This past week has been kind of long, I don't mean to complain about the weather when you guys back home in Wisconsin and Minnesota are dealing with -40 degree windchills but it has been cloudy and rainy the past three days. Today is looking up so far, but it is still early. When the clouds roll in off the mountains it gets really chilly here- again, nothing like at home but when you have no heat 40 degrees all day is quite cold! The students are feeling it too, all of my classes have been very subdued. Would you believe the other day I could not for the life of me get 6 and 7 year olds to sing?? They just sat there and shook their heads and went "teeeeaaaaccchhheeeerr, we're tired!!" All of my students, including the adults just call me "teacher". Even when I see students around town they say "Hi teacher!". So the students have been hard to teach this week. I also had to give two exams, one to the teenagers (half of whom never show up to class anyway) and one to one of my adult classes. The adults did extraordinarily well which made me quite proud!! :) The teenagers however, not so well. A lot of them got almost half of the questions wrong, even though we did an entire day of reviewing before the test with just the material that was going to be on the test. It is a bit frustrating to try to teach students who don't wish to learn the language and are only there because their parents want them to be. A lot of the parents use this as a babysitting tool- otherwise the kids are always out at the plaza with their friends getting into trouble. The one thing so far I do not like about CulturaLingua is that we cannot fail the students. Even on the exams where most of them got over half wrong, the lowest I can give them is 6.5 out of 10. (there are usually about 25 questions on an exam but they grade on a 10 point scale). Which is not a motivating factor for them to come to class and study because they know they will be moved up next semester anyway. It also gives me absolutely no leverage for the students who don't come to class or show up late and talk the whole hour instead of paying attention. So with the teenagers all I can do is teach the ones who want to learn and kind of say screw it to the ones who don't. Very frustrating!
Tonight we are going to go explore Periban a little bit and try to meet some people. Right now Angela and I are merely the foreigners here and it gets a bit boring and lonely with nothing to do! We hung out with the guys at the pizza place last night for a little while and it was very fun. A change of scenery from being cooped up at school all week! Our semester ends next Friday- the 23rd and then we have a week off. I think we are going to Ixtapa but who knows where we will end up! Somewhere on the beach so I can work on this pasty white skin of mine! :) The next semester starts the first week of Feb. and I'm still not sure if I'll have the same students and classes or if they will move up and I will stay with the same courses. Either way I'm looking forward to not having to clean up after the last teacher and start fresh with the courses so I know what they have learned. Anyway, all for now, I have to go teach my morning class!