Chapter VIII: The First Week

A quote from Patti summed up the first week of our new teaching experience for her: "What a long month this week has been! Teaching for test results and straight from the text book is so boring for the students and for the teacher. I’ll have to instill some life into these kids – try projects, research, webbing, editing, etc. I am sure they are capable but they just haven’t been taught!”

Nathan got the dreaded Ms. Hempel in his 6^th grade class, whom after his first few days according to his descriptions, I surmised was a fire-breathing dragon. I was pleasantly surprised when I met her. She wasn’t fire-breathing but she was definitely a “tough-cookie”! He also complained about how the Mexican boys were ostracizing him and making fun of him. It turns out the Mexican students could be just as racist as some of our Canadian students back home were to new Canadian arrivals.

David pulled his chameleon act and simply blended into the class and he ignored any insults and attempts to goad him into a confrontation. The students soon learned he wasn’t going to play their game and they left them alone. As well, he made some friends of a few American students in his class. Both boys were in class only for half of a day. The other half they spent in a special class with a Mexican teacher, Senora Delgado, learning the basic mechanics of Spanish. It was after all a bilingual Spanish/English class!

My week went rather well. As I had previously mentioned, my students were such a pleasant change after my class of last year. They were polite, they were civil, and the non-Mexican students were eager to find out more about me as were a few of the Mexican students. . My “hard-core” cases were either taking it “cool” or they really weren’t that bad. The young lady that I thought was going to be one of my tough nuts turned out to be a young woman from Schenectady, New York, and her family was here because her dad had been transferred to Mexico. She came from a family that consisted of the American family and some adopted children, one of whom was Vietnamese and in Grade 12. He became one of Nathan’s idols. I discovered that Molly, the young woman, was an avid reader and writer and she and I shared many common interests.

I kept my classes simple. Every day we started off with a 15 minute reading period. The only stipulation was that the book had to be in English and that they would have to read it as I would expect a written report on the book and there would be a mark assigned. We did a lot of in-class discussion and I entertained and encouraged all points-of-view. The assignments were short writing assignment which I would gather and edit for them and assign a grade mark on interest and presentation with a small amount of marks taken off for usage and spelling errors. This encouraged the students to actually present me with interesting material to read. It also meant I would have mounds of marking to do daily.

Nathan was bringing home horrendous amounts of homework and a lot of anger over his treatment in class by the other students. Patti was experiencing a lot of paperwork and busywork and lots of bureaucratic frustrations - the use of the lone copy machine, writing out daily lesson plans a week in advance, and being restricted by teaching to the tests! She was beginning to question what were we doing here?

Friday morning at 3:00 a.m. we experienced our first mariachi band. The band started playing just outside our bedroom window and slowly moved down the street to a house where they played for about an hour. There were trumpets, violins, and a vihuela, a high-pitched, round-backed guitar that provides rhythm, and a bass guitar called a guitarrón, which also provides rhythm.

The day in school was interesting because of a shortened night. One of my more astute students asked if I was tired, which I obviously was, and when I described the visit of the mariachi band, all the students nodded their head knowingly! Finally the day ended and the first tough week was over.

 That evening one of the teacher friends of Patti, Marta Calderon, escorted us in her car to the American Consulate’s home in Guadalajara. His wife was a teacher at our school which opened the door for a lot of staff to attend. Our boys stayed at Marta's place with her high-school age daughter and fried their brains on English movies, ate a lot of junk food, and had an awesome time. We were among a number of guests which included teachers, administrators, parents, and some “upper-crust” guests. The hors-d’oeuvres were delicious but soon ran out. The level of relief of the school crowd was high. They were so glad that the first week of school was over. 

When we got back to Marta’s, we visited with her for a few hours. She enlightened us to a lot of the politics of the school, what we could expect living as visitors to Mexico, and a general blue-print of survival. One of our discussion points was a cheaper place to live as most of our combined salary was going for rent. Marta thought she might know of a few places and she would help us check them out. Marta, we surmised, had led a very interesting life. She walked us to a taxi stand nearby and we got home near midnight. 

Saturday morning brought us face to face with the school’s unflappable bureaucracy. Rules, rules, rules! That seemed to be what the ASFG was about. We had cleaned our house, and shopped for groceries and then had gone to school for a swim. But Boss-lady Lupita had said no one was allowed to swim in the pool without lifeguards being present. It didn’t matter that we would be supervising our boys. The man who had hired us had said that using the facilities of the school was one of the perks. Apparently with his departure things had changed! The boys were disappointed and were reluctant helpers for us as we did some prep work for next week.

We tried to save what was left of the day by going to the Charlie Chaplin Teatro on Avenida Adolfo López Mateos Norte. We saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was in English with Spanish sub-titles and there was a lot of action to go along with the buttered popcorn and the Mexican sodas. The theatre had a very homey feel to it. There was an intermission in the middle of the movie. The patrons were friendly to us. We met a man who had been to Canada – to “Bancouver”!  We took a bus home and went to bed quite late.

The next morning we attended services at our adopted church. There was no fellowship after the service as everyone was going to attend a picnic in the afternoon. We all met at the Guadalajara Trailer Park and enjoyed good food and a good swim in a clean pool and we had good conversation with a lot of people. There are a lot of retired Americans and Canadians in the church and this trailer park seemed to be a way of life for a lot of them.

A couple we met there, the Bryant’s, took us to see an apartment that was in our price range and was available. Unfortunately it was on an extremely busy street and the traffic noise was almost over-powering. It had a nice park across the street but it had no furniture, but we would have an option to buy the furniture of the person moving out. We decided we would stay put for a while longer on Mar Caribe.

In the evening one of the Canadian teachers, Lucy Pieragostini, stopped by, as did two M.B. missionaries who were serving in our city. We had a nice visit but our minds were already focusing on school tomorrow. There was a fervent hope that this week would bring us a better time!