April Fools!! Bulldogs!! TINY DAFFODILS!....homework. Ugh.

What a crappy title, haha. It basically explains where I am in my Sunday, though.

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.

Kids really DO say the darndest things...

Bill Cosby could completely renew his career if he would come to Spain and try to teach English for a year. However, I'm gonna figure out a way to capitalize on it instead.

This past week has had its many ups and downs. School has treated me pretty well, but my private English classes have been brutal. I tutor the two brattiest Spanish children on the face of the planet...and their younger sister is a Little Miss Me Too, so whenever her big sister is doing something stupid, she loves to join in. Sometimes the kids are inadvertantly rude, which I can deal with. For instance Julia, the 3rd grader, was rubbing my back and touched my undershirt. She grabbed it and, very concerned, asked "What's this?!" I said "um...it's my undershirt. No big deal...see?" and I showed her the straps. She also saw my bra straps and gasped. She yelled and gasped "YOU WEAR A BRA?!" I said um...yes, everyone wears a bra. "Nuh uh, I don't wear a bra." I told her someday she would. Which udderly disgusted her. I thought the topic was dropped when finally she broke the silence by asking "so...do you have kids?" By the way, all my kids think I'm 38, at best, but usually assume I'm over 4o. I'm normally appalled and offended but I try to remind myself how I used to think at that age. So anyways I said, slightly annoyed, "Noooo......" to which she snapped "well then why are your boobs so big??"

...whatever. Sometimes I think they shouldn't teach kids anatomy so young in Spain. I didn't know how to respond to that but eventually I got in a little tiff with her and ended up lowering myself to her level and verbally arguing for 5 minutes about it. This time, though, she was just ornery and curious. Not mean.

That innocent train came to a halt Wednesday, when Julia got mad at me while we were playing a game online. It's a board game that practices vocabulary and is set up Jeopardy style. This game is marvelous except for the small problem that Marina, the little one, is just in first grade and cannot yet read...in Spanish, let alone English. To get around this little issue, I read the questions and answers out loud to her. Julia, mad that she was losing, got mad at me for "cheating" and threw a euro at me. I think a euro is probably in between the size of a quarter and a nickel, but twice as thick. And it was thrown full-force at my face. It hit me in between the eyes. I was DONE. SO DONE. I started rambling in English, Marina heard "finished" and ran out quickly, not waiting for the chance for me to recant, and Julia sat there frozen, wondering how much trouble she was in...but she didn't feel bad at all.

On the other hand, school has been entertaining, at best. My kids are inadvertantly hilarious. My favorite sources of laughter have come from the simple game of "I Spy". Each week Eva, the pregnant teacher, tells me something to do and usually suggests a game to practice vocabulary to make life easy on me. Soooo in her husband's class (the hot teacher), we had the most fun. I would pick something in the room and if they guessed it, the class got a point and that student would come up and play on my team. One girl, Liuva, came up and said "Ee spee wit my leetle eyes someting dat ees jellow". 10 guesses later (that's the limit), we got the point. She was so excited she ran to her seat after I gave her a high five and everyone is asking "what is it!? what is it?!" She says, so matter of factly, "Ees Chelsea!" I was wearing a periwinkle blue shirt and jeans...I was so confused.

Everyone (including me) goes, "..........what?!"

"Ees Chelsea...hair!!"

...and all the kids go "oooooooooooh." Meanwhile I am mildly offended because I consider my hair to be a subtle, tactful blonde. Yellow. Psh. It was really funny though. Of course it doesn't end there. Eventually another little kid, named Nacho by the way, comes up and is the Hitler of I Spy. Not only did he pick the most random, smallest, unnoticeable object in the room, but whenever anybody guessed incorrectly he would roll his eyes, shout "um...NO!!", and give this look that screamed "are you serious?! How dare you even waste my time with that pathetic moronic guess". Since he was playing on my team, I was thrilled. I went again after him, because he of course won, and I picked the cross above the chalkboard that is brown. So I say "I spy with my little eyes something that is.......BROWN!!" All the kids shoot up their hands and are all screaming "yo yo yo yo yo!!" (Yo means me in Spanish by the way.) I was trying to be fair and let everyone guess...so I was excited when one of the little boys in class who never says anything finally raised his hand. This is how that went:

Me: you! yes? It's brown
Him: me?
Me: yes you...what is it?
Him: me!
Me: YES!! Yoooooouuuuu....what do you think it is?
Him: ees me!!!

Then I realized he's black. He meant him, as in HE is brown. HILARIOUS. I laughed so hard I cried. Literally. I had to regroup. Eventually they did guess the cross but it was soooo funny. In this class there is a boy who is "special" as they say, and always a bit of a distraction. I think he loves me and always loves our games we play, even though he doesn't know much English. Eva always gives him extra help, though, and tries to help him participate as much as possible. He's just a bit slow. Anyways, after class, she told me he had gone up to her and asked in Spanish, "Eva, how do you say face in English?!" and she said "what? why do you need to say face? Is that what you mean?" and he says "Yes! Face. It's brown...like Juan's face!" Eva & I's ongoing inside joke now is "ees brown?"

That was just 3rd grade's fun. 1st grade held so much more in store. 1st graders are just now learning how to write...so each night for homework they have to write 25 copies of sentences. The teacher had written on the board the sentence for them to study followed by "Copy 10 lines". She showed me one of the student's notebooks and for his homework he had literally drawn 10 different lines across the page. Not one copied sentence. I thought it was funny but the teachers were less than thrilled. This has happened A LOT this past few weeks since Christmas. For example, in Science, the kids had a test about wild animals. For "spotted cat that lives in the jungle", one of the students wasn't paying attention and wrote "leotard" instead of "leopard". That one was so funny. A different time, the kids were told to write in their notebooks the four seaons. In Spanish, the word for "season" and the word for "station" is the same. So instead of understanding the context of weather, he wrote "Cuatro Caminos, Iglesia, Rios Rosas, Bilbao", which are the metro stops (or stations) he takes to get to school. Another kid, Martin, in one of my classes kept asking if he could go to the bathroom. Spanish teachers are really strict on behavior & policies, so they hardly ever let kids go to the bathroom. Isabel asked him "can you wait? Til after we listen to this song?" and he said yes and sat down. Five minutes later we look back to the back of the classroom and Martin is convulsing back and forth holding his crotch and looking extremely pained. Isabel said "Martin!! If you HAVE to go then go!" So finally he went.

All. over. the. floor.

So, needless to say, my two weeks back have been eventful. I haven't adjusted yet but luckily neither have the students. I'll have to update later on my older kids. As a P.S. before I go, you should all be happy to know that the 7 year old that usually molests me is now seeing a psychologist, so we're hoping he'll stop touching me inappropriately. He still stares awkwardly, and I have to monitor my hugs to him, but I'd say that's pretty awesome progress. I'll take it!