Kids and Hamsters

Things here continue much as they have since I returned from Christmas. I've been playing basketball with a group of older (i.e., 30+) guys on Thursday nights after they put their kids to bed, and with a group of expatriate friends on Sunday afternoons. I'm also running a March Madness pool at the moment. My weeks have been busy with teaching, including up to six tutoring lessons at one point. And although I have not been traveling, my weekends have managed to keep me entertained.

Most people who know me will know that young children and I do not get along well. Indeed, when I told people I was going to be teaching in a primary school, I got plenty of surprised laughs. Before I left, a wise man told me I would soon discover the joys of working with children. That wise man knows who he is, and as of now, he is neither right nor wrong.

My classes are generally pretty enjoyable, as almost all of them have a few intelligent and studious kids. There are also a surprising number of students who have an English-speaking parent, and so help move the rest of the class at a quicker pace. There are only a few classes that are consistently problematic, and those are the ones that make me feel drained afterwards. It can be like pulling teeth to get these kids to behave, let alone to understand my English. The combined frustration of misbehavior and lack of understanding - and the sheer absence of any attempt to understand me - only serves to make me feel out of place and as a distraction, rather than as a teacher. The kids that frustrate me most are the ones who have mastered the smug "I don't know what you're saying, and I don't care to find out" smile. On the other hand, those are the kids whose names I always know, and it makes for a great measuring stick to see if they can answer me. If I ask a bad student a simple question about the material, the other students' reaction is how I judge my success: blank stares all around means a failure, annoyed whispers to help the bad student mean success (because they know the answer).


Bad students aside, I do manage to enjoy my job. The most entertaining part continues to be the stumbles people (myself included) make over the language barrier. Recently, I was teaching a fourth grade class about daily routines, and I was having the students tell me when they did various things. I asked one student when he put on his pajamas. His response was, "I put on..." followed by a pause filled with laughter from the other students. Thinking he had just stumbled, I encouraged him to continue, when their teacher asked me if I knew why they were laughing. She said, "Think about it. Put. On." In Spanish, the word putón is a rather dirty thing to say. So I had the student repeat, "I put. On my. Pajamas."

In the same school, one of the sixth grade classes saw me drink from my tall, 750-ml water bottle (which regularly draws attention) and asked what I was drinking. It was a particularly irritating student who asked, and he asked in Spanish (which meant I shouldn't have responded), so I replied, "Beer." The students laughed. Don't ask me how they know the word "beer" in English, because I certainly didn't teach them. Then things got bizarre. One of the kids in the front row asked, "Hamster? Hamster?" while pointing at the bottle. I was so taken aback by the oddity of the question that I burst out laughing. It wasn't until later that I realized he'd been saying "Amstel? Amstel?" in reference to the joke that I was drinking beer.

I apologize for the limited number of posts I've been writing. There really is plenty to tell, but it's hard to sort out the interesting from the already-told. Maybe I'll do something different today and go drink a Hamster. That would certainly be a story.