I had my first taste of the ugly side of students at school. It really wasn’t all that horrible, but I must say that I must have been pampered with better students in the rest of my classes. The disdain with which I held for one of my classes today was quite heavy. I wanted to stomp them and wipe them off at the doorstop. These classes were the “compensatoria” classes. This means that they are repeats, and are normally mixed bunch of slow learning kids from “barrios bajos”, or better put for my English readers, lower class neighborhoods. While it might be true that these miscreants do not understand or speak English, I begin by telling them that I will slow down, or repeat myself if they need. This device of classroom assistance functions comparatively as well as an infant would while fighting Mike Tyson.
Instead of asking me to repeat myself or slow down, the majority of students turn to their friends and laugh saying in Spanish that they don’t understand what I am saying. They don’t try, they don’t care, and they don’t know anything. I eventually told them that I could stop if they did not want to listen to me anymore, and that I had come a long way to help at their school. The teacher was not doing an adequate job of controlling them, and instead of yelling at them in Spanish tried to use English. Whether they understood her or not did not matter. She needed to use her harsh Spanish tongue to really make them feel bad. I did a good job of this by letting them know I was not happy with them, and by the end was very glad to be done. Two nice girls in the front listened and answered. I wanted to shake their hands.
On a lighter note, I went running today around Logroño today in the dreary drizzle, got my first international bank card, and had a nice dinner with 2 friends. Good stress reliever. BTW, Spanish women are quite beautiful and funny, especially if you can understand them.
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2 comments:
Dude all i can say is you just described my day perfectly, what the fuck do they expect us to do teaching a class like that,most of mine were repeats too and had no respect for me. I actually wrote the word "Rude" on the board and told them to understand what it meant because im about to walk out the door if they keep it up. All they did was keep responding to me in Spanish and would not even attempt English. I believe it all begins with the teacher and the lack of rules she has failed to implement in the class, i could not believe the lack of control she had in the class and she did the same thing by trying to yell at them but in English. At least it was the last class and now i am enjoying a nice cold Mahou.
Welcome to teaching. Ha!
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