Final Stretch

Where Brooklyn at?

With one week of classes remaining, I can't stop myself from thinking about going home, starting school, and getting my student on. Since my previous post about finally getting into a medical school, I have been taken off the waitlist at a couple more schools and I have decided to attend a state school in Brooklyn called Downstate. I decided to switch from the University at Buffalo for a number of reasons, the most important being closer proximity to my family and the advantages that will come from serving a population as diverse as Brooklyn's.

Surprisingly, my biggest concern with going to Buffalo wasn't the cold and snow (I lived in South Bend for four years; ice water runs through my veins), but rather the thought of not having a lot of opportunity to keep up with my Spanish and losing it after having worked so hard to learn it in the first place. There's little doubt in my mind that my Spanish will be well utilized in Brooklyn, and if med school is going to prevent me from traveling abroad in the next four years, at least I will still have the opportunity to meet people from all over the world who end up in NYC hospitals.

Times are a Changing

I have written before about how ridiculous the buses in this country can be, but I have noticed recently that things are changing. The first time I realized something was different was when I went to Tena and at one point the bus was stopped by the police. Buses usually fill up their seats at the terminal, and then when they leave, stop along the way to pick up more people to fill in the standing room until 50+ people are simultaneously getting to second base with each other in the aisle.

This apparently wasn't O.K. with the police in Tena though, because the bus driver told everyone who was standing up that they had to get off the bus in between towns. The people got really angry and demanded to know why the driver let them on if they weren't allowed to be there, and after a while of no one obeying the driver's orders, the bus just took off again, which I assume either means the driver bribed the cops or the police let him slide since it was a new rule at the time.

I saw this new regulation in action a second time on the way back from a conference in Quito. One of my friends mentioned that he saw a cop put a sticker on the bus door before it left the terminal, and that it was probably to signal to the cops at the next checkpoint whether the bus opened the door (breaking the sticker in the process) and let in more people on the streets.

I guess that was in fact the purpose of the sticker, because every time we stopped to pick people up outside of the terminal, they had to climb in through the window. It was funny to watch people climbing to reach the high windows then squirming and struggling with all their might to get up and through. Afterward, people on the street helped to toss their bags and boxes up as well. I would have taken pictures or a video, but I feared that it would upset the people working on the bus because it was evidence of them doing an illegal activity. I didn't want to be like that guy who got Michael Phelps into trouble for snapping a picture of him taking a hit from a bong, so I kept the camera in my bag and assured myself that my words would do the incident justice.

The most recent change I noticed happened at a more local level on one of the normal buses that runs only in Ambato. The guy on the bus who was collecting people's fares looked out the window before a stop and warned the bus driver to come to a complete stop because police were nearby.

I'm not sure if the government will continue to regulate public buses like this, but hopefully they do because although it will probably raise bus fares since drivers will want to compensate for the fewer number of passengers they can take, it would mean safer and more efficient traveling for Ecuadorians who will no longer have to jump on/off moving buses and endure numerous, unofficial stops along the way to pick up passengers.

Dolla Bills Ya'll

I cannot comprehend why the twenty dollar bill exists in Ecuador. Everything here is so cheap that it is almost always impossible to use a bill that big for everyday purchases, and because it is so difficult to use, people are usually very unwilling to change you and give up their precious small bills and Sacajawea dollars.

The other day I wanted to take a cab to the mall, a one dollar fare. However, all I had was a twenty. The last time I tried to get away with paying a cab with a twenty the driver flipped out, stopped at a drug store, and demanded that I buy something to get some smaller bills to pay him with.

With that experience in mind, I walked around the block asking various businesses if they could change me. I went to four different places before I found someone that even let me finish my sentence and hooked me up with some more manageable bills.

It's pretty wild to think that when I go to work at SECAP I bring $1.25 with me: twenty-five cents for the bus and a dollar in case of an emergency. When I go back to the States I won't have any problems with using twenties anymore, but I will have to get accustomed to bringing more money than a handful of change when I go out.

Peru

Although I finish work this coming Thursday, I have left myself three more weeks here to do some traveling before returning home. My partner in crime and travel, Caitlin, will be accompanying me along with another teacher friend, Asia, to gallivant around Peru. The list of destinations includes: Lima, Cusco, Machu Pichu, Lake Titicaca, and Arequipa. La Paz, the capital city of Bolivia, may or may not happen now that we have discovered the $135 visa charge for American visitors. In any case, we will be plenty busy taking buses for days at a time and doing the main event of our journey: a five-day hike up to the ruins at Machu Picchu.

Expect to see lots of photos of me alone in the ruins, gazing thoughtfully into the distance as I ponder something very profound about life and how my South American experience has changed me as a person. It'll be just like that scene from Motorcycle Diaries, although I hope my version doesn't end with me becoming a communist revolutionary.

This image will be available on t-shirts starting next week for only $19.99

Things Ecuadorians Like: Reggaeton

Check out the nightlife in Ecuador and you will quickly discover how popular Reggaeton is in this country. Reggaeton is a style of Latin urban music that plays in dance clubs, and it has grown on me tremendously since being here due to how ridiculous it is.

The first thing I love about Reggaeton is how ugly the artists are. It seems like in most genres of music, good looks are just as important as talent. I haven't met too many people who think that Shakira is a good singer, but no one talks about that when she is gyrating in a cage dressed in a skin-colored leotard (one ticket to boner-city, please).

The way that most areas of the music industry filter out talented musicians and singers just because they aren't attractive means we are not exposed to a lot of great music, but Reggaeton gives anyone a chance to make a hit regardless of their appearance. Due to this, there are a lot of average looking guys in Reggaeton who make great music and prove that unattractiveness and popularity should not be mutually exclusive.

Hey Nacho, the Black Eyed Peas called; they want their guy whose name nobody knows back

They guys from Plan B try to hide their looks by wearing sunglasses, flashy accessories, and pointing at less attractive people, but they're not fooling anyone

Another thing I love about Reggaeton are the lyrics. While all songs have a catchy beat and are great music to hear at a dance club, they also treat a wide variety of themes and topics that range from having sex, to dancing, to having sex while dancing.

The songs about sex rarely employ innuendo or subtlety, but instead go for explicit references to sexual acts. My current favorite song of this variety is called "Dándole" (translation: giving it to her). In the song, the singer inquires to some lucky woman, "Mami, who doesn't like sex/Baby, who doesn't love this" followed by the chorus "I would spend the night giving, giving it to her." Since Spanish isn't my first language I'm a little slow on the uptake, so I sang this song non-stop for weeks before someone told me what it was about.

Other songs focus on the dancing, and the singers are sometimes considerate enough to encode dance moves into the lyrics of the song so that those of us who aren't Latino know what to do when the music starts. "Danza Kuduro" has a dance with numerous steps including: waving your hand, moving just your hips, spinning around, and not getting tired now because this just started.

The final group of songs combines the two previous themes with sexually charged dance moves, like "Contra la Pared" (translation: against the wall). You better believe that when this song comes on, people find a wall and get against it. The movement that follows is what my high school literature teacher once referred to as "the simulated anal sex dance." The Wikipedia article for Reggaeton also tells me that this style of dance, which is often associated with Reggaeton music, is referred to as perreo in Spanish, a word deriving from the Spanish word for "dog" (and no doubt that animal's associated style). When all the wall space is taken up, I have seen people make alternating guy/girl chains emanating from a single person on the wall so as not to disobey Jiggy D's command.

Sometimes I have no idea what a song is about even after I look up the lyrics. But that's just fine, because Reggaeton music is supposed to get people dancing, and if it can do that then who really cares what a guachinanga is anyway.

And Then There Were Three

After having attended the final conference for my program and with only three weeks of teaching left, I am reaching the final stretch of my time in Ecuador and trying my best to appreciate what I have going for me right now.


Jedi Mind Tricks

I recently had a rough couple of weeks with my first class as they became increasingly confrontational and disrespectful. My last week of classes they were suddenly much more cooperative, and after pondering what I have been doing differently, I think I finally figured out a way to get my students on my side.

Since I made books for my class, I usually have them open up to the chapter we are going to cover so they have the charts for the grammar point we are about to learn in front of them. I have them open their books so that I don't waste time writing things on the board that they already have in their books and so there is no chance that they miscopy something and are confused by it later. Unfortunately, upon announcing that they should open their books to start a new grammar point they invariably start complaining, and within seconds the entire class is put in a sour mood and they become restless and unreceptive to what I am saying.

Two weeks ago on Thursday I had finished giving them a test and wanted to simply introduce the next topic so that the following week they would have already been exposed to it and wouldn't be so daunted by a new grammar point. I prepared some notes to write on the board to introduce the topic and wasn't planning on opening the book at all to do exercises. I was just going to review some example sentences and let them out early.

The first difference I noticed with this approach was that when I wrote notes on the board, students were quick to get into "student mode" and copy silently. This calm in the classroom was particularly striking because my class has been known to get very rowdy after the completion of a test since they realize they aren't going to have another test for at least two more weeks.

After they finished taking notes on what I had written, we reviewed some examples that I drew on the board using pictures and sentences. I was surprised at how many of my students were paying attention and actively trying to understand what I was talking about, in contrast to the usual blank stares I get until I stop speaking and they all ask the best student in their vicinity what I just said.

The most satisfying difference in attitude came just before I was about to let them go early when a handful of students who were intrigued by the examples requested more examples/practice to make sure they understood. It was at this point that I asked my students to open their books and do an exercise, and it only elicited one complaint from my most annoying student. No one joined her.

For the entire next week I employed this technique of writing things on the board to get everyone in a classroom mindset before jumping into using the textbook, and it has made my classes run much more smoothly. Additionally, I brought back giving out lollipops as prizes for winning games in class, and it still amazes me how much motivation a piece of candy can coax out of adults.

Sure it's ridiculous that it takes so much strategy to get adults to pay attention in a class that they signed up for and are paying for themselves, but when I actually do get my students to act like students, teaching isn't half bad.

Search Word Sillies

Recently, there has been an explosion of ridiculous phrases that people have entered into various search engines to end up at my blog. Blogger tracks these phrases, and I would like to share my favorites from the past few weeks and my advice in case people with similar inquiries end up at my site again.

"dentist gave me anesthetics and my nose is itchy"- Scratch it.

"best pliers to pull wisdom teeth"- Seriously, who needs a trained medical professional when you've got a bottle of moonshine, a pair of the best wisdom tooth pulling pliers available at your local Home Depot, and YouTube to replace all that fancy book learnin'?

"do Ecuadorian women like older American men"- If you're an American citizen, they like any kind of man.

Ecuador: Check

The other day the sky around the local volcano Tungurahua was uncharacteristically clear, so I took this shot from my classroom window as the sun was about to set. Volcanoes are an awesome reminder that I live in Ecuador.

End of Service

Last weekend I attended the final conference for my program, WorldTeach. I met up with the rest of the volunteers in Quito and we reflected on our time in Ecuador and caught up on what everyone is going to be doing when they get stateside. People's plans ranged from comically uncertain to fixed plans for the next several years in grad school. Quite a few people have even decided to stay in Ecuador and continue teaching because they haven't gotten enough of the Ecua-life here.

Just a few of my fellow WordTeachers at post EOS festivities.

It was great getting to know all of the other volunteers in the Ecuador program this year since I actually get along well with them, but similar to when I left Notre Dame, it is sad to think that I probably won't see most of them again, let alone hang out with them as much as I did in Ecuador. Facebook is O.K., but it is no replacement for cruising around Ambato in the back seat of someone's car or taking trips to the Orient to go jungle rafting.

Should have went with Pablo

A few days ago Caitlin brought to my attention that there is a bar with ping-pong tables near her house. We went with her host brother who recently came back to Ecuador after living in Spain for a while. His name is Gandhi. My name is Krishna. To recap, my name is Krishna and I played an Ecuadorian guy named Gandhi in ping-pong.

It was almost as weird as the time I introduced myself to some guy at an Indian wedding and he pointed to the woman next to him and said, "Really, my wife's name is Krishna too!"

Moseying Along

Get off my Phone You Jerk

Along with motivation issues, another surprising characteristic of my adult students is how immature they are. I am consistently stunned by how annoying and childish they can be, particularly the ones that are several years older than me. I imagined that a teacher with adult students would be free of disciplinary duties and would be able to focus on teaching, but I find myself having to resort to treating my students like children to get the response I want from them.

Any kind of punishment that creates more work for me is obviously out of the question, so I never even considered any kind of detention or extra assignments for students that misbehave. I remember in high school that students would get sent to the dean for class disturbances. That would result in detention, yes, but more immediately the student would be dismissed from the class and would have to make up all the work he missed. I remember how jarring it was to see someone have to leave, and I think it is a powerful threat to kick a disruptive student out of class because it is straight to the point and fits the offense perfectly.

Over the past two and a half semesters I have threatened many times to kick students out of class, mostly if they complained or were talking/texting on their phones. It has always managed to shut them up and I've never had to actually give anyone the boot... until last week.

One of my younger students was texting on his phone while he was supposed to be doing a group assignment. I normally don't care if my students don't pay attention while I am speaking or would rather text than do the practice work I assign because they are adults and if they don't want to learn they don't have to. Students should respect my authority and listen to what I say to them since they can learn a lot from me, but if they don't it doesn't really bother me too much because they are only sabotaging their own progress. However, one thing that absolutely infuriates me is when we do work that requires groups and one student doesn't participate, thereby ruining the learning experience of the other students.

I was mad that he was being disrespectful to his classmates who were trying to learn, so instead of just asking him to put his phone away like I normally would I told him to give it to me. He put his phone in his pocket and tried to reason with me, but I insisted that he give me his phone. I told him he could leave the class if he didn't want to give it to me, and it ended with me kicking him out and telling him to come back the next day.

Students' moxie continues outside of class as well, and just the other day one of my students whose husband is in my second class tried to get me to pass him to the next level even though he hasn't attended class in the last three weeks.

- Teacher, my husband can't some to classes anymore this semester because of work.
- And?
- Can you pass him anyway?
- Not if he only came to one-fifth of the classes this semester. That's absurd.
- Can't you give him a test?
- It's a conversation class. There's no way to replicate 100 classroom hours of conversation with a native speaker in one test.
- Then can you give him classes on the weekend or in the morning before our class?
- Are you seriously asking me if I can give private lessons to one student because he signed up for a class that directly conflicts with his work schedule?!
- Teacher, don't be a bad person, I know you can do it.

After that conversation I didn't know whether to laugh at the absurdity of what my student was saying or be incensed at her suggestion that I was in the wrong for not passing her husband who doesn't come to class. I don't know if my students say things like this because I am generally cool with them and listen to their suggestions for the class or if it a consequence of Ecuadorian culture. Either way, it is completely inappropriate and I will never cease to be amazed at a thirty-five year old woman who reasons like a child.


I have wondered if I will miss teaching in Ecuador when I am in medical school. After my experience with my class today I can emphatically say that I will not. The students in my first class always complain that we work too much from the book (we do like three pages a day, mind you), so I try my best to incorporate fun, non-grammar related activities into class. I thought a fun idea for today would be to write limericks. I understand that rhyming is harder in English than in Spanish, but it is only five lines and I gave them an hour to do it.


Well my class had a collective aneurysm when I explained the assignment to them, and they very disrespectfully shouted at me that it was impossible to do. Yes, a group of students with an average age of ~24 freaked out that they had only an hour to write a five line poem with a predetermined structure. It seriously took me ten minutes to calm them down and get them to actually start doing it, but more than the frustration of playing babysitter to a room of adults, it hurt my inner-writer to see people so opposed to even attempting to be creative using my language and the language that I love.


So future Krishna, if you are sick of reading textbooks and start thinking back fondly on your time as an ESL teacher in Ecuador, remember: being an English teacher was never just about teaching English.

Just Trust me on This One

An important skill for anyone learning a foreign language is to learn how to accept differences from your first language even if you don't understand it or it doesn't make sense to you. I am not particularly good at this, and I have incessantly argued things about Spanish grammar to native speaking Spanish teachers who think differently.

For instance, in Ecuador the most common way to express the passive voice is to use the third-person plural. "He was killed" would therefore read Lo mataron. I understand how this construction works for some cases, but I cannot accept this usage for instances in which the actor was one person. What I mean to say is, if it was one unknown person who killed the man, you should not be able to use a plural verb conjugation. Alas, whenever I have tried to use a different construction that makes more sense to me, every Ecuadorian in hearing range disagrees and I have slowly and begrudgingly accepted that this is how Spanish works here.

My students are also really bad at this and I frequently find myself just telling them to trust me. I thought that this semester I would speak a little more Spanish so I could give my students better explanations about the grammar topics. That turned out to be a bad move, because it has only encouraged them to try to translate directly more than ever.

When I taught the future tense this semester I explained to them that it was similar to the way that there are multiple ways to express the future in Spanish. This resulted in them trying to match up the different ways we use the future with their different ways, and they were probably more confused than if I would have just spoken in English the whole time and had them figure it out on their own. A lot of my students were trying to translate "I'm going to the mall" to Estoy yendo al mall, even though I explained to them that the present simple and progressive are used differently in the two languages.

It is not intuitive to leave behind what you know about grammar in your own language when you are trying to learn another, but bravery is rewarded and the best language students are the ones that have faith in native speakers and accept differences in grammar even though it sometimes feels uncomfortable.



Deployed

Normally when I come home at night on the weekends, all the lights in my house are off, everyone is asleep, and my family has inadvertently locked me out. This past Friday I was shocked to see that upon my arrive late at night, all the lights in the house were on and there were a ton of people walking around. I asked the housekeeper what was going on, and she informed me that my host brother José Luis, a UN Peacekeeper, was being deployed to Sudan the coming Monday.

José Luis and I at Ricky's wedding

It took me another thirty seconds of looking around the dining room to realize that everyone was hammered. It was already 2:00am and most people were either passed out or about to leave, so within the hour it was just my oldest host brother Santi, my host dad, and some relative I didn't know sitting at the table drinking sugar cane alcohol and talking about José Luis leaving for a year.

I have never had any family member in the military who left home, so it was a completely new perspective of the military for me. It was sad to hear the stories my host brother and dad told about José Luis as a kid and how they were all very worried about his safety. It was the first time that any story about war was made real to me as well, since I know José Luis, his wife, and his three kids because they visit the house pretty often.

In the next few months Santi will also be leaving Ecuador for Australia where his wife and daughter live. I felt bad for my host parents who will be away from two of their children for a long time, but my host father managed to see the value in my host brothers' departures by stressing that they need to leave to fulfill their respective duties as a soldier and father. He even had some inspirational words for me and expressed his confidence in my decision to go back to the United States to pursue medicine and become a physician.

I'm not as close with my host family as some of the other volunteers I know, so I appreciated that they opened up and shared some of their family history with me that night, even if it was really sad.

Puyo

Last Sunday I went on a trip to a nearby jungle town called Puyo. I can't say enough about how cool it is that I live in the chilly mountains, but after a two hour bus ride east I can be in the hot and humid jungle.


In Puyo we visited a monkey rescue center where visitors can walk around and interact with the rescued and rehabilitating monkeys. The guy at the entrance of the center warned us that the monkeys like to jump on people and steal things, so we were all careful to zip everything up in our bags and I took off my glasses when I went in. I wish I would have taken more pictures of the place, but there really were monkeys jumping around on us and I was scared they would steal my camera.

Don't let my smile fool you; I was straight terrified of the baby monkey on my neck

Most of the monkeys turned out to be pretty chill and they just sat on our necks and played with our hair. In addition to the monkeys there were also a bunch of other animals hanging out. At one point a river otter showed up and started playing with the monkeys. My friend Peter got a ridiculous video of a monkey and the otter fighting, and if he ever gets around to putting it on YouTube I guarantee it gets a million views.

I noticed that a monkey was cleaning one of the dog's hair, and I joking asked if the monkeys ever ride the dogs. Five seconds later this happened:

The Internet would be proud

After hanging out with the monkeys we jumped in a waterfall (no big deal) and called it a day. Nature excursions are always a welcome way to break up the monotony of the work week in Ambato, and I love how easy it is to go on a peaceful nature outing in Ecuador.

Lis, myself, Pete, and Su

Beginning of the End

This week I will be traveling to Quito to attend my program's end of service conference. After tomorrow's classes I only have four more weeks of teaching left, and with the United States of America and medical school in sight, I am starting to get anxious about going home. My plans to travel to Peru for the three weeks following the end of my job are also slowly coming together and I will hopefully be posting pictures of Machu Picchu by the end of the summer.

Ow!

Removed

This past Monday I finally cornered a dentist and got him to remove my wisdom teeth that have been bothering me for over a month. Even though I had been assured by more than one Ecuadorian that he was the best dentist in Ambato, I was still nervous about getting the procedure done here and I was shaking in the chair the entire time.

The dentist only gave me a local anesthetic for the procedure so I was awake the entire time. After my face was good and numb, he took out a pair of pliers and applied them to my top wisdom tooth which had already emerged from my gums. I'm not sure what I thought was going to happen, but he gave it a strong push and pull and then ripped it out. I never realized how easy it is to pull teeth out, but even given that the procedure lasted mere seconds, it was still startling to have a tooth removed from my mouth with a pair of pliers while I was awake and watching.

The second tooth was a bit more difficult because it was still underneath my gums. Even though I didn't feel too much pain because of the anesthetic, I still felt pressure when the dentist was moving my tooth around. He had to cut into my gums and break the tooth into pieces, so he used a screwdriver looking tool to crack my tooth and twist it into a position to get at it with a drill. It was an incredibly uncomfortable sensation the entire procedure, but I got out of the chair feeling like a man for knowing that not a single drop fell from my trembling, tear-swollen eyes.

Dentistry is barbaric... Barbaric!

When the procedure was over, I wiped the blood that had squirted out of my mouth off my glasses and paid the dentist in the procedure room in cash money. The dentist didn't sew me up because he said the gum flaps were close enough together, and he didn't give me any restrictions on what I could eat. When I got home I looked at my mouth and was shocked to see a large hole in my lower left gum. Again, I don't know what I was expecting to see there after my tooth had been removed, but since he said stitches weren't necessary I figured it would be more of a slit than a wide open gap.

That day at lunch I ate regular food, but I had my head tilted to the right the entire time because I didn't want to get potato matter stuck in my tooth-hole. A week after the procedure I am a little concerned that I am still feeling the same kind of pain that brought me to the dentist in the first place, but I hope that it will go away as my gums heal, and I really hope that the cause of the original pain was actually my wisdom teeth because recovering from that procedure sucks.


Lunch Meat

I used to be a really difficult, picky eater when I was a kid. I remember my diet consisting mostly of macaroni and cheese and hot pockets, and I was not too keen on trying out new foods. I have come a long way since then, and as an adult I pride myself on my willingness to try new foods and my diverse tastes. Recently, my host family has been challenging my culinary bravery and making me long for the simple days of microwavable, pepperoni stuffed pastry crust treats.

For instance, liver is disgusting. There is no reason why anyone should be eating organs when there is so much delicious meat on a cow's body. This one is a favorite of my host family, and I almost killed my host brother the other day at lunch when he requested that we have it more often.

Last week we had something which appeared to be a sausage filled with couscous, but that smelled suspiciously like an asshole. I have eaten enough questionable animal parts in this country to know not to ask what anything is before I try it, so I ate a whole mystery sausage before I came to my own conclusion that based on the taste, smell, and appearance, I must have been eating an animal rectum and that I didn't need to be doing that if I wasn't winning money for it. I still haven't found the courage to ask my family what it was, and I'd like to keep it that way.

I know my American sensitivity to eating non-traditional animal parts is slowly fading when we had tongue for lunch the other day and I didn't think twice about it. Seeing the taste buds was a bit of a challenge for me, but I cut them off and actually enjoyed eating something that wasn't an organ or anus.

I'm just waiting for the lunch when I sit down and see a fried udder on my plate.


DELE

This past Friday I took a trip to Quito to take a test of Spanish proficiency called the DELE. The only interesting thing about the day was how I missed an entire section of the test because the proctor didn't explain to us how far we were allowed to go in the booklet in the first hour.

As I was doing the first section I thought that it was an awful lot of time to do the three short readings and answer questions, but since I had never done a complete practice test I had no idea how long I was supposed to have had. I figured I was just really smart (a supposition that always ends with me realizing how stupid I am) and looked over my answers with all my remaining time. When the first hour was up the proctor asked us for our answer sheets and mine was the only one half empty.

I almost freaked out that I paid $150 dollars to take the test and studied for the past three months only to blow an entire section because I didn't understand the directions, but then I remembered that I was still in Ecuador so I asked the lady if I could answer the questions with my time from the next section. As I predicted, she didn't see a problem with that so I finished up with some of my essay time.

I don't know if I will pass the test or not since I'm not sure how hard they grade the written and oral sections, but I'll get the results in a couple of months. I really had no motive for taking the test other than the fact that it was something to study for and a way to improve my Spanish, but it will be nice to have some kind of evidence that I speak Spanish proficiently instead of having to depend on people taking my word for it. After all, it is never very convincing to write on a resume "fluent Spanish" since that means something different to different people.

A wise man once said to me, "It's not about what you know, it's about what you show" and I think that holds true for just about everything you work for in life, including language proficiency.

Boom Town

Playing Hookie

Since each of my classes is 2.5 hours long, I have had trouble trying to regulate attendance and timeliness. The first semester I didn't have a rule about being late, so people would sometimes stroll into class 1.5 hours in. I couldn't let that slide so I added a rule that if you come late to class you have to wait outside until the second part started after the break. This also became a problem when students would come a few minutes late and miss an entire hour of teaching. My most recent rule has been that students can enter class during the first half late so that they don't miss the entire lesson waiting outside, but it will be marked as a half absence.

So far this has been an effective approach, and after the first few weeks students see how many class absences they have accumulated through consistently coming late to class and they tighten up for the remainder of the semester. However, my students have recently found a new way to infuriate me by missing class even with this system in place.

This past Thursday the weather was really nice outside and my students were incredibly reluctant to continue for the second half of class. One of my students, who is in college, came back from the break and said she had an important test to study for and asked if she could leave early. I reminded her that all my students are adults (with the exception of a few seventeen year olds) so she was obviously free to do whatever she wanted, even if I didn't recommend missing class. She asked about the consequences and I told her it would be half an absence just like when someone comes to class late, and without hesitation she said goodbye and left. The rest of the class must have overheard that conversation because six of my thirteen students present then proceeded to leave the class, apparently not concerned about the half-day of attendance they would all be docked.

I was then left with a difficult decision to make: should I keep teaching half the class or cancel class since so many people were going to miss it? My gut instinct was just to keep teaching since there were still people who wanted to be in class and learn English, but when I thought about it I was going to be teaching to only half of my class, and knowing the culture of studying they have in Ecuador, the absent half of the class would not have a chance at passing the next test if they weren't in class to hear me teach it. So while I know that everyday Krishna would go on teaching and have the rest of the class deal with the consequences of missing a lesson, teacher Krishna had to wonder if that would be the best move to make as a teacher whose goal is to make sure the class learns the material no matter what.

When I learned that I would be teaching adults, I really thought that I would be able to take the former approach with no problems, because why would an adult sign up and pay for classes that he wasn't going to attend? Unfortunately, teaching my unmotivated adult students has been much more like having a class of reluctant high school kids who are forced to study English by their parents, and I think I will have to start treating them accordingly if I want them to come out of my class with a satisfactory knowledge of English.

Outside of the issues the new-found loophole in my attendance policy has caused in my professional life, I am finding that it is also hard to separate work from normal relationships as a teacher with adult students, because the truth is that by spending ten hours a week with them and going out on field trips, I have become friends with a lot of my students. I understand that none of my students meant to leave as a personal attack on me, but it was still hard to see half of my class pick up and leave when I had prepared a lesson for them that day.

The expectations that students in the States and students in Ecuador have of being in a class are very different. In the States, students go into a class knowing that they will have to do the work and that the teacher is there to guide them and answer questions as an authority on the subject. Students usually end up fighting for the teacher's time when the floor is opened up for questions because they realize that they can get an immediate answer instead of having to look it up in a book. I suppose that in a lot of classes students are scared to ask questions if they don't understand something, but I think that that mostly stems from the very limited classroom time for courses in the States, and teachers need to ignore questions to get through the material.

In contrast, my students (with a few exceptions) come to class with no intention of thinking or making any kind of effort. They just stare blankly at me while I do my teaching bit, don't ask any questions when I invite them to, and then ask their neighbor what the hell is going on when I assign them an exercise to do in class. My lack of teaching experience definitely plays a part in this problem and I know I could concept check better, but I still believe that an adult who took his education into his own hands would concept check himself and take advantage of the native speaker in the room while he was in class and ask plenty of questions.

Teaching students who want to learn is rewarding, but my students who fit that profile are few and far between and I have little tolerance for people who expect to be able to speak English just by sitting in class, without putting any of their own effort into it. I am learning a lot about motivation and managing groups of people by teaching, but it definitely isn't my calling, which is why I'm happy about this...


About Time

After two years of sending out applications and attending interviews, this past Tuesday I was finally accepted to a medical school: the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB).

Unfortunately, the coolest picture I could find of a buffalo was this one getting smoked by a lion

I can't express how relieved I am to finally know what I will be doing when my time in Ecuador is up and how satisfied I am that in the end everything worked out the way I wanted it to. It obviously would have been a lot less stressful if I had been accepted somewhere the first time around and gotten a deferral to work abroad for a year, but I can't complain because I was still able to do a WorldTeach program while applying a second time and secure a seat for myself in an MD program in the States in the proces.

Med school applications were frustrating for me because of the nearly sole importance that schools put on grades. I didn't have a great first couple of years in college and that definitely got me screened at a lot of places before my application was looked at. I have to give credit to UB for actually reading my application and having a sense of humor.

Med schools have a habit of being attracted to students that are as full of shit as they are of themselves, so I was shocked when my interviewer at UB told me he liked the way I started my personal statement, which was an anecdote about how one time I thought a doctor in Mexico was telling me to kiss a patient (bésala) instead of weigh her (pésala). I won't detail what happened next except to say that I made an idiot out of myself and hilarity ensued. I think that the tone of my personal statement reflected my personality and that the way I presented myself at interviews was genuine, so it is refreshing to see that there is at least one school out there that values students who act like human beings.

There is a lot of pressure on prospective med students to appear flawless on paper and cram their resumes with as many cool sounding activities and pointless internships as they can, but I am happy that UB was impressed with my passion for the few things that I did do in college and acknowledged my maturation from freshman year to the present. Again, my interviewer surprised me when he was skimming through my grades and pointed out a C+, only to then immediately qualify it with, "Oh, but that was in calculus freshman year", readily acknowledging that my worth as a potential med student can not and should not be judged by a math grade I got four years ago.

I would have never guessed at graduation that I would end up in Buffalo, but I am nonetheless ecstatic for the opportunity to study at an MD program in New York. I suppose there is always the chance that I will be taken off the waitlist at another school, in which case I would consider that program, but until then expect "B is for Buffalo" to show up sometime next fall.

Moral of the story: the next time you meet someone who says he got accepted to medical school give him a high-five, because as it turns out, it's really hard.

Rest of the Week

On Monday I will finally be getting my wisdom teeth pulled, which will hopefully result in me no longer having to eat ibuprofen like skittles. I am also heading to Quito on Friday to take the Spanish language proficiency test I have been preparing for, the DELE. Next week I'll report on which experience was more painful.

Volcano Woes

Tungurahua Angry

For the past couple of weeks, our local volcano Tungurahua has been erupting, coating the city with a dusting of ash. Yet again my foreign friends and I were slightly astonished by the fact that we live so close to an active volcano and that volcanic ash ends up all over Ambato (and depending on the wind, can travel as far as Guayaquil on the coast) while Ecuadorians are just annoyed that the dust bothers their eyes and people with sensitive lungs have to wear masks outside.

On the worst day there was so much ash coming out of Tungurahua that the sky above the entire city was hazy, and another day it rained and piles of wet ash fell to the streets and dirtied everyone's clothing. The ash has certainly been annoying and it has bothered my nose and caused some allergic reactions on my skin, but I guess of all the bad things that can happen to a city located close to a volcano, having some ash in the streets isn't so bad.

Teeth


After having two of my appointments canceled with the dentist I was first recommended, I went back to his office to retrieve my x-rays and I went to another recommended dentist who could pull my wisdom teeth. I had the guy's name and the floor of the building he works on, but he appeared to be part of a larger operation of doctors all sharing a common waiting room. I walked in and asked the receptionist where I could find the doctor I was looking for and she pointed to the door of his procedure room. I could hear some kind of mechanical tool going and knew that he was in the middle of seeing a patient, but when the receptionist saw me awkwardly looking around looking for a clue as to what to do she assured me that I should just knock and go in.

I knocked on the door and the dentist leaned back in his chair to open it for me. Sure enough, he was sitting in his chair working on a female patient. The scene became even more bizarre when I realized that the woman reclined in the chair with her mouth wide open was holding a baby on her chest while the doctor was working on her. I guess answering the door or letting a patient hold on to an infant in the middle of a procedure aren't considered unprofessional in Ecuador because the doctor happily talked to me for a few seconds to figure out what I wanted and then told me to wait outside for him.

(Aside: a similar experience worth noting was when I got my haircut this week and the woman cutting my hair stopped to answer her cell phone three times. The second time she pinned the phone between her head and shoulder and continued to cut my hair while chatting.)

While waiting in the lobby I noticed that all the paintings in the room were signed by the same artist who had the same name as my dentist. I talked to him about it after my consultation and it turned out that he was the artist of all the paintings. The next day I walked by his office building again and noticed an advertisement that said he was also an architect. I was concerned that he was, as my mother put it today, "a jack of all trades but master of none" but my sister knows a lot of dentists and assured me that because of the creative aspects of dentistry, many dental professionals are also involved in artistic endeavors.

This multi-talented dentist charges $120 a tooth as opposed to other estimates I have heard of $40 a tooth. I have a hard time believing that anything good could come of a surgical procedure that costs $40, so I think I am going to splurge on this one and go to the fanciest dentist in town.


Who Said English Would be Fun (or Easy)?

I am finding out that one of the tricky things about teaching English is the expectation most students have that English class is supposed to be fun. I can't think of any math, science, or history class that I went into expecting to have fun, and if I did have fun in the class it was always a pleasant surprise. On the contrary, the students in my class demand that we do fun things all the time, and whenever I hand out a worksheet or give them a writing assignment they freak out and start whining.

This mindset makes for really terrible students because they never want to put in the work to learn the grammar that they need to be able to speak and understand spoken English. It kills me when I put effort into coming up with games that reinforce grammar so that they can use it correctly without help from me, only to grade their tests and see that a bunch of people still bombed because they didn't put in the time outside of class to master the admittedly boring, but necessary aspects of learning English like memorizing vocabulary.

I truthfully do like being in front of a class and teaching, but having unmotivated students makes the work much less rewarding than it could be. Even if I get into medical school, I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the future I ended up teaching something again, whether it be with medical students as an attending physician or giving a course on medical Spanish in a hospital, since I bet both medical students and physicians take good notes and are pretty good about studying.

Evolution

I am now a solid two weeks into my third semester teaching at SECAP, and time is flying by. The first two weeks have always been stressful because students continue to pick up and drop the class in the beginning and it is hard to prepare materials, learn the level of my students, and get an idea of what I want to cover with them by the end of the module. Now that the classes have, for the most part, settled into place, I finally got around to making another book for my new Intermediate class and figuring out a rough syllabus for the semester. I think my Intermediate class will be fun to teach because they have all got a pretty solid understanding of the basic tenses in English, and they now know enough to start being creative with it and try new constructions and words to see if they work.

This semester in my Advanced class I have three new students who all speak English fluently. One girl lived in New Jersey for seven years, another lived in South Africa for a year, and the last lived in Malta for a semester. These new students have changed the dynamic of the class quite a bit because along with some of my best students from last semester, I now have enough students who speak English confidently to have pretty serious discussions/debates in class.

Still, a serious problem arises when my students who lived abroad are the first to answer and they dominate the discussions, or when I start teaching to the level of the best students and leave the rest of the class completely lost. This is the first semester where I have had so many students with good spoken English, so I will have to try a few different techniques until I can figure out how to give a class that all of my students will learn from.

As it turns out, being a teacher is really easy if you don't care, but if you take any pride in your work and the progress of all your students, teaching multi-leveled classes can be very difficult.


Fig and Cheese Strike Again

Back in February during the Festival of Fruits and Flowers, I fell ill from eating two too many fig and cheese sandwiches from street vendors. I knew from the beginning that I shouldn't have been eating anything with cheese—let alone something with cheese served from a street cart—but they just looked and smelled too delicious to not be tried.

Last Thursday at lunch my family served me fig and cheese, and before I could reason to myself that eating it would be a bad idea it was already in my belly. I felt pretty good for the next few hours until the end of my first class when we ended early and decided to play Caitlin's class in a game of soccer with our remaining time. Running around playing soccer sparked a violent fig and cheese reaction in my stomach, and I battled with a brief attack of what is known in Spanish as diarrea explosiva.

So please, if you ever see me about to eat anything containing figs and cheese, stop me regardless of what I say to try to convince you otherwise.


Culture Comfort

Before I came to Ecuador, I was warned by my program's pre-departure literature that at some point during my time living abroad I would be annoyed by the cultural differences and become homesick. Some of my friends who I have talked to have expressed their desire to be back at home so they can eat the food they like, work in a place where schedules are closely followed and people show up to things on time, and not have to see so much hair gel and eye makeup every time they go out.

With two and a half months left in Ecuador, I admit that I am starting to feel anxious to return home. However, I don't think my desire to be back in the States has as much to do with my discontent with the Ecuadorian culture as much as with the fact that I miss my friends and want to get my career in the States started.

I feel like I have done a good job adjusting to the decidedly un-American things that happen in Ecuador: lateness, lack of attention to detail, starch overload, loud noises in public places, and having my personal space invaded multiple times a day. Most of these things are consequences of a culture that is less workaholic and, consequently, much more laid back. Instead of fighting these things I have tried my best to roll with them and enjoy my relatively stress-free and nap-filled life for the moment.

What I am having a hard time with is not having seen many of my friends since I graduated last May. Although I returned to the States twice for interviews, my now post-college friends are based out of cities all over the country and most of them weren't in New York when I went back.

I can't help but think out loud that July 23rd would be a good time for my friends to come to New York and have a surprise "welcome back" party for me at the airport. Not that I'm saying; just saying.

Vote or Get Arrested

The consumption of alcohol was prohibited this past weekend as Ecuador had a nationwide vote on a number of issues. Everyone in the country is required by law to vote, so I guess the government figures that people are more likely to actually make it to the polls if they are sober. Like a lot of laws in Ecuador, the dry weekend was not very strictly enforced, and I saw people buying alcohol by knocking on the metal gates of alcohol stores that were ostensibly closed up for the weekend.

I admittedly know very little about politics, but one of the topics being voted on that I have a strong opinion about was whether or not they should ban bullfights in Ecuador. From my perspective as a North American, it is a disgusting practice that has no place in a civilized society. The idea of slowly killing an animal solely for entertainment is barbaric, and any attempt to disguise it with ceremony and costume to pass it off as art is a disgrace to whatever culture it supposedly represents. It is a dark aspect of human nature that we are so strongly drawn to violence, but I think it should be obvious to everyone that seven men stabbing a bull to death to please a crowd is something we don't need in the year 2011.

When I found people who were for keeping bullfights legal in Ecuador, they took one of two positions. The first is that the government is only holding a vote on that issue to distract the public from other, more important issues. I don't really understand what that means since people are capable of voting on a number of topics in any given election, and it doesn't take very long to check "yes" or "no" for that question on the ballot.

The second position was that bullfighting should remain legal because it is a part of Ecuadorian culture that should be preserved. I was very confused by this argument because as far as I know, bullfighting is a very Spanish tradition that was brought by the conquistadors to Ecuador. I don't think it can be defended as a part of Ecuadorian culture if it was brought over by the people who imposed their religion and customs on the indigenous people and built over their cities.

I had a pretty interesting discussion with my Advanced class about the extent to which Ecuadorians consider themselves to be Spanish. The entire class agreed that they do not consider themselves Spanish at all, and one student who traveled to Spain on vacation claimed that the Spanish waiters did not want to serve him because they believed that they were better than South Americans because of Spain's history of dominance in the New World. There is obviously still some resentment between Spain and its former conquests, and I am still confused as to why any Ecuadorian would defend bullfighting on the grounds that it is part of his culture.


Latin American identity is a very complicated matter that I will never fully understand since I am not Latino myself, but I do think that Ecuadorians need to reevaluate what their representative customs really are and stop resorting to confused "preservation of culture" defenses of animal cruelty that tarnish their host of otherwise beautiful traditions.