SCHOOL!

Today was my first day of classes!! Well, kind of. We were supposed to start last Monday, but then things got postponed, so we started Thursday. However, on Thursday I had literally zero students come to class out of all four classes (only one other professor showed up) and on Friday I had a total of seven students (and one other professor) so I don’t really feel like those counted as my first days. So today I had five douplas- five sets of two 45 minutes classes. Forty-five minutes can be a long time! I didn’t really know exactly how to prepare for all the classes because I had no idea the level I’d be walking into, but it wasn’t too much of a train wreck. I had a few students that could carry on conversations with me in English and others that didn’t know how to say good afternoon- all in the same class. The way they divide classes here has nothing to do with the level of the student, it’s based on when they registered or their age (depends on the mood of the person forming the turma (class). Anyways, it became very clear very quickly that I’m going to have a few students who are where they should be after six years of learning English and many students who can’t form a sentence. I’ll have to start from the basics, move quickly, and be patient yet forceful. There was one moment where I thought I might either faint or throw my notebook at a student, but it worked out that I did neither. I think the throwing will happen first. I let the students ask me questions- in English- the popular ones were am I married, do I have a boyfriend, how old am I, how many kids do I have, who’s my favorite student, and one student asked did I think the political shift between president Bush and president Obama was a good thing for my country. Huh?!?! Well, the power was out all day, which didn’t really matter because we don’t use lights during the day, but once the sun started to go down and the students started to leave I was pretty much SOL. I was somewhat bummed that I couldn’t teach my last class, but getting out an hour and a half before I was supposed to wasn’t really that bad.
Now I’m sitting, eating and typing by candlelight, melting away from the heat and humidity. It’s been around 34 and 35 for the last few days- that’s in the 90’s, which doesn’t actually sound too horrible. But believe me, when you don’t have AC, no fan (remember no power!), no breeze, and you have to wear a bata (button-up lab coat for teachers) all day, ninety-something is disgustingly hot.
Oh, and I have an ‘intern” type figure who follows me around. He’s a Mozambican university student who was a Portuguese teacher for four years but is now becoming an English teacher, and is about to start his internship elsewhere yet wants a bit of experience first. I find it strange that he’s asking me for advice about how to lesson plan and give said lessons when he’s been teaching for four years longer than I have, but hey- what can ya do. I’m really hoping I learn a thing of two from him in the process.
So I had my students complete a few sentences- here are my favorite answers. “I am tall boy”, “I like to drink”, “I am wonderful and thin boy”, “I like to matapa” (matapa is my favorite food here- but when I read that it made me think of some kind of dance “I can mash potato”), “I like to chicken”, “I like to pass this class.”
The last few weeks have been a weird limbo between not being on ferias (vacation) anymore yet not having solid/ consistent work. It was a bit hard to know what to do with myself or how to feel about what was going on around me, but after today I have hope that once I get into the swing of classes and my students get a bit more comfortable with me it’ll start to come together a bit more.