Refrigerating

When the new fridge first arrived, we cranked the knob to maximum coldness. Our previous fridge, which slowly petered out after a month of use, had needed to be on that setting just to keep everything lukewarm. The next day, we get brain freezes while drinking our water. Our milk has ice crystals in it. We love this refrigerator.

A Purchase

Although I have no money nor stable income, I have purchased a new phone. New friend Gina asks what I'm going to do with my old one, and I tell her I'll step on it and dance on its grave. My new phone is extra cutesy, bite-sized, and takes photos of the world around me. I love it so much. In related news, our refrigerator has broken and Cathy and I have been eating ourselves silly so as not to spoil food. Our landlady, instead of going through the hassle of calling up a repairman and paying his fees, has decided to buy us a new one. Meanwhile the cheese melts, the milk curdles, and I take pictures of it all.

Homework!

We're given written assignments to complete by Monday. I store my papers in a huge Spanish binder and organize my notes according to day and subject. I buy fluorescent highlighters and assign meaning to the different colors. Blue means "grammar", Yellow means "skills lessons", etc. I attack this course like it's a one-month Master's degree, or an especially long tournament of champions. I want to win. I want an A.

More Group Dynamics

The first day, poor Lawrence leaves the lid off the marker so it dries up while he's teaching. The next day, he moves half the class into another room for a listening activity and chaos ensues. As he's a bit bumbly sometimes, he's become another of my favorite friends of the group. He laughs at his mistakes and seems to be learning a lot. He wears shorts to teach in. Cathy and I still dress business proper, in the hopes that the tutors will notice that we're the only ones who still dress as specified. Lawrence's mum is from Spain and his dad is from England, as such he is perfectly fluent in both languages. He has a twin who's his better half; a banker making tons of money somewhere in England. Lawrence bums money off of him indiscriminately. I love it. Although I still somewhat love her, British/Spanish Judy has applied to become my arch nemesis on the course. Her application is still being processed, so we quite like being around each other still, but she has moments of sheer madness and can be pretty rude. After a session where Kate had given Judy some pointers to work on during her teaching and had told me that I did very well, I was commenting that to Judy: "I really thought that I messed up the instructions to the students so it's really surprising that Kate didn't mention it." Judy says: "Yeah, I thought that your instructions really were crap." I store these comments in a small folder in the back of my brain. Judy is a double agent.

Group Dynamics

My small group, led fearlessly by Kate, is a hodgepodge of accents and countries. Some of us have taught before, but most of the group hasn't. At this point in the stage, and given my background at Syracuse and this summer, I have loads more experience than any other group member. I cling to my head start and study everything I am told every night. Katie, the Australian of the group, is quite possibly my favorite new person. She pronounces every TH like it was an F, which is at first complicated, but it ultimately is quite endearing. Everything becomes Everyfing in Katie's magical mixed-up language. Her spelling is also wonderfully atrocious, so she spells things like headache wrong on the board and gets corrected by students. The rest of the group, sitting in the back of the room, makes frantic gestures to get her attention. Linda is from South Africa, and is a bit older than the rest of us. It has been my experience that the older students are generally the most studious, like they have something to prove to everyone. We go on lunch break and Linda sits in the library, studying her lesson plans. She asks thousands of questions in our small group time and Kate patiently answers it all. It's quite overboard. If we were competing against each other, Linda would be prime competition. Sarah is from New York City and so stereotypical that it makes me laugh. The first day, she pointed to the students and asked them what their name was. The students cowered beneath her glare. When she laughed, she said "That's funny" without a smile on her face. She could beat me up.

Getting the CELTA

Cathy and I arrive early and sit in our seats properly. We fidget a bit. Nervous future English teachers enter the classroom as well. They are all dressed far more casually than we. While the classroom fills slowly, we all sit in stressed silence until someone finally turns to someone else and asks her name. Everyone begins to chat quietly. Our tutors enter, and I am separated from Cathy and assigned to Kate, the best tutor that the course has to offer, although she was obviously nor marketed that way. Later, after quick comparisons of all the tutors, it is unanimously decided that my group must have the best karma out of everyone, having received such a wonderful tutor. Cathy's group, however, was left with the weird cross-child of Hitler and John Cleese, without all the funniness of the latter and with all of the unfortunate grimaces of the former. Our first day is exhausting; after a few hours we are thrust into our classroom with nothing but our lesson plans to hold onto for support. Kate sits in the back of the room and takes copious notes of our nervous tics. At the end of my first lesson, she likes me more, but tells me I need to stop repeating everything the students say and learn to write like a normal human being. Apparently my handwriting, while delightfully artsy in some circles, is frowned upon by Cambridge.

New Adventures

I pick at my itchy scabs. Sniffle. Cough. The last few days of camp, although undoubtedly much more enjoyable than the first two week period, were a bit rough as I was inflicted with a strain of Spanish Ebola which was transmitted through the sweaty kids and ridiculously large insects that swarmed the mountains. It was with a twinge of regret that I said goodbye to the sobbing children (I giggled at the dramatics) and boarded the bus to go home. My entire head was a throbbing mass, my bruised and scabbed arm still stiff, my spider-bitten legs only now returning to normal size. I put my head between my legs as the bus zipped happily around the steep, narrow mountain roads. To my left and right children and camp counselors alike threw up. iPedro was busy singing me into a Zen state where none of these physical ailments existed. The Dramamine that I had taken threw its arms up in exasperation.

Thus I returned to Madrid after a month-long technology exile. During my month I slept a lot, taught a lot, and hated and loved an equal number of children and monitors. Camp was highly enjoyable once we got into the swing of things, though the old hills of Madrid surely were a welcome sight. As we came in view of the city, I happily smiled, mainly because my hacker friend Tyler gave me a program that, upon arrival in Madrid, located and provided me with internet signal within my apartment. The only trick is that Cathy and I have to precariously hang my computer out the window to receive said signal. My heart skips beats. Circus folk don't live with this kind of tension.

Tomorrow begins our month-long teaching course, promised to be both difficult and ridiculously intense. We pack our lunches and go back to school shopping for glue, scissors, paper, and other child-related accoutrements. We prepare out first day's homework and discuss the answers. I cheat and look in the back of the book.