Bounty Hunters!

Yesterday was my final teacher practice with the CELTA course. The next time I teach will be for moneyz and the students will probably be on average about 30 years younger or so.

The last lesson went very well, as far as I´m concerned. The tutor in the lesson had a different perspetive on some of the activities, but I don´t really care at this point. I´ve passed the course and I think I can be objective in my own self-criticism. The teacher also made a comment about the language I use in the classroom-not cuss words, but my tendency to ramble or just talk period-which irritated me because he hadn´t really mentioned the issue before. But all the same, I was happy with the lesson, so that´s all I care about.

The lesson was broadly about idioms related to money, and more specifically there was a listening activity about bounty hunters.

 Up until a few days ago, 99.7% of my experience with bounty hunters was from Star Wars (the other 0.3% being trailers for that awful movie with Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler), so it was interesting to learn, for my own education,what a ¨real¨ bounty hunter is, although Boba Fett still leads a far more active and exciting life than most of these guys.

I don´t feel like explaining what a bounty hunter does here, except to say that my feeling is mostly they hunt fugitives who didn´t pay their bail bonds and fled before the trial could begin. The listening exercise was about Domino Harvey, who was the subject of ANOTHER shitty film about bounty hunters.

I gained a valuable cultural insight about Spanish life yesterday, as it became apparent about two minutes in that people here do not give a rat´s ass about bounty hunters. Even Boba Fett. I tried to get them interested. The listening exercise was ultimately though too long and too obtuse for anybody to care. By the end of the listening activity, that included myself. I do think I was able to teach them what the word ¨bail¨ was.

Before and after that, however, the class went great. I was telling jokes, they were laughing at my jokes, the students were learning English, the students were expressing their desire to deal drugs and win the lottery (or ¨lotary¨, as one of the weaker students in the class wrote on the white board), and I even think I was able to explain why ¨stealing a bank¨ would be a lot more difficult than robbing a bank or stealing from the bank (although, if you stole the bank, they´d never be able to get your fingerprints or interrogate the bank teller, would they?).

As a homework assignment, I asked them to come back today having done one of the ten things they wrote down about how to become rich. It would show a lot about their personalities: one of them will come in with his brand new bestseller that he wrote in 30 minutes, while another will come in asking me to buy cocaine.


I found a new and more vibrant place to wander around at ngiht than the Gothic Quarter. Not that the Gothic Quarter isn´t vibrant, but the stone walls and the narrow streets make things dark a lot of the time, and trying to find a good authentic restaurant is like dodging landmines. So wandering UPtown from the school, away from the Gothic Quarter, and the sea, you get Léxaimple, which is sort of pronounced as rhyming with ¨Gay-zham-pluh¨, and that is not an accidental rhyme, since its supposed to be a great place for gay bars and everything. But gay bars or no, the area has more wide avenues and exciting-looking restaurants, especially the Passaig de Gracia, a major street which has some great places to eat as well as some of Gaudi´s more elaborate buildings.

Last night we went out and went to a cheese bar for about 30 seconds until we decided it was too expensive. We went to what I thought was a nice pizzeria except now I am horrified because I was informed later on that my pizza might have been frozen when I ordered it. From now on, I will just as a rule not eat anything here that I would eat in the US, or my house.