BBQ season...

Today it's raining and has been raining since about 2 this morning, so you'd never suspect that last weekend was bright and sunny with highs in the 80's--welcome spring!  

A friend from Barcelona was here in Andalusia on business and stayed at the house so we took advantage of the opportunity to have the first BBQ of the season.  It also coincidentally was another friend's birthday: two birds with one stone. :)  We had a great time and propperly stuffed ourselves with chorizo, filetes, bacon, sausages, pasta salad, olives, cheese and potato chips.  All followed, of course, with café and sweets for all, compliments of the birthday girl.

Our smallest guest, three and a half years old, had a blast playing with Bela (see videos below).  Later in the afternoon, Angelines remembered that we had an unopened Christmas present from my mom that would also be perfect to keep this little guy busy: "living sand".  We hadn't taken the time to open the box and play with it, though my mom assured us that it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. ;)  It's a kind of synthetic sand dough, and it really is pretty cool: soft the the touch, non-sticky, easy to mold and super fun to play with.  Little Nico was in hog heaven...but his mom (and maybe Bela, too) liked it even more!  He was totally absorbed all afternoon so the rest of us were free to chat, laugh and in Bela's case nap, without having to worry about entertaining the little one.

You'll see in the videos, too, that Nico was not the least daunted by Bela's playfulness.  He has a dog at home, also, who is apparently his number one playmate.  He got knocked down a fair share of the times he threw the ball for Bela mostly because he seemed to throw it straight up rather than away from him...but he never cried even once.  Believe it or not, I do think Bela was being gentle, although as you'll see in the video she's pretty glued to the ball. ;)

This past Wed. Nico paid us another visit.  His mom  was working nearby and apparently he was crying and being a pain.  "You want to go play with Bela?," she asked him...the answer was a no-brainer! :)  We broke out the living sand again and Angelines said that when it was time to go he was pretty upset about leaving. Poor kid.  So we've become babysitters by default. :)

There is always more to report, but I'll save it for another post. Besitos!

BBQ fun Part 2

This is what happens with both boy and dog want the small ball.  You've got to hand it to Nico, he's trying to share, giving Bela the big ball as an alternative; but she'll have none of it.  Pay close attention to the end...the things kids do!

BBQ fun Part 1

I love this one!  Pay attention to how he counts: una...tres...una!  He knows there should be three digits...just not so sure about the order yet; the "dos" has gotten lost somewhere along the line. ;)  And I especially love how he ducks to protect himself from the dog (you can tell he's been taken out a few times at this point!).

Success...Sort of

Just wanted to let you all know that today I was happily surprised with my classes. :)  Of course, part of the semi-success was because two kids didn't show for my most difficult class.  But except for the four-year-old throwing a bit of a fit, all was well and the kids seemed to have fun and be engaged...  The trouble is, I'm just not sure how that happened!

On another note, we finally got back to the pool today.  It's been two weeks of no swimming...just been busy with things here.  Carnaval was this past weekend and we had quite a bit to prepare for that.  On Thursday we brought a group (una comparsa) to the bar. It's a typical singing group for carnaval celebrations--semi-accapella, remnant of a barbershop quartet (only there were 15 of them!).  They sang great and we had a good turn-out at the bar, too, which was a very good thing since our most recent events have fallen pretty flat.

Saturday and Sunday the main bars in town get together and set up in the central plaza, then they split the money.  And once again, we were plesantly surprised by the results.  So at least the typically economically rough streak from January until Easter has been aleviated somewhat.

Well that's all for now.  I'm off to bed.

Classes

The new semester seems as though it's going to require very little study.  On the one hand that's a good thing, but at the same time, re-organizing my time to maintain efficiency when I suddenly have "free time" is easier said than done.  And the real crux of the promblem is class prep--how I hate it! 

Since I don't need to spend as much time on school work, I theoretically have more time to prep... but what actually ends up happening is I find some other completely low priority to occupy myself and push class preparation to the very last min.  This only increases my stress and the feeling that I am never on top of my game.  But it's also true, at least for me, that class prep. requires a certain ammount of inspriation.  I cannot just sit down and do it.  So sometimes I find myself in front of the computer without a clue as to where to begin and I just end up wasting time.  Usually I find something...or sometimes I just give up and sweep the floors or run a few shopping errands to clear my head.  But of course, this kind of "productive procrastination" can only last so long before it's actually down to the wire and I must have something ready for my afternoon classes.

I try to always be at least a day ahead of myself.  In general I'm pretty good at that.  The problem is what happens when I've finished preparing for the next day:  I lose all motivation to continue and get another day knocked out of the way.  Right now, for example, I am writing a blog instead of thinking about what on Earth I'll do with my Tuesday classes.  (And as I wrote that a churning knot began to form in my stomach)  I've had Monday ready since yesterday and so it seems I've been able to lull myself into a false sense of accomplishment--"I'll prep Tuesday tomorrow!"  Ugh.

And then there's the added problem that I am completely at my wit's end with one of my Tuesday classes.  No matter what I do, how I do it, what I say, or how well I plan; everything goes to hell after about five minutes (if I'm lucky!) of class.  Part of the problem is that the class is bigger than my others...but if I tell you how big, you'll laugh at me for thinking I can ever teach a class of 20+ kids in a public school!  There are only twelve kids in class (I'm ashamed to admit). 

My mom has very helpfully given me advice for dealing with difficult kids that she's used in the classroom or seen other teachers use.  I have looked online for idea for getting kids attention.  But as great as it all sounds when you read it online, and as great as I'm sure it works at C. Roy Carmichael Elementary in Portola, California...  None of you have ever seen children like Spanish children.  I am convinced that there are no worse behaved children on the planet than Spanish kids.  Seriously.  I can't begin to tell you why that is, I can only vouch that it is absolutely true.  Of course, not ALL of them are heathens; but even the best behaved Spanish child would probably stand out as rowdy kids in an American classroom.

This class has me completely perplexed, and honestly, if I could, I would just cancel it.  The trouble now is that I've had so many failures with so many different strategies that I've begun to look at is as just an hour I have to suffer through.  I have lost all desire to try to figure out something fun and motivational for these kids because I swear there is nothing in the world that will hold their attention.  Even the games that I think will be fun go sour pretty fast because they make fun of each other and gloat or cheer when a classmate doesn't answer correctly.  If it were my class in a real school setting, I'd do some serious team-work exercises.  But seeing as how I have them only one day a week for one hour, I don't see how I'd get very far with them; certainly not if we have to do the activities in English!

Still, I can't help feeling as though if only I were more creative, I could come up with some kind of solution.  I can't help feeling like a giant failure every Tuesday when another painful hour creeps by and it's all I can do to get half the kids to participate or keep them from hitting each other.  Thank goodness I end with a class that I love through and through (like I say, not all Spanish kids are inherantly bratty).  At least I usually end on a good note.

...And now I'm off to suffer through planning...

Friday

For the first time in a long time, this actually feels like a Friday.  My usual Saturday morning class has been cancelled, so I've got nothing until Monday morning.

Well, maybe "nothing" isn't quite right.  I should of course be getting ahead with planning, but I got into such a routine of waking up at 7:00 to start studying in these past few weeks that this morning I finally just got out of bed at 8:00 even though my alarm wasn't set to go off for another half hour.  I just couldn't sleep anymore!  So I know that tomorrow I'll be up bright and early once again and I can dig into the week's planning then.  Tonight I just want to take it easy.

My new semester's classes began this week and I had my first "virtual" classes (basically like a one-way skype call) today.  I have all three with the same professor: Svetlana Stefanova.  She is not Spanish, that's for sure! ;)  So I'm being taught about English grammar, phonetics, morphology and syntax by a foreigner... but really, I guess sometimes they're the best teachers.

We native speakers can use the language (usually) perfectly, or at least without too much trouble; but how many of you can do morphological analysis?  Or point out the adverbial phrase in a sentence?  And probably none of you could spell "mother" using the international phonetic alphabet!  I don't know how useful any of this will be for my own teaching, but it is true that fluent speakers of a second language often know the grammar and rules inside and out while those of us who were born speaking the language haven't got a clue as to word order, sentence structure or what on Earth an extraposed subject is.

I find that this is true here in Spain.  I can write and spell and form sentences better than many native sevillanos.  That's not bragging; it's true.  I haven't had the luxury of growing up speaking this language, where being surrounded by it naturally leads to near-perfect oral production before heading off to school and  being introduced to the written word--struggling to memorize the rules of how all the letters come together to make the words we say; or how, in turn, those words come together in different patterns to make meaningful sentences.  I have learned to speak and read and write Spanish all at once.  Therefore, my spelling (in Spanish) is nearly perfect (a novelty for the girl who scored in the 9th percentile in spelling on her STAR test in the seventh grade).

So I guess it isn't so surprising that I now have a foreign teacher to tell me about all the intricacies of my own language that I never wanted to know.  Still, I can't help but be annoyed that I have to take the classes at all.  Sure, it's not all bad, and being the strange, language-loving, nerd that I am, I got sick pleasure out of doing an assignment for my morphology and syntax class three weeks ahead of schedule tonight.  Breaking down words, designating the root, the bound inflectional suffixes, etc. it was like cracking an English-lover's code!  And yet I worry about how long these new classes will hold my interest.  It seems as though they'll lose their luster quickly, and then I'll just be stuck grinding through exercises with words like "predicative compliment" and "morpheme", or "non-finite verb."  Only time will tell.

But I didn't really want to tell you about what a language nerd I am.  What I wanted to tell you all was that despite the many things I could be doing or could have done this evening, I just decided to watch a movie. :)  So while I did get a jump start on my morphology class and I did do some reading from my grammar book, I also just decided to enjoy my Friday and sit down on the couch with a good movie--The Silver Linings Playbook.  I liked it and now I'm going to sleep.

TGIF

Where does the time go?

I know, I know...beginning each new blog with an appology is becoming a routine!

I am sitting at the bar keeping Angelines company and enjoying the fleeting feeling of freedom that comes after finals.  That's right, today were my final exams and now I have one week of "break" before the new semester begins. I say "break" because obviously I am still teaching my private classes this week.  Even so, it is a relief to not have reading or assignments hanging at the back of my mind trying to catch my attention between, class prep. and life in general.

For probably the first time in my whole four years of school here, I began to study in earnest this semester a full two weeks before my exams.  In the past I've always worked hard to get the maximum grade going into the exam and then not really worried too much about studying.  This year I decided that it wasn't worth it to loose sleep during the semester, and going into the exam with fewer than the maximum, wasn't the end of the world.  I decided I would study more and that would be that...

Changing things up worked out nicely during the semester--I wasn't nearly as worried or stressed about assignments.  If I had time to do them, I did them.  If I thought they were important to reinforce important aspects of the class, I did them.  If they were worth a lot of points, I did them; but I didn't worry about letting a few slide.  And surprisingly I found that giving myself permision to do less than 100%, actually motivated me to do more.  I didn't achieve the full points possible in any of my classes going into the exams, but out of a possible four, I had more than three in all of them.  I would say that's pretty good.  In other years, I have stressed to get those four points and sometimes only gone into the exam with the same 3.3 that I had in two of this semester's courses!

And the fact that I didn't have the full credit forced me to do some good, old-fashioned studying, which was a huge help.  It's not that I haven't studied at all in the past, but I usually just crammed in the four days leading up to the exams.  This time, I reveiwed notes, re-highlighted my texts and wrote up concept maps of each unit.  I prepared all 28 questions that one teacher gave us ahead of time to study from, and I wrote up a full lesson plan for my Didáctica de la Educación Plástica y Visual (my art class required that we write up a lesson plan in the exam aside from completing a multiple choice portion and an essay question!).

ASIDE: All this is to say that if I don't pass (or if I get anything less than a 7, let's be real!), I will be very sad.

As I was saying, the studying paid off.  In my art exam, for example, I used the full two hours for the test, but I wasn't stressed at all.  It was a great feeling.  Of course, there were some questions I wasn't sure about, but all-in-all, I was able to do each of my three exams with very little problem and next to no stress--what a concept.  I guess in the past maybe I've just been too confident in my bullsh*tting skills. ;)  Feeling prepared was a welcome change.

There's not a whole lot of other news around here.  2014 has more than begun.  I can't believe January is over already!

I'm not sure I mentioned it in my last post way back in January, but one of my New Year's Resolutions was to begin swimming again.  I am happy to say we have now gone four times. :)  Thursday was a great day in the pool.  We usually spend about 45 min in the water.  Getting to the pool takes about 25 min. and between changing clothes and showering, etc. we can't afford to be in the water much longer (depending on what time we leave home, of course).  Anyway, in 45 min, I swam a mile and it felt great--a total disconnect between mind and body.  It was like I was watching myself go back and forth across the pool: breathing and moving, the coordination came naturally.  And I didn't even feel like I was working.  My pulse must have been up, but I never got that squeezing feeling in my chest like my heart was going to come bursting out.

So despite my recent lack of blogging, I am actually feeling much more balanced than I have over the last few months.  Christmas was stressful, so January was a lot of playing catch-up and recently things have been calming down again.  Judging by the length of this blog (I could go on...), you can tell I've also been dying to get on here and write!  Now that my exams are out of the way, I think I'll be able to get back into a propper blogging routine. ;)

Cheers!