The adventures of the now Profe Gogs

May 22^nd

Today we were full of nerves as we would be planning for our charla our group would be giving to the business volunteers today, and that nervousness was elevated by me having a class to teach in the afternoon.

A volunteer who is finishing up her service came to Masatepe to help us do our Charla. We’re basically treating it as teaching a real class, and will be giving the class to our fellow trainees. Since we’re the most advanced Spanish group, once again we’re the ones who have to do things first. The girl who came to work with us lived in the same house that I’m living in now. She was the first volunteer my family ever hosted – so she walked back with me to come visit after we threw together a presentation for tomorrow. She chatted it up with my host padres while I sat around for an hour trying to figure out if I was nervous about teaching a bunch of 10^th graders or if I wasn’t.

Eventually, the hour of truth was upon me and I made my way to class. I had the ingenious game plan of taking a mototaxi to the school so I wouldn’t be sweaty after walking through the sun to get there. However, for whatever reason, this was the first time I’d never seen a mototaxi on my way to…anywhere really. So I had to walk the entire way there (I don’t know why I’m whining, it’s only a 4 minute walk). We were told that some head honchos from DC were going to sit in on our classes. Peace Corps Nicaragua gets evaluated every 5 years…and this just happens to be that year. So we were anticipating that they would watch Jordan’s class that she would teach, then would leave afterwards to evaluate other parts of the program.

Jordan’s class went super well. Her students expressed all the creativity, motivation, and participated like any other American class would have. Or in other words, it wasn’t what we expected. We expected no creativity, no participation, and tons of noise. Due to the lack of distraction in her class, Jordan flew through her class and finished 20 minutes early. Her class finished and we were all just surprised at how her class was and extremely pleased with how smoothly everything went – next was my class.

I arrived to my class where all the students stood up upon me entering, greeted me with a good afternoon, and I had them sit down. At first, I was a bit nervous and talked a little fast. What I ended up doing was completely deviating from my game plan to read my plan to read what I had written on my papelografos (I seriously can’t think of the word for them, they’re big pieces of paper), and just verbally gave all the directions to the class. I flew through the first activity, which was an icebreaker where the students had to change 5 things about their appearances. It got a little rowdy from the activity, but they were pretty receptive to me yelling at them to be quiet and to listen. My Spanish facilitator criticized me for not coming up with other ways to keep the rowdy ones quiet, but I thought I handled it pretty well. I had bought a bunch of candy to get the students to participate…but participation was really a non-issue. My main activity was for the students to talk about what their life was going to be like in 10 years and most of the students had something to say. The whole point of the activity was to teach them to think ahead, and think of what will happen in the future/what they’ll need to do to achieve certain goals. To kill time/embarrass the students, I made them come up to the front of the class and share their lives in 10 years with the rest of the class. Then I subjected them to an interrogation by questioning them about their plans and how they’d achieve them. It mostly went well when I had one girl (who I figured out is my best student) present her life. It was this gigantic 1 page description of her life. I had absolutely no idea what she said, so I just said, “Wow, that was really good, give her an applause.” I got the class done, reviewed the class, and told them to think about the theme for the next class and finished everything 5 seconds before the bell rang. It was pretty great. However, the PC/government big wigs that were supposed to show up to Jordan’s class ended up watching my class for 20 minutes. So if Peace Corps ends up pulling out of Nicaragua, you know where it all started.

May 23^rd

Today was a sort of “day off” as I only had to go to training in the next town over. We all met up at 7:30 to take the bus to Olla de Barro to meet up with the other volunteers for a full day of training. This was another training session where I didn’t start drifting off in the middle. However, this probably could be attributed to our group having to give a charla to the other volunteers since we’re in the higher Spanish group. We kind of slacked off and didn’t prepare as much, but we got our point across, and the only thing lacking was our organization as well as grammatical errors from a lack of practice.

Our charla was followed by rabies shots and a charla from the head PC doctor in Nicaragua. We learned about Malaria and Dengue fever and prevention tips/steps to take. As long as we take the malarial drugs, we won’t get it, and as long as we get to the hospital to be hooked up to artificial nutrition, we’ll survive dengue fever. Nicaragua only has a handful of people get the most severe strain of Dengue fever, and there’s never been a PC volunteer that has got it, so I’m not too worried.

It’s always good to see the fellow people in our small business group if only to share stories about the week – what illnesses we got, how our bowel movements are going, the latest dish we got, the newest unknown vegetable we’d eaten, and how many times we’d eaten gallo pinto recently (the answer is we eat it pretty much every meal).

The afternoon session flew by pretty quickly and was full of breaks, which made it even more laid back. Even though it’s job training, it’s more like sitting in info sessions that inform you on ways you could approach things. The training sessions are like classroom survival skills. More than ever though, you’re expected to be creative – really creative. It’s absolutely imperative that you teach a class that complements every learning style. If you don’t appeal to them, you’re going to lose the attention of some of your students.

Regarding my class, I’m going to have to be more of a hardass on Monday to let them know I’m not screwing around. However, it’s only a 33-minute class because they’re taking final exams, so I don’t have to plan as much. In addition to kicking up my disciplinarian side, I have some students that are the ones that don’t pay attention and just don’t bother to do the assignment, nor care. On Monday, these are the students I’m going to make do everything. They’ll be no slacking in my class! I won’t let them be lazy and not pay attention – I’m dynamic and mean. Good luck 10A.

I got back from class around 3:30, which was amazing. It was the first day I arrived home where I didn’t have to plan a class, go to a youth group, meet up with somebody, run errands, or anything. I wanted to relax, so I started fixing my host Dad’s bike. It makes tons of noise so I fiddled with the brakes and got them aligned. I took the bike for a spin around the block to find the source of all this damn noise to discover that not only did the bike make a lot of noise, but it is totally beat to sh*t. Everything is bent big time. However, with everything being made out of iron/steel, I’m not too concerned about the bike falling apart. I’ve initially diagnosed the wobbly crankset as a bottom bracket that isn’t secure (Jon – ideas?). I’ve got to pore over my PDF bike manual to get a better idea of what the issue is and what I can do to fix it.

After that, I wasted a couple hours watching TV, and ate some dinner (gallo pinto with some chicken/rice soup if you care). Then I went over to one of my student’s houses, Javier, to grab him to go running with me. The great thing is, he always says he’ll do something, no matter what it is. Chess? He’ll go grab the chess set and a table and bring it down the block. Running? He’ll just drop everything and go right then and there. Youth group? Just let him drop off his stuff at his house. Reliability.

During the night, my host mom hosted her bible study/singing/whatever group while William and I worked out in our kitchen. He never wants to run, so I try to make it as hard as possible on him since he never worked out before I showed up. I made him do 200+ rowing exercises until he was totally exhausted. In the end this kicked me in the ass because when I went to do exercises next, the resistance bands just broke. So through creativity and innovation, we spent 2 hours fixing the bands. We still haven’t finished, but we’ve got time to pull it all together.

I have to go to Managua for a short 4-hour training session on whatever. I’m not a huge fan of Managua, but I don’t have much of a choice. To top it off, PC decided that our training group (once again because of our high Spanish level), is going to go to some conference in Managua next Thursday to learn about ways to work with youths. PC will take us out to lunch and pay for our transportation, so it works out in the end.

More bikes, random tasks, concerts

So with 12 days to go until I….well….go, my ways of indulgence are coming to a close (some more abruptly than others). I went to see Enon at Larimer Lounge with Phil last week which was awesome. Good show all around minus some weird lady who persisted in peeking over Phil and my shoulders to see the song list, awkwardly putting random stuff around us and on the stage in front of us, and just being generally creepy all around. Nevertheless, the show was great, and I saw the employee from my bank who looks like the main character in the movie Secretary. At least she has good taste in music.

The weekend was passed with bike rides, the Avalanche games, me finally selling my Selle San Marco Regal saddle (I bought it two years ago and realised I hated it), and hanging out with my buddy from Prague who was working down the street from me. I was constantly on the move Sunday, and between walking around, riding my bike, and jogging, I covered about 40 miles easily. It was the most I’d been moving about…just to be moving about. The night ended with me fixing a bike at Alex’s house (to hone those maintenance skillz!).

Monday I was up at the crack of dawn to get my laptop repaired. A part of the hand rest inexplicably broke off, but fortunately it was under warranty. That morning, I also discovered that the person I’d been stealing internet from for the past 6 months finally got the sense to password protect their connection (But yoshi! I thought we were friends!) The laptop was pretty worthless to me without internet anyway, so I didn’t particularly mind parting ways with it to get it repaired. After a workout at the gym, Mom and I dinked around and did some errands. Following this, I was going to go see how my wheel truing skillz were and headed over to Alex’s house to test them out. Well, riding down there, about half a mile from his house I noticed my bike was handling quite poorly. Upon further inspection, I discovered I had a flat tire – a bad omen. So I walked over to Alex’s where we successfully tightened up his spokes, got the wheel running true, only to realise that the main problem was his brakes were crappy. So we just did all that work for nought. Due to my flat tire, I had to invest a little more repair time than I planned. I found just a tiny hole in the tube, put a patch on it and thought I was ready to roll. No, this 30 year old tube was having none of that and promptly burst a hole in another spot. So I headed over to the bike shop to get a tube where my conversation with the employee was as follows:

“You want a couple tubes?”
“No, just one will be fine.”
“Ah, so you must be feeling lucky…”
“I’m only going to be around for a couple more weeks, so I should be fine.”

Back to Alex’s where I pumped up the tire put the wheel back on, and waited to make sure nothing was wrong with it. I hadn’t found anything sharp in the tire itself, but I’m overly paranoid. A few minutes later I headed home with about a million mph headwind that I fought through with the four-word phrase “Go go Goggins bike!” Well, go go it did until I got 7 blocks from my house – that’s right, a flat tire. The same one. So now I know what the issue is, my bikes are pissed off at me. They’re out to get me because they won’t be ridden for two years, so they’re conveying their dissatisfaction with my decision.

The night was capped off by bar-hopping with Alex that also didn’t go according to plan. We ended up walking home last night where I parted ways with Alex at the alley in back of my house. I woke up at 11 this morning without any recollection of that journey down the alley and to my bed. I apparently broke off the towel rack and exploded once I entered my room. I don’t understand it – we walked three miles and I was definitely feeling less inebriated towards the end. It doesn’t fit together with me, but as a drunk Russian said this week on BBC, “What doesn’t happen when you’re drunk?”

Well said.

Tonight is the Kimya Dawson concert – concert number 2 in a seven day stretch, with concert number 3 being tomorrow night up in Boulder. Stars if you’re curious.

Time just keeps ticking.