about three words ("Yes, I did" for example...).

I shouldn't make fun of the kids, but I'm starting to question the social promotion idea at my school. In high school, I was the student representative to the school board. Towards the end of my term we started to talk about advancing kids to high school who hadn't passed middle school. In general, I believe you aren't doing anyone any favors by putting them in a grade for which they are not prepared. But I think this topic gets more complicated in a bilingual school. It is possible that the kids who can't tell me what happens in a story called "Floppy's Bone" (The plot is simple; Floppy has a bone. The bone gets stolen by a bigger dog. Floppy is sad. The end) might be able to discuss complicated topics in Spanish with ease. It is not fair to keep a child back if they are only struggling in one topic; at the same time it is doesn't work for them to flounder through English class and pass their Spanish classes. If only it were possible to have the kids be grouped for each topic, not just into 4A and 4B. We could group the students together based on ability and the groups would change for each subject. I would suggest this to Eduardo, but my plan would require an overhaul of the school system which I do not think anyone wants to do...

Along with listening to stories about the various adventures of Kipper and Biff (no, I did not make the names up, and yes, they are British books.) on Mondays I work with small groups of kids. Eduardo tries to group them according to English level, but sometimes that doesn't work out. Today we worked on interviewing a partner about their television habits. The children were supposed to ask the person their name, their "favourite programme" and why, along with how often they watch, then present this information to the rest of the group. To give them an example, I told them about my mom. The paragraph went something like this "Her name is Kathy. Her favorite program is CSI. She likes it because she thinks it is interesting and exciting. She watches once a week, on Thursdays." The kids did a decent job. Across the board they have trouble adding the "s" to third person singular verbs and keeping gender ('he' vs 'she' & 'his' vs 'her') correct.

When one of my groups had finished and they were waiting in line one of the girls had a question for me. Paula shouted, in Spanish mind you, "How long has it been since you've seen your mother?" Apparently, when I told them that I asked my mother the questions over the weekend they assumed that I had brought my mom to Spain and she lives in my apartment. When I answered that I hadn't seen her in three months they at first didn't get it, until one of the other girls translated it for them. Once she knew my answer, Paula had a follow up question, "Do you cry?!" I lied and said no.

I would be lying if I said it didn't make me sad from time to time, but the trick is to focus on something other than the fact that my friends and family are far away, such as how awesome it is going to be to go home and have free refills on sodas. Also, I like to think about what a cool experience this is; not only do I get to live in one of my favorite cities on earth, but I get to impact the lives on children (hopefully in a positive way)!