Breakthroughs and Broken Bottles

This week in autoescuela (my theory classes for a moto permit) we’ve advanced from vehicle lighting regulations to señales de circulación. Both temas seem pretty commonsense at first glance, but not so in Spain. For example, what do you do at an intersection if you’re driving in a lane that has a diverging arrow painted on it - one arrow pointing straight through and the other to the right? One would assume you could either continue straight or turn right. But what if there’s also a sign post with a yield sign below a sign of an arrow curving off to the right? The arrow indicates that you can only turn right and so cancels out the straight arrow on the road. The yield sign means that you don’t have the right of way, but there’s also a green streetlight, so you really do have the right of way. Unfortunately, this is no hypothetical question; this contradictory intersection exists somewhere in Madrid.

After a class period introducing some of the intricacies of traffic signals, we took a 40 question quiz to see how much we retained. I missed 17 questions and was feeling pretty depressed until everyone else shared the number they got wrong. Only one other woman had only missed seventeen. The rest were at twenty-some. Taking into consideration the language barrier and the fact that kilometers and kilograms (and euros for that matter) still don’t feel like real units of measurement, I’m impressed by my somewhat decent score.

I’m getting settled into my ETA role, too. Mondays are surprisingly my favorite day of the week, mainly because I get a lot of time to chat with the profes. The first hour of the day I spend practicing conversational English with the new social science teacher, who’s crazy passionate about history and archaeology, though this doesn’t seem to come across to the students. I’ve also started giving private lessons to a biology teacher who’s preparing for a specific English test. I spend the rest of the day with the segundos in history and English.

This week, though, Tuesday was the day in which I felt I was really getting into stride. My first hour I spend pulling segundos out of English class to work on speaking activities. The second hour I do the same with the bachilleratos. This Tuesday went much better than last week with the older students. Though they had a sub, she and I were immediately able to come up with activities for them. She kept most of the class to work on question writing exercises, while I pulled out 8 students at a time to do practice interviews. And then came science class.

Every other week I’ll be running the class period so the kids can hear a native English speaker. This week I was teaching on density. The teacher had said he would be with me for the lesson, as I’m not supposed to be with an entire class by myself; however, I got to the classroom, and he hadn’t shown up. A little confused, I got the kids to explain to me what they’d learned the class period before about mass and volume, and started to move on to density. The profe arrived (he did have a legitimate reason for arriving late), and as we watched a video demonstration of the density of different liquids and talked about it. I was pleased that the kids were attentive and that the first lesson I’d prepared for the group was going so well. With a few minutes left of class, the teacher pulled out a small plastic bottle of water and an identical bottle of mercury, explaining that mercury’s density is 13.6 times that of water, and handed the bottles to a student to pass around the class so that the kids could feel the difference.

The profe kept talking as the kids passed around the bottle, and I thought, “Not good, please, please, please do NOT let them drop the mercury.” But they’re 12 and 13 and clumsy and can’t help it, so of course one of the girls, surprised at its weight, let the mercury bottle fall to the floor, and instantly the entire class was circled around the spill wanting to play with it.

“Guys, it’s TOXIC, get AWAY.” The teacher and I shoved them into the hallway, and he sprinted to get clean-up supplies from the lab while I took off to alert the jefe de estudios. The other teachers heard the news quite nonchalantly.

“Oh, no big deal. When I was a kid, I played with mercury, and I turned out okay. The students will always remember density now!”

We repeated the lesson on Wednesday for the other group of segundos, minus the mercury. Maybe it makes for a less memorable lesson, but at least I don’t have to worry that we’ve poisoned the students.

In other bottle related news: Alcalá de Henares, hometown of Cervantes (author of Don Quijote) is the place to go for tapas. With each copa de vino or caña de cerveza, you get to choose from a wide selection of Spanish foods to nibble on. My day trip there last weekend with Sam, another Fulbrighter, and her roommates went something like this:

-Arrive in pueblo

-Get coffee

-Wander to cathedral

-Tapas

-Take tour of Universidad de Alcalá

-More tapas

-Visit Cervantes’s home

-Tapas again

-Check out the shops

-More coffee

Posing with Sancho Panza and Don Quijote

This weekend’s proving to be rainy and cold (luckily I finally got a space heater since our piso only has a radiator in the living room), ideal weather for making soup (stovetop foods are preferable as our piso lacks an oven as well), updating the blog, and museum visits. Coming up next weekend: I turn 23, which somehow sounds so much older than 22, and take my first solo trip, a weekend in Andalucía to check out the Royal School of Equestrian Arts and watch an exhibition of Andalusian horses. More updates (and pictures of gorgeous caballos) to follow!