OK...it wasn´t man flu...NOW WITH PICS

Firstly, thanks for the posts and Facebook comments, dear readers...it´s nice to get feedback and these little snippets of love and support from back home are a real boost. (PK, the full ´blackboard debacle´ (as it may forever be known) is on the link below the one you read...click from the bottom link up for the story in the right order! ; ) x

Secondly, I´m slowly (due to the connection) adding pics to previous blogs over this week, so do scroll back through the posts, and thirdly, to answer a question, I´m blogging 2-3 times a week, so keep checking for updates!

Thursday 22 May; today, my two naughtiest classes, 5B and 6B. We revised telling the time in 5B. Again, I´m not sure they can tell the time in Spanish, but we try. (Sigh!). I also noticed, after a chat with C last night, that at 1 hour 20 mins, the reason my kids go a bit mentalist is because the lessons are too long. I can keep their attention for the first 45 mins (as C reminded me, our own lessons were only about that long: a double period was 90 mins), up to an hour they started to get twitchy. You can forget teaching them anything in the last 20 mins, when the naughtiest will start tearing it up good and proper. Imagine trying to keep the tykes interested in a language that´s not your own, whilst trying to teach them a language that´s not theirs, and then a concept they don´t get in their own language?!?! I´m amazed I kept them interested for as long as I did. I mentioned my thoughts to Graciela in the break, she said she´d look at changing the classes. BTW, if you think my Spanish is coming on leaps and bounds...sorta, but there´s a lot to be said for using your hands and facial expressions too!

We had that old favourite...´Los animales´ for 6B. They weren´t nearly as impressed with my drawings as the other class : ( , although my animal impressions went down well and the boys at the front took great pleasure in trying to guess the animal *beneath* the current one through the cheap, thin paper of the pad I´d drawn them on. The blackboard, to my eternal relief, worked *OK* with a damp rag. It´s still more legible than it was before, which is the main thing: I noticed far fewer spelling errors in their work this time.

Back home; C *still* not well and getting *worse*. This, I felt, after days of teasing from Aida and Flor, really did necessitate a visit to ´el medico´. Besides, me spending so much time with him, and not getting this ´cold´ didn´t seem right...

I, (like you, John), am still perplexed as to ´the mystery of the missing bra´, and fear it will never be solved (C reckons there may be a black (bra) market in underwear with proper cup sizes) but mummy dearest has done her stuff on figleaves.com so we have reinforcements (quite literally!) on their way.

V came round tonight and between us 4 women, managed to nag C into going to the docs with V, whilst Flor & I settled down to watch ´Memoirs of a Geisha´ (with Spanish subtitles). I last saw the film with my mum on a girlie (and as it turned out, Oriental-themed) day in London. I then took her for a potter through Chinatown and through a seedier bit of Soho (much to her amusement) before a final stop for tea and lovely little rainbow-coloured cakes at Yauatcha (go! And the dim sum downstairs are FAB too).

Anyway, I digress.

C´s only gone and got himself PNEUMONIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I´m not sure how you catch it, but I appear, for now at least, to be in rude health. As I joked to Aida and Flor later that evening, ´Las mujers estan *mas* fuertes!´

But I do feel a little bit guilty now for thinking it was only man flu ...

Still he´s on the pills, feeling better for finally knowing what´s wrong with him, and should be back at work on Monday (I thought it was life threatening?! The wonders of modern medicine, eh?!) so worry ye not.

PS Mum/Dad, if you´re reading this, please don´t tell C´s mum as she´ll only worry and get on a plane out here. He´ll tell her when it´s over. I had to mention it here though to apologise about thinking he was exaggerating in my last post!
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23 May...Friday; my cutest classes 4A & 4B. I got to school and realised the whole school were all dressed up in their finest; one of my boys, Lucas, in an obviously hand-me-down suit jacket a few sizes too big, a lot in fancy dress, and the poorer kids - the majority - in their white ´lab coats´ which act like a cheap uniform, covering - and keeping clean - whatever they are wearing underneath. It was big celebrations for Revolution Day in Argentina (actually on 25 May, Sunday). At 9am, the kids were gathered in the playground, and each form did a little dance/song to celebrate. Little Macarena looked adorable in the dress her mum Fabiana said it took her 10 nights to run up (blurry pic, but you get the gist!)

Lucas and his crew...

The ceremonial opening

´Yaaaaay, Macarena!´

A shorter lesson due to the celebrations, so as I only have 4a once a week, I figured, revise numbers. I´m getting good at games which require audience participation, but noticed the bright kids *always* come up to write the answers on the board. So I concocted a game where each child gets a number (1-25) and I write sums on the board. Anyone can guess the answer, but only the kid with the right number gets to come up and write it, as a word, (´Si, en Inglés!´) on the board. It kept *all* the kids involved as their number could come up at any time.

I decided to do ´the alphabet´ with 4b, as the English alphabet *sounds*, and is sightly different to the Spanish one (no ´ñ´ and no ´ll´...I had to explain to the kids as they shouted ´Falta! Falta!´ thinking I´d made a mistake in missing them out...). Flor had suggested I teach them this basic - I´d skipped it originally, thinking ´of course they´d know the alphabet in English by now´, but I was wrong. Note: these kids are 8-9, and have been learning English since they were 5. What *exactly* did anyone before me teach them?!?!? I used a similar tactic with alphabet picture cards, calling out words and the child with that word´s initial letter had to step up and write it on the board.

At lunch I went to the nearby cafe and got talking to the lady behind the counter. Somehow she started talking about her daughter, who it turns out is 15 and suffering from lung cancer. She showed me a picture on her phone, a pretty girl with a headscarf on, presumably covering the effects of chemo. Her mum´s eyes filled with tears when I asked if she was in hospital and she told me no, at home, because they couldn´t go to the hospital any more. Whether that was due to distance, cost, or the physical state of her daughter I wasn´t sure, and didn´t know how to ask, so I just said sadly, ´Lo siento´. I mentioned my oldest friend Lizzy who is battling cancer at the moment, I guess, to show I understood a little bit, but I thought about the difference in access to medical treatment in the UK. I felt a bit depressed about this poor lady´s situation, and how helpless she must feel, as I walked back to school.

Met Fabiana´s son, Lucas, 11 at lunch as I was marking. A bright kid with very good English, he goes to an English speaking private school (so she doesn´t send her kid here, I noted!) and we had a lovely little chat. He´s so much more advanced than the 11 year olds I teach. He showed me a perfectly-spelled essay he´d written on the history of Walt Disney. Mine can´t write a sentence about their own family yet!!!

Me marking (with my homemade exercise books, tied up with string...)

More ´Revolutionary´ shenanigans after lunch, so I stayed to take pictures for Graciela and Cristina, who decided to make me unofficial photographer for the day.

´What *YOU* looking at?!´

Altogether now...´aaaaah!´

Dancing in the playground/assembly area

All day, that is, except for the bit when G introduced me to the whole school (and their parents) and I had to step up and say a few words in Spanish to them all. CHRIST, I could have been warned!!! I managed to burble out something about being ´muy contento in la escuela´ and Cristina got some awful shots (all but one deleted now) of me looking nigh on pregnant. Note to self, ´that top + those combats = don´t do it´.

Everyone said the weight would start to drop off me out here, but Aida´s cooking, puddings and the ´dulce de leche´ (a sweet gooey caramel-ly spread for bread which they also use in yummy pastries) have put paid to that. I regretted the two slices of pizza I ate at lunch and am now on a no-puddings-no-dulce regime, I told Aida.

The new voluntarios have arrived in Posadas today and have their orientation tomorrow, so V said she´d call me to meet them. From next Monday I´m going to have two young whippersnappers (both 23) joining me in my class (I´m sticking to 27, then!). It´ll be nice to have some English-speaking company at school, and help in the classrooms, although I have relished being able to bond with the staff and kids alone, and my Spanish has improved for it too. An interesting new dynamic, anyway.

Got home, checked outfit again in mirror - why does it look alright now?!?! - and popped round to see Norma, our Spanish teacher and V´s mum, to apologise in person for our absence this week due to C´s illness (we agreed to resume classes on Monday), and also to see if she was OK. V told me last night, her mum had broken her arm in ´a stupid fall´ - aren´t they all? - last weekend. Poor love is in a cast past her elbow. It´s her right (writing) hand too!

Guess what...it was pizza for tea...!!!! But it was very tasty, Flor´s homemade.

I stopped at three slices and tried to pick the ones with least cheese on.

Ah well, ´el diet´ (I made that one up) begins tomorrow.

Oh no, we´re going out for dinner with Natalia and her bloke...Sunday then...?!

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.

Balls! NOW WITH PICS

We went to our first footy match in Argentina today, courtesy of ´el Presidente´ of Guarani de Franja (local footy team), Cesar, who is the boyfriend of Flo´s eldest sister Mariana, so we sat in the director´s box, right on the centre line, second row.

M says that she gets to travel a lot as his girlfriend, and gets called the ´First Lady´of the club. She´s certainly perfect WAG material, beautiful, slim, immaculately turned out, big shades and heels, loves shopping...but bright, sweet and funny as well (dammit!). As Steve had asked at the BBQ the other night, ´So she looks like Penelope Cruz and loves football...what´s wrong with her?!´

A slightly scary moment; within the first ten minutes, the fans kicked off and were throwing BRICKS and stuff onto the pitch until the riot police came on. M said this was the first time it had happened in 4 years. Must have decided to put a show on for us Brits. Turns out some away fans were goading ours from outside the ground which set off the home fans trying to kick the door down to fight them. Anyway, luckily we were in the posh bit on the other side of the pitch. The game had to stop for fifteen minutes.

I´m not saying the game was dull, but...

Says a lot that this was the most interesting part of the match.

As the game was a bit dull and we were down and getting nowhere near the goal, in the 2nd half I decided to focus on the cute players instead. There was a shaven-headed one who looked like ´Sucre´ off Prison Break who was more watchable than most. Another player who provided much entertainment was ´Mr Fall Guy´ on the opposition who took diving to another level, even when there was no-one near! Got a few pics of Sucre, but a bit blurry - he kept moving, dammit! C said that was kinda the point, but as far as I could see, the point is to score and they weren´t doing that either.

´Sucre´; quite fit

I also amused myself by understanding most of the Spanish swear words being shouted.

Also funny was that the main reason for the 6 or so riot police, seemed to be to escort the ref off the pitch at half-time and at the end of the match. I know he made some duff decisions, but was he *really* that unpopular...?

Not a popular man

In the end though, ´we´ sucked, lost 2:1 and the other team get promoted. Cesar, M said, will be crying all night.

Anyhoo, got lesson prep to do now. ´Chow´ for now...