Sixteen = 33 in Peru

After teaching for a few months, I had gotten pretty comfortable with the curriculum and material, and assumed I would cruise through my final month in my pre-intermediate and intermediate level comfort zone. So I was pretty shocked and peeved when I got my schedule and saw that my favorite Intermediate II class had been dropped and in it's place was BASICO 1. I don't like Basico. I taught Basico my first two months, and it didn't go so well. (Remember Hitler?) They don't get my jokes. They seem to think I'm going to use Spanish to teach them. They either smile and nod when they clearly don't know what is happening, or they stare at me as if I'm from another planet. I don't know which one is worse, but they both make me want to bang my head off the wall.

Plus, you have to work really hard to teach Basico. I'm not up for that. I'm burned out. I can't be bothered to buy food, let alone eat it. I just ate crackers for lunch. I make my classes do stretches and jumping jacks before class. I started that to energize my 6pm class, who was among the living dead last week, then I realized it really helped me. So now if they don't answer my questions, they do jumping jacks until they do.

The first two days of class, I had three students. One was clearly not really a beginner. She could speak to me in full sentences. I love her. I rely on her. I hope she doesn't wise up and move up to another level. Another showed up 20 minutes late, didn't have a book, and wouldn't write anything down, even when the other two told him he had better. The third is right smack dab in the middle. A few new students showed up on Thursday. I taught them numbers. One woman saw the number sixteen and wrote 33. 17, maybe. 60, maybe. 33? Oh, help.

Yesterday, even more new students showed up. Missing a week of class is bad enough, but a week of basic? You're screwed. They all came up to me after class to tell me that they had missed the first week. No kidding. I pointed them to the tutor, but they wanted to keep talking. One girl informed me that she was mostly deaf, so she can't hear me when I talk in class. Oh goody. (I've had a blind student before who had to have everything read to him.) They were still talking to me 3 at a time when my jovenes started coming in the room, so I literally had to shoo them away, using shooing motions with my hands to get them to leave. (Although I can't wait until next week, when I teach them to sing Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. I LOVE that!) Only 13 days left!