Nothing super interesting has been going on lately. Not in comparison to the BULLDOGS GOING TO THE NCAA CHAMPIONSHIP AGAIN. Sigh. My little heart might explode over here in Spain. Not only are there no bars to watch the games here, nor hoards of friends to even watch the game with...the games air at about midnight or 1 a.m., and Spain doesn't even believe in basketball.
On top of that, I think I am a Butler jinx. For example, while watching the game against Florida, we started off strong and then 5 minutes later we were trailing by something heinous like 10. So I stopped. I kept the page up in the background on my laptop but I demanded that Katie's friend Echo update me on the score. And I would peek every once in awhile (every 3 minutes approximately). And everytime I would peek Echo would yell, "CHELSEA! Are you looking?! They just screwed up, stop!" So I banned myeslf from the game and watched episode after episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. But look, it paid off!! We won!!
Same for the VCU game last night. But I wasn't watching Sabrina.
I got home from school on Friday (a pretty decent Friday at that...Fridays are usually pretty rough) to a massive box from my mom!!! It's HUGE!! It's full of Eastery goodness. She sent me jelly beans, Easter eggs, a yoga DVD, shoes, sandals, makeup, flashcards for my kids, a present for one of my teachers, 4 I Spy books, and....TINY DAFFODILS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No joke, I almost cried. I almost cry everytime I look at them. I love them. And I love my mom. I've been pretty homesick lately. It's the Final Four excitement mixed with the fact that I miss my family and friends. And there's three months left, haha. AND we haven't had Spring Break yet. I need a break...
Anyways....beyond the TINY DAFFODILS!! (they're silk for the record), let's focus on the I Spy books. I've been debating for awhile if those are more for the kids....ooooor for me. I was trying to explain the books to my teachers and they have never seen them before. I guess they never got translated for Spanish use. But those books are SO COOL! I've been obsessed since I got the box. I was supposed to call my mom after school at 5:30 but didn't get to calling her until around 7 because that's how long it took me to open everything and pull my nose out of the books. Tee hee. AND it's even better because when you get stuck, you can probably find the answer now on the Internet. Sometimes you can't, though. I STILL can't find a stupid anchor on one of the pages.....so freakin tricky... Once I get done with them, though, I'm going to use them with my private classes and see if I can also figure out how to use them in the classroom.
So...during the VCU game, I kept checking the score but refused to look until I found an object in one of my I Spy books. Haha. God, I'm like a 10 year old. I also colored a Butler banner that hangs outside of my door. I put pictures of last year's Final Four excitement too. A picture of the big shoe at the pep rally downtown, the Final Four banner on the Artsgarden, and our interview at Hinkle with Kent for FOX 59.
Hmmm, what else. Oh yes, April Fools came and went. :( I did my best here but it just isn't the same as pranking atleast 20 girls at Pi Phi. I also don't have Starbucks supplies to use this year....those were great last year. Here I stuck to some basics...I scraped the cream out of Oreos and put toothpaste in instead. I put big bubble wrap under the toilet and continually changed it so it would keep popping whenever anybody sat down. (This was actually a great idea in theory but kinda bit me in the ass...my roommates took a nap after school Friday, so I rushed in and set up the trap. I laid down too, talked to my mom on Skype, and then tried take a nap as well...but no luck. I really had to pee...but, couldn't, because they hadn't set off the bubble wrap. And I've never been really good at hovering...always makes a mess...so I essentially boobie-trapped myself out of the bathroom. Fail. I held it, because I'm a champion. Gotta make sacrifices sometimes for the good of the holiday). I also found out my roommate Juliet is really jumpy, so I hid around corners and just jumped out randomly when she was leaving the bathroom, turning a corner...etc...and yelled APRIL FOOLS!!! Hahaha...such a cheap trick but I was thoroughly pleased with myself. I should have hidden in her closet...
Anywho. My 5th graders presented their animal projects last week. I was super impressed! Most of them just copied information from Wikipedia word for word (I was immediately aware when the students used words like "hibernate", "cartilaginous skeleton", and "substantial exoskeleton". Oh well.) but I was still pleased because they were able to answer my small questions....like what do they eat? Where do they live? Or I would ask a question about their interesting facts they wrote about. The teacher even hung them up in the classroom windows so anybody that walks by sees their projects. They were so excited! This is also a hard task, though, because Spaniards do projects a little differently than we do. Construction paper and puffy paint is not easily accessible here....construction paper is, but it's pretty expensive (not super cheap and easy like in the States). Puffy paint is absolutely unheard of. Paint in general is not really heard of. What the kids do have a lot of is Play-Doh, glittery glue sticks, and markers. Sooo....most of the posters had some printed pictures of animals, a lot of random glitter all over (I support), a hand-drawn picture of their animal.....and then usually they take Play-Doh and create a picture ON the posterboard. So...I don't know, it's super weird. They just stick the Play-Doh to the posterboard. Sometimes it's flat, and sometimes it's not. Those were interesting to hang on the windows, haha.
Anyways, almost all of the projects went off without a problem. One girl even made a Powerpoint Presentation! With sounds! The only problem we really had was that some of them DID take information directly off the Internet...without really understanding it....and it was in English. I was really impressed they tried to read English articles! Most of them used Google Translator....and those paragraphs are really easy to tell because they don't make any sense. The ones who used original English articles were easy to tell...because it was so well written...and they had no idea what it said. For example, Sexy Boy (remember him? Otherwise known as Black Strong?) had chosen the horse. So he was rambling about horses...blah blah...and then started asking "how do you say 1978? 1990? 2002? 2014?..." etc. I was so confused. I went over to look at his poster and read his paragraph that said "If you are born a Horse, you are strong and confident. Gemstone is topaz and is a symbol of war and courage. Falls on the years..."
Ah. He had stumbled upon an entire article about the Chinese year of the Horse. Sooooo rather than explain he had the wrong "horse", I tried to explain to the class that some years in China are classified by animals, like our zodiac signs, and the Horse is a sign of strength and courage. They understood but as soon as I said "China" their eyes glazed over. They could care less about anything Chinese...
Another .... err, "fun" presentation was about crocodiles. Most of the kids wrote about diet, appearance (length and weight), and random facts about their animal like how far they could jump or why they're endangered. A few directly followed the internet webpages they found...so crocodiles. Miguel, this fun, energetic ginger kid, was super embarrassed and didn't want to read his project out loud. I told him he had to. Everybody else did. Plus his pictures were very interesting. So he gets up there and starts reading about crocodiles. His poster had a lot of information...so I knew it was going to take a little bit. At first he talked about where they lived and what they ate. Then he started the big paragraph of his poster.
85% of his poster was about crocodile reproduction.
I don't know how he stumbled upon whatever website he was on, but he literally talked about the (literal) in's and out's of crocodile sex for about 5 minutes. It was SO PAINFUL. Mainly because I was the only one in the classroom listening to the horrific things he was saying. I mean it was all scientific, mostly....kinda. I asked him what he thought the paragraph was about and he said he liked it because it was about crocodiles killing other crocodiles, because it said "mate" a lot. Matar in Spanish is to kill...mate would be subjunctive. Ugh. So I smiled and nodded. It's actually about the exact opposite...
My favorite sentence from his poster was, "The male may actually mate with the same female several times during the breeding season to ensure that he fertilizes her right after she ovulates. Males actually often try to make with other males, and females do the same with other females. Threesomes are not uncommon either!"
..............speechless. I think I snorted when I heard him read this.
Anyways, luckily for you all, I made the kids turn in a sheet with their information. I looked up his information on Google and found the website he was citing. If you'd like, you can read ALL of the information that he read to the class outloud. All of the disgusting, painful details about crocodile reproduction.
http://w3.shorecrest.org/~Lisa_Peck/MarineBio/syllabus/ch9vertebrates/reptilesandbirds/repbirdwp/barbara/repro.html
If I never hear about crocodiles again, I'll be perfectly content.
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