Oktoberfest, El Centro

Geoff and I have had a few very uneventful weekends, because I've had to catch up on work before the quarter ends. By this weekend, both of us were going stir-crazy and wanting to go away somewhere for the weekend. But, we had promised our friend Andrea that we would go to her Oktoberfest party, so we decided to stick around the city...

We decided, instead, to make the best out of Andrea's party. We went and bought a ton of beers (a mix of cheap and nice beers), bought two giant beer mugs, got some plastic cups for beer pong, and made jello shots! Andrea's party turned out to be totally fun, even though the Americans mostly turned in somewhat early. We ended up partying with her Salvadorean friends, plus Jon, after everyone else had left. We taught the Salvadorean girls how to play flip cup and beer pong, and they taught us how to play Vikingo and Marcas. And we silly-danced. It was pretty awesome times. :)

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One thing we did try to do this weekend was to go down to El Centro to visit the Palacio Nacional, the Catedral Metropolitana, and the Teatro Nacional, which are all on the same block in El Centro. We got inside the cathedral, and it was pretty neat, but both the National Palace and the National Theatre were closed to visitors. What a shame! We were also warned by our taxi driver to not walk around past the 2 block-by-3 block area, since El Centro is not at all a safe barrio. Anyway, the cab driver said we'd be OK if we stayed around the very bustling parts of town, so we didn't press our luck. We left pretty soon after visiting the cathedral, since I wasn't feeling very safe. Afterwards, Geoff said that he felt like people were giving him pretty unfriendly vibes. I am not sure whether I had felt the same, but it was definitely a very impoverished part of the city. As soon as we had gotten out of the cab, a waft of something in the air had told me that there were homeless people nearby; and sure enough, you could see them every few feet, huddled next to a building or holding out their hands to beg for money. According to things I've read on the internet, El Centro suffers from a lot of street violence, and isn't really safe to visit at any hour.

Generally speaking, I'm feeling a little frustrated by the security situation here. Some days, it seems like we cannot really go anywhere. Even on our way down to a popular bar one night (La Luna Arte y Casa), a kid jumped out in front of our taxi cab in an attempt to stop us -- probably for no good. The cab driver eventually drove around the kid, and the cop car behind us picked up the kid and took him down to the station, but it's hard to say that we're going to keep being so lucky.

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Anyway, the first quarter is already over! Can you believe it?

I need a break. We've only had one long weekend since the school started. The next 3-day weekend will be the weekend of Halloween. I cannot wait!

"Unconventional" measurement methods

I have been thinking about doing a mini Geometry unit on non-conventional measurement methods. My inspiration comes from the fact that, in order to measure the exact height from the second-floor balcony to the ground, I had to tie a string to a weight, lower the weight to the ground while keeping the string taut, and then measure the length of the string afterwards. (I was measuring the height in preparation for an Algebra 2 linear regression project.) There are other "non-conventional" measurement methods, such as using water to measure an irregular volume, that my 9th-graders almost certainly are not familiar with. Same goes for measuring perimeters around irregular shapes using a string or a rope. I think the mini unit has potential to be really fun for the kids, and also very educational / directly relevant to our Geometry content strands. :)

After some quick brainstorming, I recalled vaguely a classic puzzle of how to measure the weight of an elephant. I guessed that it would involve using buoyancy / weight of displaced water*, which, after looking the problem up on the internet, is indeed one standard way of measuring something that heavy. That might be cool to teach the kids. Another really awesome story that I found while looking this up was the story of the Chinese emperor who received advice from a kid for weighing an elephant. They sort of do use buoyancy, but in a much more intuitive / elegant way! I think my kids would dig that.

...Some days, I love teaching Geometry. It's pretty funny, because Geometry was my least favorite math topic in high school! (I did like it in grad school though.)

*Another way of doing it, I think, is to use pulleys to keep dividing the weight, until you can suspend the elephant in the air. But, that would take a whole lot of pulleys...

Math Videos

How do you feel about the usefulness of videos inside the classroom? I was wondering about this today, and did some research to look up interesting math videos online. Sadly, there really aren't very many math videos out there -- definitely not as readily available as videos for history, English, or science. What a shame!! Seems like we are missing an entire medium of instruction this way. Videos in other classes can evoke emotions, which can then help to trigger a higher level of engagement during the class discussions that follow. I have decided that I would explore this method of teaching a little bit further.

I did manage to find one source: http://www.projectmathematics.com/index.htm , which appears to be promising, at least in terms of its Geometry videos clips. One thing I liked, for instance, was a clip where they showed a fun animation of a shape transforming into another similar shape -- something you just can't visualize quite as well on a whiteboard. I'm going to try to get a hold of this video in order to evaluate it further. The same website also sells another video about the historic applications of math (something that I think is so rich, yet so rarely discussed with kids). I'm very tempted to buy it, but I think I'm going to wait on this. No $40 impulse buys. --Here, that money could buy you 40 beers! :)

Things that drive me nuts

...Oh, obviously (as an addendum to the last entry), there are things about living in El Salvador that drive me absolutely nuts. For instance, I've been trying to go pick up my ATM card from the bank near my school. The first time I went there, I got there at 4:30pm and only the express window was still open. They told me to return between 9am and 4pm the next day -- a near impossibility on a school day, unless I grab my stuff, abandon all meetings with parents/teachers/kids, and run out the door after my last period. So, finally I went back a week later to pick up my ATM card. The customer-service agent who spoke to me briefly made me sign a form and told me to return 3 days later, when the card would be ready. I waited a full week, and went back on a Saturday. This time, I had to walk 40 minutes from home to the bank. When I got there, I waited 20 or so minutes -- a very moderate wait time, for El Salvador --- to see a customer-service agent. Then, she took my ID and left me waiting at her desk for another 20 to 30 minutes, while she went to the backroom to fetch my ATM card. After waiting for what seemed like forever, she came back and told me that -- surprise, surprise! -- the card was not ready, and that it wouldn't be ready until the following Tuesday. Too tired to argue with her, I told her that I needed to withdraw some money. She asked in surprise, "You don't have your checkbook with you?" I told her dryly that I had anticipated having my ATM card in hand. So, she wrote a letter to the bank teller and took my ID to the teller. I had to wait in another line for about another 20 minutes in order to see the teller, before I could withdraw my money. Following that, I walked 40 minutes home, having really accomplished nothing and having already wasted half of my Saturday at the bank.

And on the same day, at a different bank, my friend Andrea had the same exact experience trying to do something else that's very simple. I don't understand why everything has to be so complicated down here. Everything!! Efficiency surely is not of critical importance here. Coming from NYC, this type of stuff just drives me nuts.

Luxuries, PSAT

I'm not going to lie: One of the beautiful things about living in El Salvador is having a weekly maid service. We pay her $12 to come for a full 8-hour day once a week, which is actually higher than the usual rate for maids. She cleans our apartment, cooks, and -- most importantly -- does laundry and irons my clothes! (Those who have worked at my old school know how I don't iron, like, ever. I actually don't know how, really. My clothes are still wrinkly after I iron them, so I just never bother.) It's really fabulous. I don't think my life will ever be the same again, without having to worry about laundry ever.

Another item of luxury is our beautiful sunshine year-round, which allows for things like hammocks. Geoff and I sometimes complain about one of our hammocks being less comfortable than the other, but then we both feel silly: complaining about a hammock is about as ridiculous-sounding as complaining about a massage (which, believe it or not, people do around here).

But, no complaints about our massages! All of the international teachers who live in the complejo have regularly scheduled visits from a local masseuse; that, too, is really cheap. The standard rate is $15 for an hour of massage. Well, Geoff and I hadn't been on the bandwagon, but we serendipitously found a masseuse to come to our apartment today for the first time. (The girl was already in the building servicing someone else, when she stopped us in the stairwell over the weekend and handed us her business card. Funny thing is that we had been trying in vain to contact the complejo masseuse, so we gladly made an appointment with her on the spot.) Anyway, she came today, and she was brilliant!! Geoff and I feel completely relaxed afterwards and couldn't stop raving about her.

Life is really lovely these days...

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In school news, I can't believe how quickly time is passing by! It's already near the end of the first quarter, and so I have to rush to give a round of tests this week in each class, to allow for last-minute makeup points next week. I've already warned Geoff that this weekend I will be mired in work, in order to finish grading ~90 tests...

I am also helping to prep my kids for the PSAT this year. It's the first time in many years that I've taken a look at that material, and I'm amazed by how clever some of the questions are. For instance, this one in particular tugged at my Algebra-teacher heart:

You are told that k and L are perpendicular, and that (4, n) lies on line k. Your task is to find the value of n. Such an elegant way to test that the kids know a slew of stuff dealing with linearity!

Portezuelo Coffee Finca

Holly, who works at our school as a community-service coordinator, also is experienced working in eco-tourism (which is a buzzword for sustainable tourism, for those of you who are un-hip like me). She organized a trip this weekend up to a coffee finca (farm) up in the mountains, about an hour drive away from the Guatemalan border, and happily I went along.

It was fantastic! We got there in the afternoon, and it was pretty rainy. Everyone was a good sport, so we all huddled indoors and drank hot chocolates and coffees to keep warm. Our hosts at the farm came out to greet us, and they talked about the history of the farm, as well as their motivation for running a part-time eco-tourism business to help supplement their income. They have horses, mountain bikes, hiking trails, and even a few neat ropes courses on the farm! Not to mention delicious food and amazing hospitality. (They had even arranged for us to roast marshmellows at night. Mmmm marshmellows for gringos...) :) There is also a charming remnant of a church where the young couple had gotten married 10 years ago; the actual church collapsed a few years after their wedding, in an earthquake, so now it's just a beautiful empty courtyard, with a wall where the chapel used to stand. Because they had wanted to explore the possibility of offering yoga (and other therapeutic activities) on site, they had asked a yoga teacher to come from San Salvador to stay for the night at the finca. Early the next day, at around 7am, five of us girls rose early to do yoga with Visel the yoga teacher in the chapel courtyard. I'm not really a yoga person, but doing yoga outdoors on a Sunday is such a beautiful feeling! She said that she is down at El Tunco on some weekends, so I might have to look her up so I can check out her morning yoga class on the beach!!

Anyway, after breakfast, since we didn't have a ton of time (it's Sunday, and we teachers had to get back to the city to do work before the day ends), we all got to choose just one activity out of the many things to do at the farm. I had originally planned on going horseback-riding (because I had only done it once in college, and it had been so much fun), but I last-minute changed my mind and decided to go on a hike to the geiser instead. Either way, I had figured I couldn't lose, and visiting the geiser seemed more like a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing. It was a surprisingly leisurely hike down to the geiser, actually. The floor was muddy and slippery from the rain, but otherwise the trail was fairly well-maintained and the terrain was pretty easy to traverse. The actual geiser itself was amazing! When asked how hot the water is in temperature, the guide said, "Demaciado!" and then quickly explained that it's hotter than water that is boiling over fire. You could see the steam and smell the sulfur (sulfre) from even a short distance away. The Earth Science teacher in me swooned obligatorily. :)

This weekend was fantastic, but I missed Geoff a lot. We'll have to go back there together sometime, because I'm sure he would want to check it out, and also because I'd like to check out their horses! (The ladies who went horseback-riding said they went from one hill across to another hill before they finally turned around. Sounds incredible!!)

Yay eco-tourism!

Mini updates!

This week has been somewhat distressing. Geoff and I had some noticeable water problems -- as in, our water got turned off by the water company! --Not fun. We learned the hard way that the ANDA water bills here are not cumulative; if you miss a payment (which we did in the beginning, since we didn't know whether we were supposed to be paying the bills ourselves, or how), the next bill that comes doesn't contain or refer to the overdue amount. Each bill stands alone, which doesn't make much sense to us, but that's just the way it works here. So, we had paid off the most recent bill online, thinking that would suffice, but that was apparently the wrong assumption. And, after a couple months of an unpaid old bill... tada! off goes the water. FOR THREE DAYS!!! Geoff and I couldn't get down to the office in person to take care of the issue during the work week, so we had our super-ish person look into it for us. She spoke to the company and they said it was coming back on, blah blah. Predictably, nothing happened following that promise. Eventually, because of a fluke, a maintenance guy from a different company turned the water back on for us today. So, in short, we don't know whether the water is here to stay, or if the water company is going to come back and turn it back off, or what. We can only hope for the best.

And, you know, it's amazing how difficult this was. The amazing thing is that we sort of did have water; we still had drinking water in tubs, and we took our empty tubs to the pool out in the back and filled them to flush the toilets. But still, we were frustrated as hell. We can only hope that this is a permanent fix, and that the water company just flakes out altogether and doesn't send anyone else down to toggle with our water supply. But, as the running joke goes, it's El Salvador, and anything is possible.

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I learned while talking to a friend that once you employ a maid here, you are responsible for paying the maid weekly even if you aren't going to be around that week (ie. the maid gets the week off). This is because the $10 to $15 you pay your maid each week is, in fact, their main source of income, so if you go on vacation and decide not to pay them, then they are unemployed for that duration. Good to know, since Christmas break is coming up. I would NOT want to cause our maid to be unemployed and to be in financial difficulty when we are away.

It's one of those small things that showcase the income disparity in this country.

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On a brilliantly good note, Geoff and I went to scope out a salsa dancing class yesterday, and it was fantastic! The dance teacher, Raul, had been dancing for 16 years. It was basically like a private session, because he thinks we're not good enough to be with the rest of the class. So, for the whole hour, Geoff and I practiced on the side, and he showed us several moves. I have taken a number of social dance classes and am usually pretty good with following the rapid-fire instructions, but this instructor was moving fast. I love it! He says that in two months, he thinks we'll be good enough to join the rest of the crew in learning fancier moves. It sounds lovely...

We want to go back there at least once a week. The only problem is that getting a cab ride to and from that place isn't totally easy, so we have to resume looking for a car to buy...

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Geoff won't be around this weekend, because he is heading to Jersey for a wedding! I'm totally envious, because I want to be in NY and I wish I could be at this beautiful wedding of two really good people. But, it's good that the local crowd is organizing a weekend getaway, so I wouldn't just be hanging out at home feeling bored. Congrats, M&M!! Enjoy your big day!!