Feeling drained, achey and a little bit homesick...

C´s been fluey since Sunday - he wasn´t feeling great at the match and deteriorated after that. It did seem like a cold to me, but you know men, there was a lot of dramatic holding of his head and lots of loud snuffling, which of course means I haven´t had any quality sleep for 3 nights.

He´s been off work all week (today is Wednesday) so my days were simply going to school and coming back to bring him Gatorade, cakes, cough-sweets etc. It did mean we got to miss Spanish lessons for a few days, which to be honest is a welcome break as my head is screwed after having to communicate mainly in Spanish at work anyway (I have to explain concepts to the kids in Spanish), then marking for 2.5 hours, then wolf lunch down and rush back to cram more Spanish for 1.5 hours.

I´m ashamed to say I didn´t go into school today, exhausted by the last two weeks and lack of sleep catching up on me. I also feared I was coming down with C´s thing, feeling achey and hot, but I think a day´s sleep and I´m feeling better for it.

I´ve been in a *foul* mood since yesterday, too, as Aida has somehow managed, in my first clothes wash to lose one of my bras. I´d seen it hanging out to dry, but now it´s gone and she *says* she´s never seen it...hmmm. I only brought 3 out with me, so I´m mightily annoyed. Tried to find a new one out here today, but the quality is far inferior and they don´t seem to do cup sizes?!?! (And I need cup sizes!!!).

This experience alone suddenly made me feel very very homesick, and I rang my mum & dad. It was nice to hear their voices, however briefly.

I´m going to have to go on www.figleaves.com later, send my mum a reference number and get her to mail one out with my new cash card (I managed to lose that in the first week).

I´m a little bit worried though, because I don´t want my mum to find out how much I spend on underwear!

A few little bits from my school days this week; firstly, my suspicions were right (John, one of my blog fans, you´ll love this); it *wasn´t* blackboard paint. Gulp.

I haven´t taken 6B yet; that joy is tomorrow, so I´ll have to deal with it then. Says a lot that their form teacher was pleased anyway as the kids could see the board, but I think I´ll have to try and find some proper blackboard paint and do it again...I can´t leave it like that! They have to wash the chalk off with a damp rag. I realised this as I walked past at lunchtime and snuck in to have a quick go on the blackboard. I ran out when I couldn´t rub the chalk off.

Tuesday, I did ´Los Animales´ with 5a. This lesson is popular with all the classes, what with my animal impersonations and my drawings. I overheard some of the boys chatting about the pictures and asking each other where they thought I got the drawings from. One of them supposed it was a computer. I interrupted to say ´Nooooooo! It was meeee!´(in Spanish, natch), to which they said ´A mano?!´ ... ´Si! A mano!´ ...´Noooo!!!!´

So I proved it by re-drawing my monkey on the board (that´s not a euphemism, it really was a picture of a monkey), to amazed ´ooohs´ and ´aaaahs´ from the children, and then, a little round of applause when I finished. I beamed and took a little bow. Think I´ve gained cool points with the boys, especially.

They did then of course expect me to draw every animal on the board, so I did a few random ones. The way I teach them is they first have to tell me the name in Spanish (sneakily improving my Spanish at the same time, see?!) and then ´En Inglés´. As I was drawing one animal, I was a little shocked to hear some kids shouting out ´F*cker! F*cker!´ over and over again.

Had I done something wrong?!?!

No, I´d just drawn a seal.

Which is ´foca´ in Spanish (See?! Now you´ve learnt a new word too! Stick with me, kidda...you´ll be as fluent as me by the end of this experience)

When one girl persuaded me to draw tiger in her book, of course they all wanted one, so as the lesson wrapped up, I said if they wrote ´My favourite animal is...´ I would draw that animal in their book. Marking time then saw me drawing an awful lot of tigers and snakes, a few crocodiles and lions, a couple of goats, and one dog and butterfly.

As well as cool points for my drawing skills, I´m also scoring fashion points with the chicas. On Monday, the girls of 5a (I love the girls, they are no trouble at all, and one mega-cutie looks just like an Argentinian Drew Barrymore in her ET days) also said they liked my pink dress. I´m already sick of dressing down in combats all the time, so I thought, sod it, fuschia pink dress, (with black footless tights, the more naughty boys could try looking up my skirt) and little black ballet pumps. And on Tuesday, I wore a Che Guevara t-shirt and mini denim skirt with more footless tights and pumps, which the girls of 6a said they liked.

I´ll be working the tango heels to school before you know it.

For 6a, I did ´mi familia´. Fabiana had puffed her cheeks out and told me that would be a difficult lesson as most of them came from broken homes, but I managed to get somewhere. I asked them to put the names and ages of their family in a picture first (hoping the picture would act as an ´aide memoire´ when we got to the writing bit...but very few children actually got that far) and was amazed that a lot of these 10-11 year olds had parents in their mid-late 20s. No wonder education doesn´t seem important to the kids here; it evidently wasn´t to most of their parents. And their chances of using the English I teach them after I´ve gone are probably next to nothing; most people in Posadas don´t speak even a smattering of English, bar perhaps ´Hello´/´Goodbye´ (and that´s the teachers in my class, educated professionals!). They don´t need to if they´re not going to be going anywhere else.

I met Natalia yesterday in the staffroom, who, I was amazed, greeted me in perfect English. She´s the English teacher. I was surprised as I´d been there over a week and wasn´t aware they had one. Turns out she only works there part time. She asked me to join her to teach 8a, so Fabiana offered to make me a sandwich as I was about to go to lunch. These kids, she explained on the way to class are rude, disruptive, disrespectful, difficult, come from poor backgrounds, and are this way because most of them have already done this year (so they´ll be 14) and have been held back, so they are a bit bored, too.

It was a bit of an impromptu lesson in comprehension as Natalia asked me to tell them about myself and they had to then repeat back to Natalia what they understood. Which even when I spoke in the most basic English, at slow pace, and repeated what I´d said, wasn´t very much. As she kept asking me for more and more info about myself, I struggled to find stuff that was *appropriate* for 14 year olds, and for kids from such a poor area (I couldn´t start talking about heels and designer handbags, cocktail bars, client lunches in nice restaurants, advertising deals worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, going to loads of gigs and parties)...but somehow managed to paint an edited and wholesome image of my previous life in London.

They all thought I was mad to give it all up. Perhaps I am, but it will help me appreciate my lot more than anything when I return, I´m sure.

At least a new element in their class (me) meant, on the whole, they behaved. None of them wrote anything down, some didn´t have books. One boy just sat on a chair (no desk) and swung back on it till he fell off, to raucous laughter from his mates. I´m amazed at how disorganised and undiciplined the teachers are.

A highlight; when Natalia asked them to guess my age, one said ´diez y ocho! diez y ocho!´. Eighteen! He can go *straight* to the top of the class, I don´t care *what* his English is like.

They were of course all amazed then when I admitted to being ´27´. Natalia will properly fall off her chair when I tell her the truth! She dashed off after a very short and unstructured lesson to her other school, presumably a private one that pays better. We have agreed to go out this weekend. It´s a relief to have a ´colleague´, no matter how obviously disinterested she is in these children, to talk to in English. It´s the kids I feel sorry for though. If even she has given up on them and can´t be bothered, they haven´t got a rat´s chance, have they?!

When I´m feeling a little negative, I start thinking, what´s the point?!

Then I was marking Facundo´s work, a boy who was the most polite and studious in my first week (the only one with a workbook) and, Jekyll & Hyde-like, an absolute horror on Monday. After the lesson, I mentioned his behaviour to Fabiana and Graciela, and they said he was from a very poor, bad home and very changeable in his moods. I noticed, although he´d done everything wrong in the lesson on how to tell the time (I´m not actually sure most of these 10 year olds know how to tell the time in Spanish, either; they were shouting some very random numbers out when I asked ´Que hora es?´ ...so me teaching them the time in English is getting a little ahead of ourselves, I now realise...), he had found time to write, in very neat writing, and highlighted in yellow felt tip ´sos la mejor maestra sapna´ (you are the best teacher, sapna). Either he was trying to butter me up after being naughty, or the other teachers truly are rubbish.

Either way, I took the book home and asked Flor to translate ´And you could be the best student with a bit more concentration, Facundo!´

Tuesday, I was marking his next lot of work on los animales. Even though he´d been a bit naughty still, he´d somehow managed to catch up on his work and... it was faultless. I gave him a ´Fantastico Facundo!´ And a shiny sticker (My Goofy stamp, like most things I´ve bought here, is poor quality and running out already).

Back to school tomorrow; 5b and 6b. This teaching lark is hard work.

Respec´ to you, Lisa, Kev and auntie Mira for doing this full-time in England.