Barking Mad

It’s  4:30 am on a Sunday and I can’t sleep because the neighbor’s dog won’t shut up. I swear I am going to make myself a new fur rug for my room (once I’ve bleached it of course).

I don’t know where the time is going. The weeks are just going by in a blur of insanity and screaming children. Actually it’s not the kids screaming, it’s me. Tuesday night (I think it was Tuesday) a bunch of kids were throwing rocks at our house and I just lost it. I have to deal with disrespectful snotty kids all day, I was tired, and I was not going to take it in my own home. I charged out the front door, red in the face, screaming at the little monsters at the top of my lungs. The result was the kids vanishing in a VERY satisfying and somewhat comical dust cloud. Turns out that one of the kids is in Jeff’s class, and I seem to have made quite an impression on them.

Of course Wednesday night they were back, but by then I was feeling much more rational. I knew screaming at them again would just be what they wanted this time, and I had no intention of humoring them. I was about to go out and talk to them, but Jeff beat me to the punch. He thought that the “good cop, bad cop” routine would be a good thing to try. He was right, we haven’t had a problem since.

Well, I should say we haven’t had a problem since at the house. My students reached yet another all-time low this week, with at least three of the teachers at the school almost losing it with the students (myself included). After the little beasts have gone home, the general sentiment is “what’s the point in lesson planning when I spend 95% of the class just trying to get the kids to sit down and listen.”

Our mood was not improved by the week before last when we had a “teaching development” program, where a bunch of teachers from California came down to teach us about teaching. This was a waste of time on two fronts. First, we ended the school day early for us to go to the class, and the kids, who are rowdy under normal conditions, became uncontrollable when they found out that they were getting an early release. It would have been more productive to just cancel school for the week. Second, the teachers had NO IDEA what we needed. Oh I’m sure that all the stuff about lesson planning and group learning would be very useful in an American classroom, but here it was about as useful to us as a cleaning the kitchen with sugar (imagine the size of THOSE cockroaches!) Honestly, most of what they talked about I was already from the orientation at the beginning of the school year, and I don’t have a degree in this. The volunteers with actual teaching experience had it even worse.

TO top it off, the head of the CA group was abrasive, rude, demeaning, and had NO sense of humor. Apparently the dislike was mutual, as she thought we were inconsiderate and racist (honestly, you say “meester” once in class, and you’re pegged as a white supremacist.)

I could go on, but if I do this post will be ten pages long. I’ll spare the gory details for any who care to listen when I get back.

On a lighter note, I faced up to my childhood fear of beng hit in the head with fast moving objects on Thursday! We had our Friday futbol (soccer) game a day early as Friday was a national holiday (yes, another one). At one point the ball flew high into the air and started coming down strait at me. Time suddenly slowed down as I watched that black and white sphere slowly grow larger in my field of vision. “This is it” I thought “time to man up, face the music, take one for the team. You can do Andrew, you can OW!” One concussion later I was wearing a very goofy grin and having a trouble walking strait, but at least I headed the ball in the right direction!

I shall end this post with another installment of “Iron Chef: Honduras”. Today’s secret ingredient, frijoles!

Re-fried red beans are a staple protein in Honduras, and are much tastier than the yellow-brown ones we get in the states. I don’t know if it’s the different bacteria down here or what, but they also don’t have quite the same…um…“effect” as re-fried beans in the US.

Frijoles are an essential ingredient in baleadas, a popular dish in Honduras (it may be the national dish for all I know). You wrap a tortilla with frijoles, scrambled egg, sliced avocado, cheese, and mantequilla (I think that’s how you spell it) which is a sort of cross between cheese and sour cream. The best baleadas are the ones where the tortillas and frijoles are home-made. I intend to track down the recipe for both before I leave.

Well, the dog seems to FINALLY shut up, so I’m gonna crash. Let’s hope this week proves better than the last two…an unlikely even what with a rather sore topic rapidly approaching. Halloween.

More on that later.