''con" whatever

Mango season is ending. Months of the best mangoes anyone has ever eaten is drawing to a close. It fills my heart with sadness and apprehension for the next month or so when we only have bananas. But hope springs eternal, and orange season is just over the horizon. Anyways…

I survived.

The first week of school came and went, and I survived. Learning by doing at it’s most raw.

My first day was the roughest. I have six classes in a row on Monday, and after the first one I was certain I had never been so exhausted in my life. My brain was fried, my Portuguese all but gone. I didn’t know how I’d make it through the next periods. By the fourth period I was numb from my feet (did you know teachers have to stay standing ALL DAY?! It’s crazy!) to my brain, which was about as good as a baked potato.

The high point of the day was when I saw on my schedule a class abbreviated “Con,” short for “cozinha” for the kids learning how to be cooks (my school is a professional school). I was thirty minutes into the lesson, I had already introduced myself and the class rules, I thought things were going pretty well. Then a colleague entered. “So it’s my time, eh?” he said. No, I explained, he was either thirty minutes too late or fifteen too early. No, he explained, “Con” stands for “Contabilidade” which are the kids studying to be accountants, not cozinha.

I sprinted across the school and tried to cram my lesson into 15 minutes for the accounting kids who had been sitting in their classroom without a teacher for the better part of an hour.

All day I was ready for a unified insurrection from my classes. I expected mutiny, but more than that I got confusion. Not from me (to clarify: I was confused all day) but from them. At one point I asked them to introduce themselves to three other people in the class in English. I figured this to be a relatively easy and fun exercise, allowing them to get up and maybe goof around a little bit. What I got was forty blank stares.

I explained three more times what they should do, and eventually a handful of the 40-student class tentatively stood up or turned to a neighbor. I was flabbergasted. What had I done wrong? I asked my Italian neighbors who work with the school, and they said that it was probably because they had never done anything like that before.

“They just came from primary school,” my neighbor explained, “they were trained to sit still, memorize and repeat.” A miserable fate indeed, but it makes their confusion (and mine) more understandable. This in conjunction with it being their first day of high school, me being their first crazy American teacher, and on top of all that me asking them to do something that they had never done before.

I am now “Teacher Colin,” a name that follows me through the streets as I walk to the market, on my way out of mass, as I nap on the beach. The title bears some responsibility, but I am grateful to finally have a real job and challenges to occupy my life. My sitemate said that a student referred to me as “gangster,” and it’s hearing things like this that get you through the day.