Long Two Days

You know that scene in Beetlejuice where the main character woman, forgot her name, is trying to say Beetlejuice at the end to stop him, but Beetlejuice uses his weird vodoo magic and creates a metal plate and sticks it onto her mouth so she can't speak. Well the point is this is what I wish I could do to my students at all hours of the day, screw a metal plate over their mouths so they would shut up, then tie them to their seats. Ha maybe a little overboard to say the least but the last few days were rough. About ten minutes before classes on Tuesday around 820am I get an email on my super duper Crackberry from the English teacher I work with on Tuesdays telling me she is sick and can't make it to school today. In the email she proceeded to tell me what topics I should cover for all her classes. Now this is not the usual teacher I work with, my real host teacher I work with all the other days and she is the shit, she's like my older sister. Anyways I tell them she is sick and am like what should I do. In the program it says that volunteers are not substitute teachers and do not have the responsibility of one. So when Don Rueben told me I am going to teach all the classes today alone I was like, um shit..... I quickly ran back to my apartment and grabbed the only movie I brought down here, haha, Nacho Libre. I thought to myself, screw trying to teach these kids anyways its hard enough when I work with ten of them at once no way I could do it with 45 in a room the size of a closet. So I got a computer and the movie and walked to my first class, the kids like usual were running around talking yelling not listening. I told them all to sit and tried setting up the computer, and told them the teacher is sick and we are watching a movie, they all liked the idea of Nacho Libre. Then the DVD wouldn't work and the kids started getting louder and louder and soon enough I was like this day is going to suck. The Don Rueben came to my rescue, Don Rueben is the Inspector General at my school which means his like the discipline guy. He is the funniest guy ever, he loves Michael Jordan and always tries to speak broken english with me. He settled the class down while I went and got Toy Story 3 which worked and my day was set. This is how pretty much every class went. It took about 2o minutes to settle the kids down and get them quiet enough for you to speak, then by the last 30 minutes of class no one would want to watch anymore so I would spend even more time saying, "silencio por favor!" and "sientate!" and other spanish phrases to make them shut up. I was extremely tired afterwards and need to blow off some steam so I went for a super long run.

There are some major problems in the Chilean School system. Classes are 90 minutes long, which for any human is way to long to sit in one place and listen to someone talk especially kids going through puberty with every hormone bursting through their bodies. The students do not change class rooms, they stay in the same room all day, and the teachers move to different classes at different periods. There are 4 periods a day so only 3 breaks a day. Lunch is not until 130pm so they students are always hungry witch makes them more anxious. Most teachers and principals know these problems but it is to hard for things to change now because of money and the government.

One thing that did help me over my hard few days of teaching alone was my awesome little host dad, Genaro. He is the man. Eating his delicious food and listening to him talk and trying to talk spanish is one of the things I look forward to. And sometimes my host principle, Veronica, has dinner with us and she is also hilarious because she is the fastest talker I've ever heard, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner when she talks.

Everything else is going well, weather is getting a bit better here. Going to do some outdoors shit this weekend. Um....I bought about 8 Snickers yesterday.

Future goal while I'm down here is to learn to ride a motorcycle because they are badass.

Frank William Patiperro