Despedida, parte 1

Tomorrow is my last day at the school, and I leave Mexico the day after that.

The despedidas, the goodbyes, the "lasts" have begun.

Last week, I had my official despedida at school. I thought it was going to be full of ridiculous ceremony - and it was - but it was also really sweet and a wonderful way to start off my last week here. A couple of students spoke, a couple of students danced, and all of second year gave me spoken-word-style snaps, which was so happy-making. 

The day after my despedida, I got the chance to do something I'd be hoping to do since I first got to Mexico - learn to make mole. Jayime's mom generously offered to share her culinary wisdom with me and invited me to her house Thursday afternoon. We made mole verde in her mother's cazuela, using her grandmother's recipe and I now have almost-incoherent instructions on how to make both mole verde and mole rojo scrawled in Spanglish on the back of an old lesson plan.

I doubt that any mole I make will ever be as delicious as what was in that steaming cazuela, but it's pretty cool that I kinda-sorta know how to make it now, right? I'm pretty sure this is the best souvenir I'm bringing back from Mexico - a generations-old recipe, packed full of love and ready to be shared with friends and family. Hope you're ready to taste my attempts to recreate it!

(Stay tuned for more despedida-type reflections...)

Spoken Word, an Introduction

On Monday, I had my most fun literature class yet at the Normal. Class was at 7 in the morning and I didn't expect the students to be too focused - especially since daylight savings had started the day before AND we were scheduled to leave for a field trip right after class - so I decided to do something that would really grab their attention... spoken word poetry!

We talked about the origins of the genre, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Beat generation, and then we actually started watching some spoken word performances. We had a lot of fun watching the videos, so I thought I'd share them with you - enjoy!

"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron

"Make Me More Mexican" by David A. Romero

"Fuck I Look Like" by Kai Davis

Teaching in Mexico (or, Being a Human)

Since I've been in Mexico, I've mostly posted about my travels – pretty photos, some nice little anecdotes, etc. – but I haven’t written much about my daily life, about my work, mostly because it’s a somewhat daunting task. Today, I have just enough angsty frustration to get me going and I’m going to tell you all about it. 

As (most of) you know, I’m here in Mexico through the US Fulbright program. I was placed as an English Teaching Assistant (ETA) at a Normal (a teachers college) in Toluca, the capital of the state of Mexico. There are twenty-three of us ETAs here in the country and our placements vary greatly. Some of us are at universities, others at high schools, a few are at middle schools, and several ETAs move around between more than one school. Some people teach academic classes, like me, and others mostly act as tutors or give cultural presentations. 

 Our positions are not full-time by any means. I work four days a week, but only for a few hours each day. This semester, I’m generally at school from 7 to 10 on Mondays, and from 10 to 3 or so Tuesday through Thursday. I’m teaching a conversational English workshop and “Historical Evolution of the English Language”, and co-teaching “English Literature” and “Academic Reading and Writing.” 

 Most days at school are punctuated with moments of joy and moments of frustration. I love teaching and I love my students. I love when we have little breakthroughs and I love when I learn from them. Those are the things that make me happy and keep me from losing my mind. 

There are also plenty of things that don’t make me happy, plenty of things that make me feel like I’m part of some elaborate practical joke. There are unused SMART Boards in most of the classrooms, but no classroom sets of text books. One of my co-workers has two different classes scheduled at the same time – meaning that one of the classes just doesn’t have teacher because she’s not superhuman and she can’t be in two places at once - and the administration refuses to fix it. At the beginning of the semester, the third year students had three classes without teachers – meaning they literally just sat there for 12 hours a week – which is why I’m now teaching “Historical Evolution.” Class gets cancelled and none of the teachers are notified. The laziest teachers generally make the most money (yay for corrupt tenure policies!) and the REALLY terrible ones get promoted out of our department. The curriculum provided by the government is insane (the anthology for “Historical Evolution” includes the entire text of Heart of Darkness, among other such absurdities) so every semester, each teacher either makes a new syllabus and collection of lesson plans from scratch or they give up and teach nonsense. And that’s just scratching the surface. 

 I know this not a Mexico problem. I know this kind of absolute educational craziness happens in the United States. In fact, the majority of my students (AND coworkers) here in Toluca remind me so much of the adult students I’ve worked with in the United States and that’s what scares me. Every day, I watch how the education system is failing them. I watch them memorize facts as their critical thinking skills go undeveloped. I watch them give up and get lazy. And as much I try to be a good teacher for them, I get discouraged and heavy-hearted and I start to feel powerless because the system is big and I am small. 

Today, I don’t even want to attempt to sketch out some large-scale, hypothetical solution. I don’t know where to start. Today, I just want to give you a sense of how being a teacher (or a social worker or a human rights advocate or a doctor or an ethically-minded entrepreneur or a loving parent or just a person who cares) pulls at you. It fills you up with joy when little advances are made, when hope is glimpsed, but it also weighs you down with despair. 

But that’s the human condition, isn't it? I mean, no matter what our job or title is, if we’re choosing to see the world for what is and trying to live in a way that affirms beauty and love even in the face of persistent darkness, we will know delight and we will know heartache, and we will know the awful tension of experiencing both in the same moment. 

Like I said, I have no solutions, but today, I’m just letting myself feel that. I’m trying to face the absurd challenge of “making a difference” not with overly idealistic naiveté or hardened cynicism, but a realistic and clear-eyed understanding of the limits of what I can do and the necessity to do it anyway. I’m trying to see the problems and not get overwhelmed by them. I’m trying to walk into the classroom, do the best I can, to cry when necessary, to laugh when necessary, to be silent when necessary. And I’m seeking comfort in the knowledge that I’m not alone in this experience, even when I feel like I am. 

As Dorothy Day wrote, “we have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” 

So thank you for reading and thank you for being part of the loving community that sustains me. I hope that you are along for the struggle and that you are ready to share in all the wonder and horror and everything in between because, well, there’s a whole lot of it to go around and it’d be a shame to miss out on it, because that’s the stuff of life.