acuarelas/watercolors

Sometimes, when I walk in Valladolid, the city becomes a watercolor painting...

snapshots of Valladolid and UNO

Top image: my apartment building. Mine is the door on the lower right, just above the big "garage"
Next two images: blouses and huipiles and the Mayan woman who sell them
Bottom two images: students from my Gastronomy 5 B class on our last day of the cuatri last week (We had a party!)

Santana at sunrise

This morning, on my way to work at 6:45 am, my taxi driver was blasting Santana as we made our way towards UNO and the rising sun was just starting to burn through the thick layer of low-lying clouds that were hovering over us here on the peninsular plain of Yucatán. It made me want to go out and get all the live Santana albums immediately. I´ve got an iTunes gift card just waiting for me to get home and use it! Good to know that Mexicans still love their Jalisco-born guitar hero.
I have another very busy day ahead of me - grading and writing more exams. Then, next week, the students won´t be here, but faculty have to come to plan for next cuatri and complete the end-of-cuatri administrative paperwork. On the plus side, it´s almost the weekend and I really need some down time! Still trying to figure out how to spend it wisely...

a little feedback...finally

You make me feel in USA. In other courses I felt my English teachers teching English in Mexico. Do you understand me?
This was a comment written by one of my students taking the online Moodle course I have been teaching. I utilized the SurveyMonkey website to digitize the evaluation that I made for my face-to-face classes and I sent my Moodle students the link. So far I have 5 of 15 responses, and it is a boost to read comments like that. To me, it is a wonderful compliment.
Things are fairly crazy right now, with grading and exams and final projects. I am not looking forward to creating several exams tomorrow for any students who are forced to take the extraordinario exam due to failing the course (either for not attending or for having less than a 70%). I already know I will have several students from one class taking it because they have too many unjustified absences, but from my three other classes, there are no students who have to take it, so it is just a formality. I´m not happy about having to create exams for no reason, but that bureaucracy is part of academia, I guess.
While talking with my dear friend, Sara, last night on Skype, I was doing some reflection on the progress my students have made over the past several months. She mentioned something that got me thinking even more about the effects of being here and working with so many different students, connecting with them as a teacher and as a representative of the different facets of my identity, namely: the ripple effect. What effect will my teaching have on these individuals? How can I continue to make the most of the time we have together to help them not only to learn English, but also to develop life skills?
I leave you with a picture that I included in the Modal Auxiliaries section on the Final Exam for my 2nd cuatri students from the site, Icanhascheezburger.com:

musings

Lately I have been thinking about the coping skills, strategies, and mechanisms that people utilize when learning a new language in order to not offend (or even to avoid interaction with) their target language counterparts.
As a language learner myself, I think there are many things that we do that effectively change our behavior, causing us to behave very differently than we do in our own culture and speaking in our native language. We might say things that aren't exactly true to keep our communications simple. We often pretend we understand, though we don't. We might even plan things in our day around the interactions we want to have (or those we wish to avoid). These observations are valuable in that they inform my teaching practice now.
Ultimately, learning a language is an extremely humbling experience. When I first began to learn Spanish, I had very little concept of the long, rewarding, transformative process that lay before me, and I knew nothing about Second Language Acquisition. My conceptions of what "bilingual" or "fluent" meant were vague, and I was ignorant about the depth of language - I mean, what does it really mean to know a language?
What is clear to me now about the work I did in my Master's program at MIIS is that it was extremely focused specifically on the connection between the practices of teaching and learning and the theory and science of language acquisition.
It is one thing to study pedagogy and methodology, and another to study language and understand its innerworkings. But it is yet another thing entirely to navigate the area where these two fields merge, and I believe to have credibility and to truly be able to sense your students' needs, it is necessary to have a background in foreign language learning or bilingualism.
My musings here are really just a reiteration of the things I thought, wrote, and read about during my two years in grad school, but now I am living them.

wrong turns and piñatas

This morning on my way to the lavandería near my new apartment, I took the wrong street at a fork in the road. Because that part of Valladolid, near the Convento de San Bernadino, is so old, the streets don´t follow the same grid pattern as they do in the center of town, and as I kept walking with my two bags of dirty laundry, I began to realize I was getting farther and farther from my destination. I saw burning garbage and hungry dogs laying on the street, and the sun was starting to get hot. Luckily, before too long I saw a taxi and had him take me back to where I wanted to go! Valladolid is a small town, but carrying two bags of dirty clothes and sheets through an unfamiliar neighborhood, it can feel deceptively big.
We are in our last week of classes for this cuatri which is always a busy time. I have definitely learned a lot from doing grades several times now (mid-terms twice and finals once), so I think I´m getting smarter about logistics and time management and all that fun stuff.
As I write this, my GASTRO 5A group is filling out a course evaluation that I created because I was so disappointed with the way things turned out after last cuatri. We were told we were going to be given feedback, but what we received was meaningless - a percentage "score" without any basis. Not only that, but the jargon-filled and complex "evaluation" was also someone´s Master´s degree project - it wasn´t even a proven evaluation instrument! Ugh! I was livid.
Anyway, I designed this evaluation and I have arranged for my students to fill them out anonymously. My colleague will then hold onto them until after grades are submitted for all of my classes. I am looking forward to getting some real feedback from my students.
To wrap things up for the cuatri, two of my classes are having parties this week. I am going to bring a piñata to one of them! For my other group, I am going to eat a chapulín, aka a crispy-fried grasshopper, because one of my students brought me back a little baggy filled with them from Oaxaca. And, yes, this is my Gastronomy group! So I think this week is pretty much guaranteed to be interesting...

We have been having lots and lots of rainshowers and a few thunderstorms here in Valladolid, but yesterday turned out to be a very beautiful day which was perfect because I spent it in Tulum at the beach. I needed to take a day for some relaxation and it did the trick. Now I am recharged and ready for the mountain of grading that is in front of me...
¡Hasta luego y saludos a todos!

Fake Break

I don´t exactly feel like I had a real Spring Break, but after a difficult trip home in which I had to both do my taxes AND say goodbye to my sweet dog, Mira, it´s already back to work at UNO. We have just two more weeks until the end of the cuatri which means lots to accomplish in a short period of time.
We found out this morning that the Governor of Yucatán, Ivonne Ortega Pacheco, is coming to UNO this evening for some sort of special dedication event. Should be interesting...Unfortunately it also means I have to stay at work extra long!
On the plus side, it was so nice to have my apartment to come home to. I had a very relaxing weekend, allowing myself lots of time to adjust to being back in Mexico and to rest after a few very difficult days in PA.
Before I go, I want to post a picture of Mira, a beautiful creature loved by everyone who knew her....





I´ll miss you, Poochie.