As a side note about my thesis, I caught a pretty fantastic break. My teachers have been super helpful, giving me books and materials to use which have helped me a lot. The nun asked me one day to make a game for vocabulary review and I laughed, because I have just spent hours and hours organizing games for a curriculum (I'm writing my thesis about how to use games to teach English as a second language). I told her that, and she said she had this book with many activities and games if I wanted to take a look. I'm already done but I said sure, why not? She gives me this "book" and I notice it's written by Ileana...the old assistant at the school. I was confused at first, thinking it was a book she had written??, but then I realized it was her thesis. I was excited, not because I'm going to copy (I had already done all of the work) but I loved her format (it's pretty and like a book). So I creeped her on Facebook and asked her if she got a good grade, haha. Answer: yes! So I'm going to be working on that once these papers are finished.
Anyways...I'm going to have to flash back to a few weeks ago for some pretty awesome stories. And then soon here after I'll update again with some videos of the most Spanish holiday I've witnessed thus far.
Just to reaffirm before I write this post, I loooove my students. I really do. And they're wonderful kids.
That being said, I was appalled to learn that some of my 5th graders had created a gang and tried to attack a fellow 5th grader at recess.
Now...my school has good kids. They really are. Which is why it is so ABSURD that they made a stupid ass GANG. It's like the CareBears making a gang against My Little Ponies. Stupid as hell. PLUS Spain doesn't have guns or anything. I made the mistake one day of saying I thought I was going to get shot when my bus was stopped by the police (not an interesting story I promise) and my teacher laughed in my face for about 5 minutes...and then explained nobody here has guns. I think even the cops might just carry around one of those huge sticks. Not positive.
I digress. So I'm teaching my Easter lesson...I've got my basket of eggs filled with candy and for the 5th graders I was practicing large numbers (235,183...in the thousands). If they could tell me how to correctly say 2 large numbers and a year (1882), then they could choose an egg. While I'm explaining how to read the numbers, two of the other fifth grade teachers barge in the classroom, said sorry to me, and asked for all of the boys in the "Neck-soos" to go out to the hallway. Immediately. They already knew who they were but wanted to see who would admit to it. HALF of the boys in my class went into the hallway. Like eight boys.
I looked to Rocio, my teacher, panicked, curious, wondering what the hell was going on. The boys were in the hallway, these two teachers were PISSED screaming at them, most were crying, and all of my students couldn't give two shits about large numbers because the entire wall of that side of the room is window. Four huge windows. The door is even paned with a big, long, window. The class had a front row seat. Rocio came over to me and explained that this group of boys, "Neck-soos", had created a gang and tried to kick a boy together at recess. Neck-soos...I had no idea what that was.
Anyways Rocio went out into the hallway and left me alone...which would be fine if there wasn't a verbal onslaughter of the students' classmates within their eyeshot. So I keep screaming to look at the numbers, trying to ignore them...except I really wanted to watch to see what was happening too, and try to lip read what the teachers were screaming. They also kept coming out into the classroom and asking for more boys who didn't fess up. Also distracting.
So, finally, they all leave the hallway and go to a classroom to yell more. Why that wasn't first choice is beyond me. After that class was lunch. I sat with one of the teachers that was doing all of the yelling and she asked me how my "huevos" were (eggs in Spanish...it's also the equivalent of "balls" in English, joking about testicles. All week long all of the teachers in the school were joking with me about carrying around eggs, and how were my eggs, very colorful, what's it like to finally say I have "eggs", etc....it was really funny, haha, but I am so glad that's over now) and I told her good...and asked, of course, about the Neck-soos thing. She waved a piece of paper about it and was cursing about the situation, about how the kids were stupid and had even arranged, before recess, how they could gang up on certain kids they didn't like. It really was shocking, considering how nice my students are. It wasn't really violence or anything, just dumb stupid bullying. Which is still awful. She said that all of them broke down crying and confessing except one, and all of the other boys ratted him out anyways, haha. Clearly their gang didn't practice loyalty. On the paper she had, I saw the name of the gang, and their symbol.
Nexxus. With Spanish pronunciation, sounds like "Neck-soos".
Ring a bell for anybody else? Maybe I've just spent too much time in beauty salons. Let me refresh your memory.
Yup. Nexxus. The shampoo and hair care brand. The symbol they use even has the X's arranged in the same way. Hilarious.
Nothing says "fear me" quite like clean and stylish hair.
Honestly I'm not sure whatever happened to them as punishment. Part of me wanted to joke around with them about it and ask if they wanted to borrow my curling iron to crimp somebody's hair they didn't like in an unfashionable matter. I'm sure they don't even know that's what Nexxus is anyways.
Moving on, I took my eggs with me to my private lessons and the little girls were super excited to have an Easter egg hunt. (They live in a gated community so there's a like a little built in park with a playground we had access to) I was hoping the park was empty but there were 2 mothers there with their children. I walked up to them and explained that I'm the English tutor for two of the girls here, from America, and we were going to do an Easter egg hunt...and that if they wanted their kids could play too. The looked only slightly hesitant but thanked me and told their kids to get ready. While I was walking away, I thought about how that would never fly in America. "Hi strangers, I'm from a foreign country and I'm the language tutor for two unnamed girls that live here...I'm going to hide plastic food objects with unnamed candy inside if your kids would like to join in the game!" Never. Ever.
So anyways I go upstairs, tell the girls to grab plastic bags for their eggs, and we come downstairs to search. The boy, Miguel, refused to play. He said his ankle hurt. I wanted to tell him I'd rather him not play anyways because he's a brat. By the way, the roles of those kids have changed. Once upon a time, Julia threw a quarter at my forehead and I left pissed off at her. Now we're friends, somehow, and they really like me. We have days that are better than others but we're friends. Miguel, however, refuses to like me. He hates English and subsequently hates me. He's a brat...going into the teenage years. The horror.
Anyways the girls go after the eggs and somehow by the time we come downstairs there are like five different families. Their kids are super young and grabbing all of the eggs on the playground. I figured....well...let them have them, they are super special because you can't get those here in Spain. So the girls are running around like crazy and I was a moron and didn't count how many eggs there were...who knows if we got them all. When I thought they had gotten most of them, we sat down outside (which was GLORIOUS, there isn't really any grass here in Spain...but in their park there is) and counted the eggs to see who had "won" (the real winner, regardless, was Julia because Marina is diabetic and couldn't eat any of the candy...so even though Marina got 18 eggs and Julia got 15, all of the candy goes to Julia. Because of this I gave Marina a big thing of Orbitz gum...bubblegum flavored which doesn't exist here. So she was happy) While we were counting, one of the neighbor kids came up and started playing with the eggs. Out of nowhere this kid (who is probably three/four) starts naming the colors of the eggs and asks "where ees green?" He also started counting the eggs with us, but stopped when he got to thirteen. He randomly took a blue egg and ran away. I have no idea who he was but the girls were impressed he knew so much English. I just wondered where the hell he came from and who he was, haha.
So, to end Easter, I started out with a basket of 60 eggs...four big ones, six little ones, and fifty normal ones. After some of my students STOLE some, and the neighbor kids, and me forgetting where I hid some...and I gave some to Javi, the little brother of my private class kids....I had 28 eggs. Epic fail. The good news is that was enough to use for my class the following day. That's all I really needed.
Moving on to titular topic #2....fire drills. Now, in America, fire drills usually occur a.) throughout the year, b.) when the whole school is present, and c.) at the beginning of the year. Not in Spain! Actually, most schools have some sort of plan but from what I've seen, they don't have drills. They don't practice. Ever. HOWEVER! My school is wonderful so we just had our first one (read: only one) of the year. It happened last week (May...a month before school is out) and all of the 2nd graders were on a field trip (hypothetically, if any of my students were unfortunately going to be burnt to a crisp in a fire, I'd vote them. They would have been AWFUL to deal with during a fire drill.)
Now, I went to Zionsville High School, so we weren't in the "city". The school had a lot of property and the students just stood in a single file line outside of the building. I never thought about what a fire drill would be like in the city. It's CHAOS.
So first of all, nobody knew about the fire drill. The teachers knew it was on a Friday, but the students didn't. They had sent fliers home to the parents telling them it was sometime this week. They don't tell the kids so they don't freak them out I guess. Anyways, Isabel, my teacher, was gone because her class is 2A, 2nd grade. So first of all, I had my entire 1st grade class in the morning all by myself. Do you know who told me that? My first graders. When I walked in, "Chelsea Chelsea! Isabel isn't coming! It's just you!" Good to know. Luckily I had a million games prepared from my thesis so I thought I'd take a shot at playing "Soccer" with vocabulary review. Also, the kids had been studying Science so two of my kids had brought in insects they were talking about. One brought in "silk worms" which are just those little annoying worms on leaves, apparently...and another brought in a giant ass snail the size of my palm. I was so thrilled. Daniel refused to put the lid on the snail because then he'd be "upside down". I tried to explain it didn't matter but he also didn't care.
That's Daniel's snail. Gross.
Anyways, after they calmed down we played Soccer. I talked to them in Spanish and made them promise not to tell anybody, it was a secret. I love days I do that. Anyways we played but Spaniards get so intense over soccer. It's insane. Kids were pushing, shoving, kicking, and hitting their classmates. Also keep in mind this is my favorite class. I told them that it was just a friendly game, it doesn't matter who wins. It's just to practice English and have fun.
One of the students piped up and said "yeah, you don't have to scream and hurt my ears, or hit people....it's not a real soccer game!" I said "Yes! Exactly! It's not a real.............wait, even in real soccer games you don't need to hit people! Or scream! You can be excited if your team wins but fans of the other team are still friends too. You don't want to hurt them...."
Lord. I'm not qualified to deal with this. Or what came next.
So luckily my 2nd grade classes were gone, which means I was free for the fire drill. I figured I'd just stick with the class I was with. Their teacher, Silvia, explained that we were going to have a fire drill and we were going to walk a few blocks to a nearby Plaza (note: taking all of the children, including the infants, three or four blocks away from the school. TERRIBLE). They were going to hear an alarm, a loud noise, and that's when they leave.
Right. In the states a fire drill sound is just really loud...it sounds like a school bell and there were flashing lights. This alarm sounded like an immediate bomb warning straight out of World War II. When I heard the alarm, it gave me chills. I look down and all of my 1st graders are grasping at my legs with their little fingers and nails and looking up at me stricken with terror. They all were trying really hard not to cry. The alarm was so terrifying! Anyways their teacher asked me to just watch the back and make sure nobody was left behind. That upset the girls who wanted to hold my hand and didn't settle well. We walk and we walk and we walk.....and then walk some more....and eventually get to the plaza. They have to make sure that everybody is there, so we ended up waiting thirty minutes for the whole thing to be over. Meanwhile the kids are asking me a million questions, none of them I have answers for. "How long are we going to be here? Where is Silvia? When do we go back? Why do we have to pretend there is a fire?" and so on. One student asked me a question but asked it quickly and really excitedly so I just smiled and nodded. All of the students were buzzing about something for a little bit but they all have such high pitched voices and talk so quickly I have a hard time understanding their Spanish. Finally their teacher walked up and asked what was going on and one of the students said that there was a real fire in the building and that a student was stuck inside. Silvia asked why they were lying like that and they told her that I told them. They then got yelled at for five minutes by Silvia, calling them liars and saying I would never tell them that and they got their recess taken away for two days. I felt really bad...I tried to tell her I was confused and might have said that but apparently this student lies a lot anyways. Ooops.
It was imperative all of the students stand in line during the fire drill, to keep track of everyone, but all of the kids at one point were huddled in a circle because this massive grasshopper, literally the size of two clothes pins, was flying around, jumping on the students and wreaking havock. Finally the Nun walked over, pinched his hind legs, practically threw it over her shoulder and marched it over to the bushes and chucked it over a wall. That ended that chaos quickly.
The walk back to school was quite pleasant. All of the students were trying to hold one of my fingers (which doesn't work because I only have ten) and every stair we hit I told them to count....which annoyed all of the other teachers, especially on the three flights of stairs where we ended up counting to fifty.
So, anyways, that is the end to my crazy Season Finale. Perhaps tomorrow I can squeeze five more stories into one post...and finally be caught up. Stay tuned, it's gonna be a good one with pictures and videos.
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