A day and a good day and pictures of the latter (ladder)

Bola, Rosario, Me, and Dalid

Rosario, Me, Deyanira, and Dalid

Gabriel

Friend of "I dream with you" girl

The tags made by the girls for the class, professing our love for each other. The first is from all the class to me. Claire got one of those as well.

Me making a face

Popular, Eumir, Tigre, Misa, and Bola, making faces

Tigre

Popular and me

Carlos

Bola, me, and Claire, from France

Rosario with grape stem

Popular, Tigre, Eumir (not really that tall), and Me

Popular, Bola, Me, Eumir, and Tigre below

Tigre, Bola, Misa, Me, and Eumir

Beautiful cloud from lunch

Sun and beautiful clouds gilded by it in the afternoon

The same

Beautiful clouds after school

Over the last two days I have passed through two very opposed states of being. Yesterday at school, I was extremely restless and frustrated with the poor quality of many classes and teachers, and the discomfort of my desk. The school I attend is wonderful in many ways, of course, but a lot of the classes are taught fairly poorly. I don't know if this is because these practices are standard practice in Mexico or because the teachers legitimately think they're worthwhile, however. Neither of those things save them from being really big wastes of time.

The big things here are dictation and note-taking. Dictation has the teacher slowly reading long passages and us copying them down, of course. It is so slow that you never really are presented with a clear idea unless you read what you've written, and we don't really do that. And of course we never discuss them afterwards. Note-taking is bad here because the teachers write big sections on the big and expect us to copy the whole thing down exactly. Then we still don't talk about it. So we don't take notes on what we feel is helpful to learn information, we just copy down images and words without thinking.

The worst of all this in so many ways is the most recent homework assignment from the philosophy teacher. Now, this man, the owner and director of the school, seems really intelligent and respected. He knows the material, teaches through his time slot, and makes sure to some degree that the students know what he's talking about. He's certainly no Mr. Dean, of course, but he's much above average, I think. This all makes the disappointment even worse when he gives the most ridiculous homework assignment I've heard of in my 13 years of public education. That is, they have to memorize and present one by one a page-long Galileo speech. What the hell? A philosophy teacher, an intelligent man, an educator who OWNS a school, should know better than that. The alternative, by the way, is to write the speech out 500 times. If you don't do one of these, you're not permitted to take the final exam, and thus fail the class, I guess.

That said, there are some really good classes and teachers. We still use these same methods of bad teaching but then talk about what we're doing afterward. I am looking forward to Anthropology and Sociology and Communications and Philosophy. I just got pretty fed up with all this bullshit yesterday and had a hard time sitting through it. I think it's something to do with Culture Shock as well. I have noticed really weird things annoying me, like Pedro slurping cereal in the morning, or people teasing me really light-heartedly. They say this happens and is normal, so I guess that's fine.

When I got home from school, however, everything was much better. I got a lot done, it seemed like, reading philosophy and writing a bunch and practicing a bunch. I even read a bit of my Spanish novel, which is really difficult and I never want to do it. I listened to a philosophy lecture before I fell asleep, too.

This morning I felt much less tired at school, and when I arrived I felt all warm and comfy. I have no idea what changed. Maybe philosophy helped out? I wrote a poem, my first poem, during English class, and then some more philosophy and a series of poems by Federica Garcia Lorca. Poetry is much more immediately gratifying than my novel. In poetry, you look up words and comprehend the meaning of the poem at once, an image or what have you. However, a lot of the point of a novel comes from getting to know characters and plots and such, and the fact that you don't get all the little metaphors and similes and vocabulary used keeps you from understanding well enough to trudge through. When you look up the words, immediate images come to mind but aren't necessarily as immediately graspable or beautiful as in poetry. Images fit into a context more than they are meant to stand alone.

At lunch time I took more cloud pictures, which I've been doing almost every day lately. After lunch, a group of girls, Deyanira primarily as well as Dalid and Rosario, were making these great little tags, pieces of paper that we taped to our vests and ties. They said "I love you (name)" They made enough that most of the class loved one or more other people in the class, all regardless of gender and such. It was really sweet and it made me really happy. I had a "Te amo Eumir" tag, a "I heart Weska" tag (I don't really know Weska. He's not in our class), and my class "We heart Adam" tag. Fanny and Kristell started tickling and punching me also. I don't know how I feel about that. Probably pretty good though.

Dalid had brought in grapes with seeds and was giving them away. I ate a bunch and put the seeds in my pocket. I asked the girls if they thought I could put dirt in there and water it and give it sun and grow grapes in my pocket. The vote was 2-1 in favor, with Rosario voting no. After we'd eaten our grapes, Rosario and I put the stems in our hair over our ears like flowers.

Overall, a pretty good really good night and day, following a melancholy and frowny day.