The Bill Please

Procedure for buying lunch at the cafeteria:

1) Yell "COMPRA" (you buy) as loud as you can until a certain kid named Chicho comes over.
2) Throw your wallet at him and say you want the usual.
3) Chicho comes back 5 minutes later with the food.
4) Get your wallet back with the change in it, minus a "tip" for Chicho.
5) Argue that he took too big of a tip.

Chicho runs his own little waitering business during lunch time. If you have a few extra pesos you don't need to stand in the long line for food, he does it for you! I have studied his technique extensively and it seems he is either buddies with the guy that gives out food or he gives him a cut of his profits, either way he somehow manages to cut to the front of the line and have his order waiting for him to pick up. He brings your food to where you are sitting. As a rule Mexicans aren't very good at mental math so there is always a lot of arguments over how much change someone should get. The fact that he doesn't have a price for his services, instead he just takes what he thinks is fair, makes for many vague accusations of him taking too much. I help figure out who gets what change almost everyday. The reason that Chicho goes through all of this is so that he can buy a chocolate bar with his lunch.

Mathematics

This class has the one teacher that the students actually listen to. I'm not sure why but when he walks into the classroom everyone stops assaulting the fans with balls of paper and sits down to do their work. This teacher also eats lunch in the cafeteria with the kids (I don't know where the others go, the teachers lounge is not very nice) and he plays tennis against any one that wants to. Somehow this gives him an unquestioned command over everyone. His teaching abilities aren't anything special, he just explains how to do something then relies on the smart kids that probably already knew how to explain it to everyone else. Over all the math here is more advanced than at home but I think they reached this level by skipping the basics (multiplication timestables, addition/subtraction in your head, long division). All the students use calculators even for the simplest of computations. The end of the year exam didn't allow calculators, no problem for me, but all of the other kids panicked. Every 2 months we have a math test that requires a practice test first. We have these at home and the teacher prints out a class set of the practice test and hands them out, no big deal. Here the teacher gets 5 people's emails and between those 5 people they have to get everyone else's emails. This creates an email tree that gets everyone the practice test in digital form, it is then up to the students to get their own test printed individually on their own time and bring it to school the next day. Most people (including me) do not have a printer in their home here so they have to drive to a printing/computer business to have it done. I have done this 4 times so far and each time it isn't even emailed to me until about 9 at night. Then my mom ad I have to go through the almost hour long ordeal of running out to the printing place in the dark. I think it's quite possible that there isn't a printer in this school.

Science Class

At some point near the beginning of the year the science teacher left the school (before I came to Mexico). A new teacher was brought in and was treated like a substitute teacher, because that was what she was. So far it could be any Canadian school but the difference is that the lack of respect for the teacher never went away. So when I joined the class about 5 months after the first science teacher I was told to never do a single thing she said. At first I thought they were just trying to get me in trouble as a joke, but I soon realized that if you just pretended to not know that she was there and not make eye contact. Science class mainly consists of everyone walking around the class, playing games and talking, while the teacher tries to teach, yells at everyone for not listening and then gives up and messes around on her laptop. To a certain extent this is what it is like in all classes but our science class is the best. Once a week we all put on our lab coats (except for me because I never got around to buying one), and go downstairs for an experiment in the lab. The lab coats are not for safety, no one ever even wears protective goggles and so far this year we haven't dealt with anything more dangerous than vinegar. My educated guess is that the coats are purely for looks. Every kid has their name embroidered on the chest pocket. The lab experiments mainly consist of combining household things inorder to have sciency things happen. One day we did the writing with lemon juice to make invisible ink thing, another day we did catching the gas from vinegar and baking soda in a balloon. None of them are to prove a scientific hypothesis or to demonstrate a chemical reaction, they are just to make something cool happen. The science happening before your eyes is never explained, you are just supposed to learn that baking soda and vinegar make gas, not why they make gas, not what the gas is, just that it happens. Also these "experiments" are all designed to be a lot like cooking, with measurements like "a pinch" or "a few drops." I think that lab classes are just entertainment.

This Reminded Me of Something...

In the spirit of Mexican schooling I have decided to copy out of a book today:

"The educational scheme or course established by Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples and put straws up one another's backs until Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with a birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of derision, the pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and a little spelling--that is to say, it had it once. As soon as this volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt fell into a state of coma; arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils then entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the subject of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the hardest upon whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been unskillfully cut off the chump end of something), more illegibly printed than any curiosities of literature I have since met with, speckled all over with iron mold and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between their leaves. This part of the course was usually lightened by several single combats between Biddy and refractory students."

-Great Expectations- Charles Dickens

P.E. Stands for Partial Exertion

2 days a week I Have gym class. Everyone wears their special gym uniform made of light fabrics. I love these days simply because the uniform involves shorts instead of the usual jeans in 35 degrees. At home we wear special clothes for gym too, but we only wear them for gym class, not all day as is the case here. In Canada we even have showers, you can shower and put on clean clothing so you smell/feel good for the next class. Unfortunately, here, they don't seem to understand the purpose of having different clothes for gym. You have to wear the same sweaty uniform all day, and people sweat a LOT in the blistering sun. Some days when we go downstairs and outside for P.E. we do some stretching and a walking lap around the tennis court but mostly the guys run for the soccer ball on the field. Boys and girls do gym separately, the guys are left to themselves to make teams and play soccer. The girls play tennis if it isn't particularly hot that day (maybe once a month?) or just sit in one of the shade tents and talk. Luckily only a few of the guys actually run during soccer so I'm not expected to work too hard. It is still much too hot to even play lazy soccer. When the block is over we go back to our classroom and turn all of the fans on full but the Spanish teacher always turns them off when she comes in and complains about how cold it is. I'm not sure whats wrong with her.

Swear Your Soul

Every Monday we have a "flag ceremony" that involves a large amount of saluting, looking orderly and pretty, chanting and patriotism. Instead of first block everyone is herded out onto the soccer field and creates a blob around the outside of the 18 yard box. The teachers move through the crowd and in about 15 minutes manage to form each class into two lines of girls and two lines of boys, from shortest to tallest. They play a really bad recording (for a couple months the speakers were broken and this part was silent) of some sort of army drumming and a group of 8 kids march in formation in a pattern around sort of a figure 8. Everyone salutes with their forearm horizontally across their chest. Next comes singing the national anthem, another tremendously bad recording. I sort of hum along or sing "Oh Canada," sometimes I sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. To the best of my knowledge most other kids are doing something like me, everyone makes noise, no one sings the song. For the third part you hold your right hand straight out from your body. The Directora (sort of like a pricipal but way more powerful and scary) reads out an oath to either the flag, country or government. I'm not sure which one it is but you are swearing allegiance to something. I usually mumble this as well because I'm not 100% sure what they are saying. The class with the highest average grade for the last week gets the task of reading out a bunch of mixed up points ranging from school anouncments to happy birthdays to historical happenings on the next few days. When this is over the marching with the flag is redone, in reverse and everyone salutes on their chest. At this point each class is dismissed one by one. throughout the whole thing some teachers circulate through the ranks and tell random kids to tuck their shirt in tighter, stand straighter, stay looking ahead, put more energy into their salutes etc...

When you go back to class there is still 20 minutes left but the teacher doesn't even try to make anyone do anything.

I Can't Write Much Tonight Because...

I can't write anything much right now because my school starts at the ungodly hour of 7:30 and I need to sleep. There are some schools here that start before 6:00 so I guess I can't complain. Normally I would be able to handle getting up early by catching up on sleep on the weekends, but this time of year it gets so hot that the only time I can ride my bike is from 6:00-8:00 in the morning. A few days ago a girl was actually asleep in class, not just resting her eyes or laying her head on her desk, not faking, 100% legitimately asleep. Of course the teacher didn't notice/care.