Friday, February 18, 2011

Middle Schoolers and Medieval Walls

This week I started my teaching internship. I thought I was going to be working at an elementary school, but apparently when they told me grades 1-5, they meant the first four grades of "upper school," so I'm working with 11-16 year olds. That definitely had the potential to be disastrous, considering that I have way more experience working with younger kids and that middle school aged kids can be AWFUL, but I'm really enjoying it so far. Sure, some of the kids have a bit too much attitude, but the majority of them are really nice. I volunteer six hours a week, each hour with a different class. This week I was mostly observing Gonzalo, the supervising teacher, but he also had the classes ask me questions to practice their English. There were a few questions that were asked in every single class this week, such as:
"Do you like Justin Beiber?" (Yes, at least one student from each of the six classes asked me that. One boy sang part of "Baby" for the class - at least Beiber Fever is good for something - helping them learn English, lol)
"What do people do in the United States?" (So open-ended! I had no idea how to respond to that one... I was really tempted to just say, "Eat!")
"Do you like Real Madrid or Barcelona?" (I've learned that this is the great divider of Spanish society - when I respond that I'm a fan of Real Madrid, half the class cheers and the other half groans.)

Last weekend some friends and I went to Ávila, a small town about an hour away from Salamanca. It's famous in Spain for still having its complete medieval city walls. It was a really fun and low-key day trip. We got to climb up the walls for some great views! Photos:





Also, while we were shopping for postcards, we found this one which just says "Ávila por noche" or "Ávila at night." It's kind of hard to tell in this photo, but it's literally just a black postcard. I was so tempted to buy it, but I figured my sister would rather have something a bit more legit...

Other random notes:
I love how international Salamanca is. In my two university classes, there are students from China, Germany, Sweden, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Canada, France, Russia, the Netherlands, and Portugal (and, of course, lots of Spanish students). It's funny because the Spaniards always sit in the back of the class and all the international students sit in the front. The other Americans in my program joked that foreign students from Latin America are only "pseudo-foreign" because they (obviously) don't have all the language difficulties. The rest of us who only know Spanish as a second language (or third or fourth language, in some insane cases) all kind of cling to each other to try to figure out what is going on. I had to read a 30 page article on the International Monetary Fund for my econ class the other day, and it was such a comfort to find out that no one else understood a word of it either. Andre, from Portugal, was telling me that he fakes his way through class with "Portuñol," the Portuguese equivalent of Spanglish.

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