Hello, hello! I'm finally writing because I finally have time & energy...and health. Since the last time I wrote I have had the life drained from me from the preschoolers and in the past two weeks have been different kinds of sick three times. Living the dream, I tell ya.
Anyways since it's been so long of course this post would be like 55 pages...but since you all complain they're too long the way it is, I'll try to post about everything in three different segments...Halloween, preschool, and the apartment shenanigans. This post is dedicated to Halloween...which you probably couldn't tell from the title but you soon will.
Oh Halloween...where to start? Well first of all I'd like to thank my family and friends for all of the care packages you sent...I offically have so much Pumpkin Spice Via that I don't have to hoard it and I'm in love!! It means a lot as well because I know sending things internationally is expensive and it makes it easier to be away from home. You'd think after being here for so long I'd get used to it but I feel like it's the opposite for me. Anyways I was a pumpkin and I was adorable (not to toot my own horn but...toot toot). I ended up going out with my Spanish friends AND Canadian friends so all was well with the world.
At school, since it might be my last year, I wanted to do the coolest activity I had with all the students I possibly could. Thus far my greatest achievement as a teacher has been the Dead Man In A Cup game. At least in the eyes of my students...to recap, I close all of the blinds, windows, and doors so it's almost pitch black in the room and I tell them that a year ago, on Halloween, a man died. I don't know how, or why...but he's dead (insert slitting throat and dead face motion...they love it, gasping, cupping their mouths, squealing..) I explain that I went to the police station (otherwise known as the super market) and collected his body parts which are in 9 labelled white cups. Their job is to reach into the cup, feel (not look) and if they dare, smell, the "body parts" and then write on their paper what food it really is. Granted, this game is more for the Halloween experience than English language exercise, but I'm also a cultural assistant and it's arguably the most memorable activity we do all year. Because they're so young they find it nearly impossible to dissimilate what they're feeling from the idea of it being a body part so it TOTALLY freaks them out. Last year I only did it with 5th and 6th grade because I was afraid it was too scary...but this year I opened it up to 3rd and 4th grade as well. My 6th graders already knew what to expect so this year I made sure to make their food especially disgusting. I used frozen peeled grapes for eyes, mussels for the tongue, and canned sun dried tomatoes for intestines. I also boiled some carrots and put pistachio shells on them for fingernails...those were SUPER gross because even out of the cup they looked like putrid dead fingers. It was AWESOME.
But of course, in the end......Colonel Nun stole the show.
I was worried about doing the activity with my 3rd graders because they're a bit behind the rest of my classes...and I'm not sure why, but they are just...slow. They're my favorite students by far, they adore me, but academically they could use a push. To give them this push, Colonel Nun only speaks to them in English..........in her broken, poorly pronounced English. They have no clue what's going on at all times and one student, Flamboyant Daniel, came up to me one day and told me he had a secret...I asked what it was and he whispered in my ear "Chelsea I don't like the teacher....she scares me. Don't tell her!!!" .............hahah. Oh by the way, her name is Sister Maria Jose but she refuses to let any of the students call her by name. They all call us by our first names, or profe, or teacher...but she insists they call her "Da Teacher"....well, "Da teachuh" because of her "British" accent. All of the other teachers joke around and call her Mary Jo behind her back....which I find hilarious because she's the most intimidating human being I've ever met in my life and "Mary Jo" just does NOT fit the build. It'd be like finding out Hitler's nickname was Teddy, or Alf.
Anyways the first problem with Colonel Mary Jo came when I was explaining the activity. I explained to them what was happening, I tried to explain quite clearly that there was FOOD in the cups, not body parts...and it was a fun game. I asked Mary Jo to help me explain and she turned right around and repeated what I had just said but in broken English, without a word of Spanish to help them. So I shrug it off, assume they'll figure it out as we go on...but notice they they are becoming increasingly terrified the more they touch the food because they never actually understood that there weren't real body parts in the cups. Therefore on their little slips of paper, where it said "Eyes", they wrote down "ojos".....because they thought they were real eyes. Other students who were mildly more intelligent, but not abundantly so, decided to count the objects in the cups. So for eyes they wrote 2. For fingers & fingernails they wrote 4. For tongue they wrote 1...but they STILL thought they were touching a dead man's body parts. I'm trying at this point to not bang my head against the wall and give myself a concussion. Finally MJ explains, super exasperated, in her growling Spanish that it's FOOD, it's not actually body parts, and that starving people in Africa could be eating this food that we're using for a game to nourish numerous families. Womp, womp, womp...so much for the fun Halloween game when we're the cause of starvation in third world countries. The game continued and everytime anybody reacted and said "Eww, gross!" she'd yell "NO!! Ees no disgusting!! EES FOOD, JEW EAT!! Babies!! Jew haf to guess!! SMELL!! JEW CAN SMELL!! SMELL JOUR FINGAHS!!! MY BABY LOOK!! JEW CAN SMELL DA FINGAHS!! (insert action of Colonel MJ smelling her fingers exageratedly). If that didn't scare the hell out of them then nothing ever will.
The next day's class came quickly and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to better explain the game since Mary Jo was not only not helping me explain, but killing all of the fun as well. I used all of my best gestures and body language to help explain to the kids that these are NOT real body parts (wink wink) but FOOD, normal things that just feel like body parts...not to be too scared! It's a fun game. So we get into a circle and we start...the kids are already looking really queasy and unsure of what to expect and the first body part is the eyes (grapes)...so the kids are touching, feeling, and the grapes are pretty flacid and gooey because they're no longer frozen...and then Mary Jo starts in...in Spanish even. "Careful!! When you touch the eyes they start to roll around!! Don't touch them too hard or they might jump out of the cup!!!............JES, JES....DEAD MAN'S EYES IN THE CUP, CUT FROM HIS FACE!!".......Hold your damned horses Mary Jo!! Where did that come from!? Yesterday you were depressing and suffocating all the fun and today you're literally scaring the crap out of them? What gives? I thought it was just an impulse so we continued...but as we continued her commentaries got darker and darker.
Lips (wet marshmallows): BABIES!! Feel da two leeeps...he can't talk anymore!! If you all talk too much in class that's what happens! Your lips fall off your face! And then they'll end up in the cup like the dead man!! Squishy and sticky lips!!
Intestines (dried tomatoes): Be careful babies! Da intesteens...dried and curled up together...it's like the stomach but longer where all of the food goes! Maybe there is some old food left over in there!!
Tongue (mussels): Babies he might lick you!! With his dead lifeless tongue...is it wet?? JESS?? Well he must have died recently!!
I thought we were going to lose someone to the toilet to go throw up, honestly. After this I was convinced she's bipolar. I love her, and she has even declared her love for me one day (that was a weird scenario...the kids all ran to me and hugged me one day and said "Chelsea, I love jew! You're my best friend" and her response was "JESS JESS I love you too, now SHIT DOWN. SHIT DOWN NOW!!") but she's so freaking special. Which is one of the reasons I love her, haha. She's seriously a loose cannon and you never know when she's gonna blow. It just so happens that this time she blew all over Halloween. Most kids who attend a Catholic school fondly remember the nuns smacking their hands with rulers...my 3rd graders will probably always rememember Mary Jo smelling her hands and screaming "SMELL JOUR FINGAHS!!!!"
Hopefully soon this week I'll update on my next source of entertainment and lack of patience: Preschool!
