Jewel, Teaching, and this American Life

I’ve taken to listening to pretty sappy music recently. Like, really sappy. Like, really bad sappy 90s classics. Topping the list has been Jewel’s Foolish Games. I didn’t even know I had it in my music library, but now that it’s been discovered, it’s climbing on the play count ranking (still has a ways to go before it tops my most played song, Shake It, by Metro Station). Celine has also risen to the top. I’ll omit reference to the select boy-band songs that have reentered my life. So I dug deep to see where this change in taste stems from. Well, not that deep. The answer is pretty superficial. I’m far away from friends and family and don’t have anyone to hug me here. And I kinda get that warm fuzzy feeling from sappy 90s songs. I’m meeting people and making friends (sort of, I’ve gone out drinking with co-workers), but how do you replace friends and family? You don’t, that’s how. You get used to it. Oh, and I’ll place partial blame for the music choices on the insomnia I’ve been suffering with as of late. Sleep deprivation make you do crazy things.

So here’s the call to action: Email me some new music! Just a few mp3 files will do the trick. Keep me hip. What’s on the radio these days? Or what do you think is an essential iTunes track. No reggaeton please.

I’ve been able to swipe some spotty wireless recently in house here in Jinotega, go figure. The following link is therefore brought to you by this recent development, your thoughts of “shouldn’t Daina be out practicing her Spanish,” and the letter F (for fierce): advancedstyle.blogspot.com (you’re welcome, trust me)

I taught my first class WITH a counterpart this week. Guess what? It went WAYYYYY better than the classes I gave on my own. DUH. My counterpart can give all of the cultural contexts and anecdotes that totally escape me. She also has the authority. They stay quiet for her. I’m just the silly gringa speaking broken Spanish. They compliment my outfit or earrings, ask me how to say a few things in English, and then pretty much disregard the rest. Also, the fact that I’m only a handful of years older than many of them doesn’t help. I have a 21 year old in my class of 3rd year students. Though he is probably my best student. There goes my argument out the window. I hope they learn to take this class seriously. Because it is new, less regimented, we build things out of straws, and do lots of riddles, many consider it a free period. I think if the teacher commits, they will follow suit, and it will be way easier to motivate her.
Speaking of encouraging and teaching youth, I just listened to an episode of This American Life that I found especially interesting. A brief summary of what was covered in the first act: among other things, what I want to focus on is that poor children in the United States hear something like 20 million less words in their first 3 years than middle to upper class children, and the majority of what they hear is discouraging diction. The amount of language, the pure quantity of words, that a child is exposed to in its first 3 years has a dramatic affect on its future success. I’ve heard about these studies elsewhere, but mostly in the context of standardized testing, and college acceptance, how certain kids are at a disadvantage. This podcast was about a man who was using it to break the cycle of poverty in Harlem through baby college (teaching parents in Harlem all the fancy baby things that parents in the suburbs know) and charter schools (teaching those babies when they’re no longer babies). His kids test at or above state levels. Go dude! (cant remember his name).
So here is another call to action, for myself, a goal I am setting for myself here: work with the casa materna, or casa de la mujer either getting the word out, or reading to kids. I toooooootally understand children’s books in Spanish. Maybe I’ll try to set something up with the Health volunteers here who do a lot of work with pregnant women. And hopefully, if something catches on, in 16 years or so the Peace Corps volunteers here in Nicaragua will have a MUCH easier time getting kids to pay attention in class, because during their formative years they got ahead of the game. And those volunteers will shower me with thanks, and I will nod and grin my 30-(or maybe 40)-something-year-old grin of wisdom, thinking back on my service and how insufferable the kids could be sometimes and say “no no, I just did what I thought was good at the time, you guys are the real difference makers” HAHA! I hope you’ve learned by now that I write most of these blogs in the weeeeeee hours of the night, and am prone to nonsensical outbursts. I encourage you all to track my mental state throughout the blog, and if you start to worry, please let me know, I don’t want to spiral. During training, the host sister of another PCV told us that everyone goes crazy after a few months in Nicaragua. I’ve taken heed of that warning. I do feel a tad schizophrenic here, considering I can have a full conversation in Spanish with one person, and then turn to my right and not understand a damn thing someone else is trying to say to me. Poco a poco.