BUAP to the Top

One of two buildings on the BUAP-Atlixco campus

Today was supposed to be the day. The day that I introduced my Lengua Extranjera II class to my forever valentine, Troy Bolton.

We had decided to pull a typical lazy teacher move and show a romantic comedy in my class at noon because we knew the majority of students would be at a scholarship meeting. After some painstaking internet research into the questionable content of classics such as 10 Things I Hate About You and 50 First Dates (#tbt to Plugged In and Clean Films, @mom) -- I realized that the charming innocence of High School Musical would be the perfect Valentine's flick. Duh.

Since HSM isn't on Mexican Netflix, I dished out five bucks for an Amazon rental with subtitles and fell asleep imagining my students and me dancing to "Work This Out" while learning about verb tenses.

But alas, the dozen or so students who weren't attending the aforementioned meeting decided to peace out and go buy balloons and teddy bears for their girlfriends, or something. Because that's a thing they do sometimes. If enough of them don't want to have class, they just leave and then the janitors lock the classroom and us teachers have no choice but to accept their defiance. 

Five months in and I'm still struggling with this, digamos, "laidback" culture at my university. My first mistake was expecting something resembling my own prim and proper college experience, rather than something more like this:

No, it's not that bad. But it's no Type-A paradise either. I would never want to complain about my school placement. I could not have survived my move to Mexico if it weren't for the supportive community and hands-on assistance of colleagues and students. I'm also aware that it's not my place, as a temporary staff member, to enter in and critique differences in school infrastructure that I perceive as inefficient or problematic.

So there's a 15-minute grace period for tardiness? Breathe in, breathe out, Malissa. Better late than never. Wifi, electricity, and running water are inconsistent? Alright, well flexibility is the name of the game; I'll manually flush the toilet with a bucket of water, no problem! Despite prompts to work quickly, students spend the whole class period completing a simple warm-up activity? That's fine, learning is not meant to be rushed! Just call me Charlotte Mason!

(In other words, there's a reason I've taken up yoga...)

As a small campus of the larger Benemérita Universidad Autonóma de Puebla, our 300 students have two options for their major: Accounting or Tourism Administration. There's an undeniable rivalry between the academic tracks, and I happen to be one of the only teachers who crosses over between them (you know me, always #buildingbridges). Last semester the schedules overlapped in such a way that I had to pick and choose which classes to attend for each group, but this semester I do four hours weekly with all five sections of English and teach a total of about 100 students (meaning that most days I'm actively teaching from 8am to 3pm, if you include the obligatory tutoring sessions and classes for teachers that I hold after school-- woohoo!). On days where I follow a normal schedule I end up downright exhausted, but more often than not I'll have a class or asesoría cancelled due to a teacher's unexpected absence or a field trip no one told me about. Cue a mix of annoyance and relief. 

Although some of the school's norms are outright frustrating, others just take some getting used to. For instance, each generation of students takes the exact same course load, so they have back-to-back classes in the same room and the professor for each subject comes to them (think US elementary/middle school structure). Then they're done by 2 or 3pm so they can get to their afternoon jobs. Any classwork must be corrected and signed by the teacher before class is officially over (so essentially the first and last 15 minutes of class are taken up by tardiness and revisions, leaving only about 20 minutes for actual content-- oops, I forgot I'm in the "not outright frustrating" section). 

My students are truly wonderful, hilarious, clever, and friendly. Their interest in English is... less inspiring than their vibrant personalities. I haven't had the opportunity to sit in on a non-English class, but I'm guessing that their Accounting professor assigning a single paragraph for homework would not elicit whines of "teeeeacher, a whole paragraph?!" Keep in mind these students are around my age, if not older. 

It's most certainly NOT that they're not smart and capable. It's just that, apart from a handful of students who do really care about learning English, they're simply not invested. Which makes my job interesting, stimulating, and challenging.

They're always on their phones, so I built Duolingo into the curriculum.

They love social media and memes, so I integrate internet humor as much as I can.

They're into American music, so we watch videos and analyze lyrics.

But they also openly hate coming to class, and there's not much I can do to indulge that preference.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Aren't they adorable? Note that this picture was taken last semester as evidence of the 30% of students who came to class one day when the rest of their compañeros decided against it.