8-11-09

The last week has brought a few changes to my life here in Fortuna, the tourist season has started to pick up. Something that can be measured by the number of Octogenarians in bermuda shorts standing in the park taking a picture of the volcano at anyone time. This statistic has transformed from an anomily to the norm seemingly overnight and the town is deffinitely busier for that. I gave the first installment of my final exam on Friday and Saturday of this week. I had to give it over two days because I had a student strike to deal with, they said that they didnt have enough time to review the material, but from my perspective a solid week of review, when I only taught for two weeks seemed like more then enough. They had called Andres who is the officer in charge of the program here earlier in the day and asked him to move the test which he did, but of course they didnt ask me and when I arrived on Friday they told me there wouldnt be a test that day.

Let me just say that I was beyond pissed off, and even though I dont have the vocabulary to express that feeling in Spanish without utilizing the myriad curse words Ive aquired since my arrival I think they got the message. I called Andres and he explained their possition to me, too much work this week, not enough time to study. I responded that this weeks group is in fact the advanced group so that if he wanted the test moved back for this group I would without a doubt be moving the test for the other group (not actually an option because of the graduation date). After talking with me, I think he too realized how pissed I was that they had gone around my back to declare an extra week of studying for themselves and we ended up giving the test to those who wanted to do it on Friday, and everyone else got to take it on Saturday. The scores ended up how I thought that they would, all over the damn place, but teaching to and measuring the progress of a widely varied student ability has been a problem from the beginning.

I think that Cooper is starting to settle in pretty well here. His spanish is much better then mine, during his last year at prep school in Massachusets he spent a combined six months in Chile and Argentina. It has been nice to have someone who can explain my ideas to the officers but we have also run into some problems along the way. I am sure that Luke had the same issues with me when I first got here, lots of ideas and energy and trying to do teach as much as possible everynight. The problem is that it is just impossible to expect the police officers to absorb more then a little information everynight, and because they dont have time/ choose not to practice outside of class effectively everything that sticks in their minds is absorbed in the 3 hours of class everynight. At first I felt bad telling him to tone it down with throwing a bunch of concepts at them (prepositions, the role of ´s) because I didnt want to dissuade him from giving teaching his all, and I deffinitely didnt want to portray the Police as stupid or unteachable. But in the middle of a test review week if there was any chance of them doing well I had to get them focused on the information and concepts they would need for the test.

After a day of putting it off I finally got around to explaining to him how frustrating teaching here is, and the limited ammount of information that can get successfully communicated in a week. I think I did a pretty good job of setting some lower expectations for him while not dissuading him from really trying while hes down here. With his knowledge of Spanish and fresh out of highschool drive I think he can really get alot taught in his time down here.

There were two people who camped out behind the station last night who are working on a two year bike ride from Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina. They were about the type of people you would expect to be attempting that kind of adventure and looked like they had recently rode a bike through El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (three places I dont think I would want to be able to move only as fast as my legs would take me, but as mr T would say different strokes for really crazy people). It was a bummer to watch my hawkeyes loose for the first time this year on saturday, but oh well Id rather go to a bowlgame that we will can win, than get torn apart by texas or OK at the rose bowl. Im closing in on my last days here in Fortuna which is starting to seem a little sad but Im am looking forward to freezing my ass off in Iowa with friends and family soon too. Pura Vida