“Miss”

With my eight hours of experience, this is what I like about teaching:

• Being able to tell people what to do
• To be able to say, “Your homework is…”
• To have children call me “Maestra,” “Teacher” or “Miss”
• Having people ask me if they can go to the bathroom
• When someone says, “Class is over already?”

This is what I don’t like about teaching:

• Having to be center-stage, clueless, for two to four hours
• To watch children squirm and teenagers whisper
• Having to teach from a book that is dull enough to kill an elephant
• Trying to inject interest into such material without adequate preparation

And by “inadequate preparation” I’m referring to finding out who my students will be and what their levels and books are less than 24 hours prior to our first meeting. It’s also a challenge to fly from one class to the next without time to change mental gears. And I never signed on to teach young children or teenagers, but there you have it.

All that said, some of the students are charming. They’re respectful, except for those who aren’t.

I won’t be able to keep up this blog regularly, I don’t think. Not only has teaching begun in earnest — for me, twelve hours of classes require double that in preparation — but I’ve also decided to sign up for a two-hour-a-day, five-day-a-week, six-week-long course in Spanish for extranjeros. That’s me. I am now an officially registered student at UAEH (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo).

It’s amazing I got to the first class. For reasons too complicated to mention, I didn’t meet up with Kim, who knew the way. I didn’t have the first notion about where in this city of 200,000 it might be, except that it was at a university. There are many campuses here. Each has many buildings. I looked at a map and walked to one. Wrong place. In my skeletal Spanish I tried to find out where to go. One woman thought she knew and suggested I take a taxi there since the campus was lejos. But money is running low so I walked and walked, stopping only to ask for help and not understanding the answers. During one of these abortive conversations, a young guy got out of his car and came over to me. Somehow he’d heard (and understood) what I was asking, and offered me a ride. Seeing his equally young girlfriend in the car, I accepted, and they dropped me exactly where I needed to be. He even showed me the right building. Only in Mexico?

Turn the clock back a couple days: I had my first get-together in Pachuca with my MAT peers, Sarah, Brandon and Kim. We had ice cream and a lot of laughs. Sadly, we won’t be seeing each other much. Three of us are chapstick addicts; here are my peers in front of Pachuca’s famous reloj, and here’s Brandon and me doing a mug shot pose.

What else? On Sunday Magdalena took me to Real del Monte, a former mining town and now tourist attraction where you can get local silver at bargain prices. It’s very quaint there.

I made the mistake of wearing my dress-up, high-heeled shoes in which I trip on flat ground, leave alone steep, slippery, cobblestone streets.

I bought some presents, and doggie earrings for myself. As we left, we encountered a long line for a play of La Llorona. I want to go back in the next week or two, since I love that legend second only to John Henry. You’ve got to love a woman who goes crazy and drowns her kids, and then spends the rest of her life looking for them, stealing other people’s children in the meantime: kids like these, who are leaning against one of the pure silver turtles surrounding the central fuente.

As we departed we passed a sort of hurdy-gurdy man who, rather than singing songs of love, was holding out his hand for money.

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