Mr. Pony

My new Group 10 students, the highest level in the camp and arguably one of the most difficult to teach, has decided to call me Mr. Pony in an unexplainable act of utter weirdness. My Group 8, a class that I had dreaded for the entire two-week run of the last fortnight, is now filled with kids intent on learning. The draw in fevered silence for 15 minutes while I marvel at their strange, horror movie willingness to study. I put on my mean face when chastising children and surprise myself when they start to cry. The scallywags and devils from the first two weeks have gone, and in their place are meek, studious children. I warily watch these kids, waiting for the day of their revolt, when they throw books out the window and perform an unexpected coup d'etat, replacing monitors with the adolescents and English Class for Archery. They love some Archery.

Notes from Camp

Bugs sing outside my window. My roommate, Canadian Tyler, sniffles with a cold and groggily searches for something apparently lost deep within his bags. The first two weeks of our exile in the mountains, minus internet and phone service, have passed by relatively quickly. Along with Cathy and I, the English professors are Emily (Boston), Tyler (Canada) and Ginny (Virginia from Spain). Our coordinator is Maria, a Londoner who was Cathy's roommate in the Golden Days, when we three lived in Spain four years ago. Camp is as expected, negative and positive, plus a little more.

My first two weeks were filled with Spanish kids working out syllable after painstaking syllable of English, speaking to me in broken sentences and adding new phonetic sounds to my native tongue. I smiled through their fruitless attempts at the past simple, late nights in our lab (an actual science laboratory) doing lesson plans, and hostile camp counselors who think that the English Teachers have it too easy. The kids dreaded their English Classes (Student Carmen says: "Can we just skip the rest of the lesson since this is so boring anyway?"). Along with the students, there were days when I as well dreaded the idea of going to class.

But isn't there always a ray of hope? The feverish anticipation with which some of the kids would listen to story time, the days when the adolescents worked together and actually held a conversation in English, the drawing of Spiderman that little, wild-haired Pablo gave to me on the last day of class... Unforgettable moments in a fortnight of many forgettable ones, but ultimately what makes everything worth the effort.

A-Camping We Will Go

We're leaving early in the morning. Buses, filled with young Spaniards all a-blossom, will leave from the football stadium heading for the south of Spain, Murcia. In return for many, many euros, I have agreed to be an English professor to the tots. I've skinned down the website for the time being, as I won't have too much time these coming months to dedicate to the website and prefer just to keep things simple. Updates may be sparse this coming month, but please keep checking back as I at least plan on updating once a week. Wish me luck!