January 2-3, 4 am in the Mexico City Airport

I don’t know if coming home to say hi-bye to loved ones was a good or bad idea, but it has been exceptionally confusing and hard. The days with family were typical of Christmas, and the four days in California surreal. I began by bidding adieu to my girls and then spending a quick night with Anna and hearing about the return of her bad skin cancer that requires yet another surgery in about a week, and I won’t be here for her. Then up to Grass Valley to see those friends, which was still good even though I knew the sacred time with my children was over. Then the good fortune to see the man who is unintentionally drawing my love interest, who was in fine fettle and happy to see me (for a change). A quiet night and two days with him, culminating in his almost deciding to come with me to Mexico for a few days. Then came my breaking. First, not wanting to leave him. Then calls from my younger daughter that her schedule meant I’d see her for only minutes before I leave for 6 to 8 months. New Year’s party with too many people who were not those my heart was crying for. Just minutes with Molly as I drove her back to her boyfriend’s house, and stroked her head and neck as I drove. Last minute discovery of a place to spend last night: Bul, who is cuddly, but it was Milt I wanted to cuddle. Some phone-called farewells from driveways of people who weren’t home. Hard to be unrooted in a place that is supposed to be home. Finally reached Pat who let me come to her house to unpack and repack and charge batteries, etc. Another “heart’ visit; I care deeply about her and Jen. I could handle only certain people in this mood of fear and depression, and thus didn’t call some I should have. Tea and lying on sofas with Pat & Jen, and discussion of Pat’s brand new diagnosis of diabetes. My eyes teared and my chin puckered. She left and I hung for a while longer. Her nasty-ass dog bit me and I yelled at it. Ran to do final errands — banking, mail stuff — and then to my house where one of the renters and their illegal cat awaited me. I am not happy. I didn’t say a word. There was a giant bag of mail for me that had accumulated over the past months, including a jury summons for two months ago. Christ.

Bul helped me get my car’s battery charger working so it’ll be on trickle while I’m gone.

Airport lines were long and as before when I’ve come south of the border, most of my fellow passengers and the departure announcements are Spanish. My Spanish couldn’t keep up.

Among my final errands was a stop to the deli to buy a sandwich. The woman was a Spanish-speaker and I asked where she was from. She’s Colombian, here initially as an asylee with her children and husband. I told her I was about to go to Mexico and was feeling the pain of separation — and in my case my departure is voluntary.

I am still in the Mexico City airport and it’s now 5:15 pm. I’m really thirsty but I have no Mexican money and of course I can’t drink the water. When I got off the plane I was thoroughly confused. I am lucky in that I can understand the occasional word of the language, but not enough to know what flight is where. I’ve tried to ask for help a few times in Spanish, communicating through the occasional word but mostly by pointing at my ticket and gates and other prompts. Several people speak enough English to help me muddle through. Finally found my way to the gate where I’ll wait for 1.5 hours.

Update: The clock on the wall was wrong. The plane left an hour earlier than it was meant to according to that measure. Luckily I hadn’t strayed, and boarded with the others!

One last note: Nightmares about teaching children: we’re in a wilderness in the dark and I’m responsible for their safety. First problems involve a child with behavior issues: a disorder that makes her violent and sneaky about it. A high-level disorder, not teacher-fare, but I had to deal with it, trying to keep her under control without whalloping her, and comforting those she had been torturing. Then some sort of car accident where one of my children ran out in traffic under my watch. Then a vat of some sort of battery acid into which a child fell and was grossly disfigured. He was just about to die as I stood by, when I awoke in Bul’s bed.

I am really depressed. I wish I wasn’t here. I don’t understand why I do these things: why I think it will be fun to go somewhere you can’t communicate with others, where you’re on the outside of everything, where nothing is familiar around you. I have a head ache and I’m painfully tired. I just want to go home to my babies and my friends. Better yet, I want them to come to me. I do love travel and meeting new people and seeing new places. I’m not enjoying being alone. Sometimes I do. I have a new fear of getting sick here, where I have no one to help me. Which is probably not true: if I were sick, people would help. But it would be like when I was in the hospital last year: I was getting help but of dubious quality and I was alone and afraid and didn’t understand why I felt as sick as I did or what would happen next. A woman on my flight was making an emergency trip to see her aunt who had been studying language here and suddenly came down with an intestinal blockage and was in the ICU, with no one to help advise her. I’m afraid of that, particularly since being sick in Tibet and then after I came home and had surgery.

I love the voices of the little children and wish I knew how to talk to them. I should get out my teaching supplies — the rods — and see if we can play with them together.

January 10, en route to Chiapas

Busy week in Oaxaca, studying and exploring. I’m amazed at how different Mexican Spanish and culture are from Guatemalan. For example, “chaqueta” in Guatemala means “jacket.” In Guatemala it means male masturbacion. I learned the hard way, so to speak.

In common is the warmth of both people, and an openness to us that we don’t have for them in our country.

I’ve had many language-learning experiences but noticed more about the process during my weeks of studies here. Important to learning were the enthusiasm and spirit of the teacher — lots of energy — her willingness to individualize and extemporaneize our classroom activities, her sharp and observant mind made plain in some questions she asked about a reading, ones that cut through the skin and to the heart, and that tied it to our experience and to her experience as a Mexican.

In my own learning I was interested to observe several things:

Despite my devout desire to learn Spanish, I didn’t find time to study at home, or to complete homework.

Also despite this desire, my occasional resistance to going to class. That came from mental exhaustion and emotional depletion, feeling as I did that I was learning less as the days passed. What had come easily to me in the first day or two had left me entirely. Sometimes the words — ones I actually know — vanished. Other times they would thread together loosely in my head, but when I went to speak them, they wouldn’t come out. Kim and I talked about the idea of retraining your muscles to speak a different language. And after speaking Spanish for a while, it was hard to get my mouth to say some English words.

I had the same experience I always do, during the first few days of being in a new country, particularly when I’m learning the language, of having my brain flood with random floating words, particularly at bedtime: delgado, estuvieron, de vez en cuando, he estu—. I can’t turn it off. I want to get up and look up what they words mean, because often they’re ones I’ve heard but don’t even know I’ve heard, and other times they’re ones I know but can’t remember. Strange verb tenses are particularly pesky. Then there are the nightmares that have been coming almost every night once I do get to sleep — daughters in danger, houses burning, children drowning — so that when I awake, the last thing I want to do is hear more Spanish. I found myself thinking, “I wish they wouldn’t speak so much damned Spanish here.”

I think it’s been of supremely high value to have spent a week here before teaching. The studying has been illuminating. I should know now that a student’s lack of completion of work does not necessarily indicate disinterest, but reality. I should understand the intense and emotionally deep frustration of learning and feeling like you’re not. On the specific cultural level, I think it’s important for me to know a little of the language and culture of my students. I realize that in many situations that’s not possible. But here, it will be good to have a sense of their syntax and intonation and, possibly more importantly, a glimpse (however small) into their spirit as a culture. I’ve found the people I’ve met to be exceptionally warm and welcoming, and open. Those I met love to laugh and love jokes and community and family. Men love women, and treat even older ones like me with a certain kind of male/female attention that I find gratifying. They love to flirt. Many, of course, are deeply religious. The younger generation is breaking somewhat from the tradition of its parents. Some live with their novios/as. Some are contemptuous of the church. I didn’t know those things. I did know about the Mexican timetable and saw it amply in action. In many ways I think their relaxed attitude and their willingness to “waste” time yacking is very healthy. In other ways I will find it frustrating, since I won’t hold class for people who are late. I’ll need to work around that. Ideas I had a few weeks ago are to start each class with something fun and unexpected that people won’t want to miss, and yet to make sure it’s not crucial to the rest of the class. I’ll also need not to take it personally or to get frustrated by it, which I suspect will be much easier said than done.

On the plane just now I read a few pages of Penny Ur’s Teaching Listening Comprehension and have been struck by how I identify at the moment with what she says about the challenges of learning to listen to a new language. She writes about how a learner can be in an environment where they understand little of what’s being said — common for me, and I tend to withdraw — but that in fact they are able to  know a lot anyway: about the register and mood and relationship between speakers. If I can reassure my students that even if that’s all they’re getting, that’s a start.

She writes a lot about the gaps in comprehension — due to “noise,” colloquialisms, collocations, and other words we don’t know — that she says cause “a gap… which is filled… by a meaningless buzz.” Yes, this is familiar. As is the problem of falling behind when I try to fill the gap, as the conversation careens ahead. She writes also about fatigue. In any class or conversation more than a few minutes, my mind starts to fade. She says it’s common, in fact, for people to comprehend the start of conversations the best, and then drop in understanding. It’s both because our brains get tired and, in my case, I get discouraged, and also I get so busy filling the gaps that I miss what comes next, and by the time I catch up I feel so far behind that I don’t even care any more.

A few other things she identifies about learners that I experienced myself: we have a need, not present in our first language, to try to understand every word of what’s being said. We don’t feel as though we’re getting it otherwise. Yet in our native language, we often block out unnecessary words. Students need to learn to skim for gist and overlook details, and to know that’s not only acceptable but normal. “Foreign language-learners run into a psychological problem: they have a kind of compulsion to understand everything… He assumes that successful comprehension is total comprehension.” And that’s not true, she says. She also talks about the problem of analyzing the words in isolation rather than rising up to the level of context. We need to teach students how they can listen for cues as to when they can “safely switch off”: that its, how to make the transition from intensive to extensive listening.

That’s very interesting to me, because even though we’ve studied the idea of intensive v. extensive listening, and listening for gist v. listening for detail, I didn’t realize that my sense of urgency to understand everything is not only common but something we can work with as teachers, to free students to dive into the language in a more holistic manner.

The ride’s getting bumpy so I should stop for now. It’s been really great to have Sarah and Kim around, and to hear their ideas about teaching and culture. And talking to Enrique has been equally enlightening. His idea of teaching language as a piece of the culture of Oaxaca has been fascinating, and certainly enriched my learning. While I’m really grateful to both Enrique and the lovely Araceli for their excellent and patient teaching, I think I’m most appreciative of their spirit and warmth, and their willingness to open up about their personal lives to help me understand their culture. I don’t know when and to what extent that’s appropriate. It was in the setting, but will it be with my students? I know that I won’t be as open as Enrique, who talked about depression, or Araceli, who talked about her abusive father — all revealed with lightness and humor, amazingly.