Doing laundry in my flat here is a waste of time, effort, clothes, and patience. Now I know that not having real cleaning facilities might constitute a "first world problem", but here me out. It's one thing to have to hang your clothing up on a hangar outside and let it dry in the air. It's another for those clothes to have to be hung up forty feet above a ceiling-less outdoor patio in someone's flat below.
Also, the owner of my flat has purchased a washing machine, which seems like a grand idea except a washer without a dryer is pretty stupid especially when you only have a vague idea of how it works. The landlady showed me how to use it except my clothes came out soaking wet. I think there was a wrong button pushed somewhere along the way.
I have a feeling its going to take at least a week for these clothes to be wearable.
But then it gets worse as there's people who live downstairs and were none too happy that my clothes were dripping down to the bottom of their floor. THere is a plastic covering protecting some, but not all, of the room from overhanging clothes. I have no idea what they do when it rains, it looks to me like they might be able to close the roof. However, i heard them swearing in Spanish when they noticed that it wasn't raining, it was just one of the students upstairs doing his laundry.
The worst part happened when my underpants fell off the clotheshanger and dropped all the way down the patio. The natives swore again and then laughed. I think I just lost those underpants forever. I'm not going to try to recollect them.
Now that I know I'll be responsible for my own detergent as well, I think it just makes more sense at this point to go find a laundromat. I'll get some good reading time in at least.
In other news, I am finally finished with the beginner-level students. This is mostly excellent news. I will regret not being able to build upon any progress I made in teaching them, and also there were students who told me they could understand me better. But overall, it just seemed incredibly difficult to get anything across the language barrier: the problem here was that the MY learning was supposed to be skills based, which basically means as a "teacher" I was handicapped because I couldn't use Spanish, even my horrible garbled unintelligible Spanish, during the lesson.
I understand why they do this and I am glad that I was forced to have to use word economy and non-verbal communication, but at the same time it made it very difficult for me to teach them anything, and my "creative" lesson today seemed to be dead on arrival.
The trickiest thing is that I felt like I was screwed if I made just one mistake, because it wouldn't be interpreted as such. If, for example, a math teacher put up "6 + 6 = 483" or an English teacher told you Shakespeare wrote Jane Eyre, you'd know it was a goof, but the students in the class seem to take things verbatim and because our communication skills across the language barrier are bad, not only is the mistake disastrous, but it's compounded because I can't explain my own mistake to the class.
Today I wrote things on the board which were not a mistake, but in fact turned out to be a bad way to explain something. The problem is that the damage had already been done and it was extremely hard for us to "go back" to the beginning of the lesson because they can't follow that trail if I speak only in English.
I should also mention that will I did like some of my "students", there were also a handful which were just obnoxious and had "given up" on me by last Friday. So they sat in the corner, passive-agressively ignored my lesson, and made full class participation impossible.
The class was able to convey that you cannot take a train from New York to Barcelona. At least they learned that much.
It will be a tremendous pleasure to be able to teach students who have a better grasp of the English language.
The positive spin here is even if I wind up teaching beginner-level students somewhere, if it's a Spanish country I'll be able to use the L1 (primary language) AND I know kind-of-sort-of have skills to be able to convey meaning even more simply. Also, if I am truly teaching beginners, I will be able to completely control the lesson, instead of working around other people's lessons and the actual professional teaching given by the actual instructors at the IH school.
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