Teachers like Botox, too

And so year one teaching in Madrid has ended.  I covered some topics that were important to me on here, although I didn’t write about my experiences in the school nearly as much as I’d planned.  Luckily I’ll be there next year, too!

Below are some rambling thoughts about this year, and some things I’m looking forward to or thinking about regarding the year to come.  You’ll find that most are complaints, and I’m afraid that simply reflects the reality that I’ve found to be the Spanish public education system and especially my own school, but I will try to include good things, too:

I can say that I ended up blown away by the differences between the Spanish public school system, especially my school in particular, and the American school system in which I was raised.  I definitely did not expect to see so many glaring differences.  Whenever I talk to people about this I always preface what I’m saying by acknowledging that there are plenty of terrible schools in the U.S., and there are plenty of districts, particularly in inner cities and areas with large numbers of immigrants, that do not handle public education very well.  Naturally I can only speak from my own experiences, but lots of people I know come from education systems similar, at least in their structure, to my own.

I recall many of my teachers spending long hours at home plannning activities, making things, grading things.  I recall many of my teachers getting to school well before the kids, and it was normal to drive by my school in the evening and still see some cars in the parking lot or some lights on while a teacher was still working on something.  There are always exceptions, but I can’t say the same for Madrid.  Generally, teachers seem to arrive with the kids and leave with them whenever possible, unless they have a meeting with parents.  If the parents decide to show up…  Most lesson planning seems to be done during the rare free hour during the day, which doesn’t allow for much in the way of long-term activity planning or larger-scale, more complex projects.

I haven’t come across an elementary school that does a yearbook!

Classy tools and morons

Why don’t you like Sarah Palin?  People are ALWAYS asking me this.  (Not really.)  There are lots of reasons, but this thing with David Letterman has really awakened the semi-dormant disgust that I felt toward her all during the latter end of the presidential campaign.  Last night, I saw this (I saw it on Huffington Post, but can’t seem to embed from there):

First of all there’s a semantics issue: Letterman did not call her slutty.  He referred to her look.  Not the same thing.

Anyway here in Madrid I don’t watch our 24-hour news channels, and until I watched this I had no idea who Contessa Brewer was, but I might kind of like her, and I know I like her more than Campbell Brown, who kind of gets on my nerves because she’s alright but I don’t understand why everyone loves her so much.  (Although I was listening to a Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! from winter on my iTunes last night and she was the celebrity guest and I have to say that I have a little more respect for her now.)  This Ziegler douche clearly needs a swift kick in the nuts, but I’m not sure it would be worth the trouble.

So then this morning Huffington brought me this:

I wish Letterman hadn’t been so nice, but I SUPPOSE if he REALLY wants people to understand that he doesn’t think raping 14-year-old girls is funny, then it’s okay.  That aside, there are two things about this that really piss me off, and that show Sarah Palin as the vacuous carcass of ridiculousness that I believe her to be.

First: Ziegler went for the sexism angle when Brewer addressed the “slutty” thing and he was all, ‘I dunno, you’re the female, you tell me!’  Look, I would never dare say that there is no sexism in the media, but not every single thing ever said about a female politician is sexist, and just because the word “slutty” is used does not make the statement inherently sexist.  If comedians and entertainers and journalists can endlessly poke fun at Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer and every one else whose personal shenanigans get brought into the spotlight, then Sarah Palin is fair game.  She wants to be a politician, and she clearly likes the attention, so she can’t be okay with all the other politicians and public figures getting made fun of and then whine when it happens to her.  And if we can all happily make fun of Phil Spector’s terrifying face/hairpieces and Michael Jackson’s disconcerting physical appearance, and Donald Trump’s hair, and Angelina Jolie’s lips, and Pamela Anderson’s boobs, and Larry King’s age, and if we can obsess over what Michelle Obama is wearing every second of the day, then we can make fun of Sarah Palin’s clothes.  Either we’re equal, or we’re not.  Saying that Palin looks like a slutty flight attendant/librarian/teacher/secretary/etc. is not sexist, it’s reality.

Second, and this is the worst: Have we been gossiping about Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter since September?  No.  I don’t even know what that kid’s name is.  The media frenzy has always been over Bristol.  Obviously.  (And who, as Letterman pointed out, WAS knocked up and is now an adult.)  No one in their right mind would ever think that in those jokes Letterman was poking fun at any of Palin’s children other than Bristol.  What does that mean?  It means that the only people bringing up the sex life of her 14-year-old daughter are Sarah and Todd Palin.  No one else.  Now that’s good parenting, good politics, and high class.

UPDATE:

I hate that I’m even paying attention to this, but Sarah Palin went on the Today Show this morning to talk about this “feud”.  Turn the volume down if you’re sensitive to shrill:

To be fair, the first in this post above didn’t play the A-Rod joke, and I hadn’t realized that it was Palin’s younger daughter at the game with her .  (But they look really, really similar, and if I’d seen photos in the paper I probably would have assumed it was Bristol since she’s the one in all the tabloids, and it wouldn’t surprise me if others mistook her also.)   And maybe the joke was in poor taste, as Letterman has readily said.  But do you really think that the joke was making fun of Willow Palin?  Is it fair to decide that Letterman thought statutory rape is funny?  I admit that I can’t argue about this one much more because, while I can understand how some might think it crossed the line, I’m a young woman and I simply didn’t find it offensive — in the slightest.  It seems to me that the butts were: Alex Rodriguez, obviously; Bristol Palin, obviously, because she DID get knocked up as a teenager and, because teen pregnancy is generally something that is frowned upon in our culture, we make fun of it, regardless of how tasteful that is; Sarah Palin, because she and her husband exude a certain trashiness while attacking others for having a lack of class, and she would oppose an abortion even if her daughter were raped and she’s a fervent supporter of abstinence-only sex education and was so before her teenage daughter got knocked up.

Her complaints about the “slutty flight attendant” thing hold no water whatsoever.  Putting the word “slutty” before a profession doesn’t necessarily say anything about the profession itself.  Saying she looks like a slutty flight attendant, which she frequently does, just means that she looks like a flight attendant who is slutty.  It would be more insulting to flight attendants if we said that they looked like Sarah Palin, or that Sarah Palin just looked like a flight attendant, because THAT would imply that flight attendants look slutty.  The fact that “slutty” is put before something means we’re qualifying that thing, which we wouldn’t need to do if we felt that all flight attendants were slutty.  We don’t say that a scantily clad woman in cheap thigh-high boots looks like a slutty hooker, we just use “hooker” because, well, duh.

Ultimately, even if you do decide that Letterman’s joke really was inappropriate, doesn’t Palin’s comment about keeping her daughter away from Letterman void her complaints?  Not only did she initially imply that Letterman might be some sort of pedophile, Matt Lauer immediately gave her the chance to clarify and she didn’t budge.

Okay, hopefully this is the end, unless Letterman needs to defend himself which would be understandable.  But otherwise, please can Sarah Palin just evaporate or something now?  I’m embarrassed to have her speaking out on behalf of my gender.

Forcing creativity

Early in the year I noticed something devastating, something pervasive throughout my classes and my school: A complete and depressing lack of imagination and creativity.  In kids under the age of 12.  Which, if I’m not mistaken, isn’t that supposed to be the time when you have the wildest imagination?  I mentioned it in an earlier post, after discovering when I asked my third-graders what they wanted to be when they grew up, that no one had any interesting ideas.  Actually, they didn’t seem to have any ideas at all.

I’ve seen this manifested in other ways throughout the school year.  I also mentioned in the other post that my kids lack almost any autonomy whatsoever, in part because arbitrary rules are enforced in places like art class, and they are reprimanded for drawing a cloud the wrong shape or for drawing a landscape that doesn’t totally look like a real landscape.  They have art teachers that tell them what color to use, to not draw the line like that but like this, to make the circle rounder (more round?), and the worst of all, finish or correct projects themselves if it’s not to their liking.  (Franco died nearly 35 years ago; clearly these people were born in the wrong decade.  If this intrigues you, you might like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the oppressive artistic environment of Communist Czechoslovakia is described through the experiences of one of the characters.)  Naturally, this also stifles the students’ creativity; they are prevented from using their imagination, until the imaginative parts of their brains are, I imagine (ha), dry and atrophied.  With cobwebs and tumbleweeds.  And echoes.

But of course the schools are only partly to blame.  In fact, I think in this case most of the blame is better placed elsewhere.  Because I do have a few kids with more active imaginations, and these children seem to have some things in common: They get more creative/intellectual/emotional stimulation at home, and/or they like to read.  I have one student who, despite being pesada, always blurting out unfunny tonterías in class, is provided with far more reading materials and exposure to culture than her peers.  Her annoying comments in class drive me up the wall, but I can’t say she’s not creative with them.  (She’s also Spanish, which doesn’t necessarily matter, but given the ethnic makeup of the public schools here, it could also be significant.)  I have another student, with a really crappy home life that I wish I could get him out of, who is malnourished on so many levels at home, yet loves to read and is more concerned with the world and with ultimate truth than most kids his age from any country.  (If it turns out to matter: He is half-Spanish and half-Moroccan.)

Leave me starstruck

There are people who become starstruck at the sight of any famous person.  I might expect to feel a disorienting sense of “Baah, is this really happening?”  but my brain synapses seem to reserve being starstruck for those who I really love and admire, have been following since I was a child, or just for some reason awaken a sense of awe in me.  Actually, out of the small handful of times I’ve seen someone famous (Richard Karn at Arborland when I was a kid –my mom was very excited about that one; saw Judd Nelson two days in a row in L.A. with Ashley and the second time he flipped us the bird for no apparent reason, which first offended us and then we realized that it was awesome; obviously Jeff Daniels at the Cube, which is amazing but normal if you’re in the Ann Arbor area; Monte Nagler at Briarwood Mall, which did actually bring me close to awe; the guy who played Bania on Seinfeld at a restaurant in L.A.; President Palmer in L.A. and he said something to me and Margie about smiling or being serious or something, and this may have meant more to me if at that time I’d been watching 24; also there was this guy; walked right past Hope Davis and Gwyneth Paltrow while they were shooting Proof in Chicago –Hayley stopped with her eyes wide open in the middle of the street; Ethan Hawke at a book signing in middle school –he liked my name, which maybe is a compliment but maybe not anything to write home about because at the time he was married to a woman named Uma; just the other day at Corte Inglés we were at the checkout right next to Blanca Portillo, which was pretty sweet and she’s totally normal; when I was a kid I went to a book signing and met Ray Bradbury with my mom and I think he said something to her about how she should use a different pen, but this was not as exciting to me because I was young and not the science fiction fanatic that my parents are; this is all that occurs to me right now), while they’ve definitely been cause for curiosity and excitement and I will definitely go peek if someone tells me there’s a celebrity around the corner, so far I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who’s left me really, really starstruck.  Like, struck with enough awe that my eyes might get a little wide and my jaw might drop a little and I might fumble over my words a little and I might gush uncontrollably.  Here’s who would leave me starstruck –I’m including living people only– and if you want jump on board and tell me who would leave you starstruck, go ahead…

• George Winston (most of you probably don’t know who he is, but I’ve been listening to him since I was a baby and I love him absolutely and forever and I would probably be speechless for a few seconds if I met him)
• John Cleese
• Tina Fey
• Christian Bale
• Bob Harper
• Rowan Atkinson
• Hugh Laurie
• Stephen Fry
• Emily Deschanel (especially if she were with David Boreanaz or with the entire cast of Bones, except then I’d be disappointed if they were just being themselves and not completely in character )
• Christopher Walken
• Rachel McAdams
• Morgan Freeman
• Jon Hamm 
  

  Don Draper (Jon Hamm)

There are probably more.  I’ll add them as I think of them.  Because this is obviously a really deep and significant post that needs constant updating.

There are lots of Africans in Spain but no Jews, don’t let anyone fool you

Overt racism and ethnocentrism are still pervasive in Spain, especially when you compare the country to some of its European neighbors.  The country is still building itself back up since the relatively recent end of Franco’s dictatorship, and is understandably behind the rest of Western Europe in many respects.  It’s common to hear Spaniards young and old —and Spaniards who may otherwise seem quite progressive— complain about the blacks and the Africans and the Latin Americans and the Chinese and the Gypsies and assure you that there are NO Jews in Spain, goddammit.  It’s normal here for police to randomly harass an African or Latin American immigrant, as I’ve talked about in a previous post, demanding their documentation.  (It’s not always misguided, as in certain areas there are large groups of illegal immigrants that do engage in illegal activity, but the way that they get harassed when they are not doing anything suspicious is the kind of thing that sparks lots outrage in the U.S.)

Spain intercepts fishing boat with 229 African migrants on board (The Guardian)

Additionally, here in Madrid there are large numbers of African immigrants, many of whom are illegal.  A normal day downtown finds them lined up on the streets with their sheets spread out to display their various goods, from watches to jewelry to handbags to sunglasses to DVDs and CDs.  Some of these products are fake, others are real and probably stolen, all of the DVDs and CDs appear to be bootlegged.  The salesmen are crafty with their sheets: strings are attached to the corners so that when police are nearby they just pull, and up comes the sheet in the form of a sack, securing all of their goods and allowing them a quick getaway.  They always have a lookout.  I’ve never been able to tell if the lookout communicates by voice or by cell phone, but they are alert and they are fast.  A normal day downtown will also find them running in large packs, usually smiling and laughing, and often with some police officers trailing behind them, eating their dust.  Only once have I ever seen one get caught by a cop, and the moment was fleeting.  The man was slick, and quickly left his bag of goods and slithered out of his jacket and darted off shirtless, leaving the police officer with nothing but a parting gift.  The cop puffed up his chest as he walked away with the goods, but in his smile I couldn’t tell if he was happy with how things went or embarrassed that the man got away from him.  Maybe both.  Passersby examined the jacket on the ground like some sort of specimen in a museum.

The thing is, everyone knows the spots where the salesmen usually are, and if the cops really wanted to arrest all of them they could easily do it.  It almost seems that their job is more to shepherd than to catch.  They just herd them around downtown here and there, looking the other way as long as they don’t stay in the same spot for too long, and occasionally nabbing one to remind us that they’re doing their job.  (Remember that this is just one type of situation in downtown Madrid.  Immigration and illegal immigration are increasing rapidly in Spain, especially Southern Spain.  Problems arise and plenty of people are detained and deported on a regular basis.)

Funny Searches

Here are some more funny searches that lead people to my site, along with my guesses on who they might be:

• “catchy title for september massacre” (someone plotting something and his future fame along with it?)
• “girls update” (how simple and ambiguous, it’s almost poetry…  a feminist existentialist?  A horny male existentialist?)
• “slutty middle school” (a horny middle school searching for architectural porn?)
• “youtube-lesbian kombat legs” (um… ?  I searched this and didn’t find anything that seemed to really match the topic.  Given the spelling, the most common results had to do with Mortal Kombat.  If anyone could tell me what they might have been looking for, please let me know.)
• “recent creepy things in the news” (my mother?)
• “how to deal with lesbians” (hahahahaha)

Secular Right: A Secular Case Against Gay Marriage?

Andrew Sullivan led me to a post on Secular Right by John Derbyshire attempting to lay out a a secular argument against gay marriage.  I was thinking of all these things I wanted to write in response, but was surprised to see that several people had already put many of my thoughts into words, so I recommend you browse their more thorough comments.  Meanwhile, here are the things that get me the most in Derbyshire’s arguments (bold words are my doing):  

There really is a slippery slope here. Once marriage has been redefined to include homosexual pairings, what grounds will there be to oppose futher redefinition — to encompass people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team? Are all private contractual relations for cohabitation to be rendered equal, or are some to be privileged over others, as has been customary in all times and places? If the latter, what is wrong with heterosexual pairing as the privileged status, sanctified as it is by custom and popular feeling?

Seriously?  Ponies and sisters?  Are people still trying to legitimately use that argument?  Incest and marrying animals?  Really?  While Derbyshire alludes to having had gay folk in his neighborhood growing up and going to school with some, does he actually know any gay people?  Several SR readers made a good point: that a major flaw in Derbyshire’s argument is that he takes for granted the “always” nature of marriage, which is a social construct and has gone through both creation and dramatic changes during human civilization, and which still enjoys an abundance of different interpretations in various cultures around the world.  A Daily Dish reader said it perfectly: “I also love the casual assertion that ‘marriage is by nature the union of a man and woman,’ as if marriage is some sort of naturally occurring phenomenon like evaporation or mitosis.“

Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us. It has been present always and everywhere, if only minimally (and unfairly — there has always been a double standard here) in disdain for “the man who plays the part of a woman.”  There has never, anywhere, at any level of civilization, been a society that approved egalitarian (i.e. same age, same status) homosexual bonding. This tells us something about human nature — something it might be wisest (and would certainly be conservative-est) to leave alone.

I was raised in a town with a substantial openly gay population, we have gay family friends, I went to schools with openly gay and bisexual classmates and had classmates with gay parents, my parents are not homophobic.  There was never a time growing up where I wondered if homosexuality was weird or unnatural or simply a lifestyle choice, nor was there ever a time growing up where it made me uncomfortable.  I am wired not to be attracted to other women, but that doesn’t mean that I am wired to disapprove of or be disgusted by homosexuality.  He’s also taking a big leap with regard to what is normal in every culture.  It’s true that the more dominant cultures in the world seem to have similar views and the tendency to oppress homosexuals, but there are myriad small cultures all over the world that have differing views on gender, virginity, premarital sex, and sexuality in general.  

Also, so, what, that makes it okay?  Don’t we tout ourselves for being all highly evolved and intelligent and with a conscience?  Why should this be the time to decide to just let our “nature” take its course and deny our friends and family their deserved happiness?  And as astute commenter Joe said, Derbyshire mysteriously manages to ignore the fact that “homosexuality is also part of human nature, as well as many other species’ natures.”

If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in.

Like several readers who commented on the post, I understand his words (although it took me a while because, what?) but don’t really see where he’s trying to go with this.  And he says that if we all had high IQs that we might have a society that’s totally cool with gay marriage, so (1) is he saying he has a low IQ?  (2) Doesn’t that kind of imply that gay people and gay-friendly people are smarter than everyone else and therefore SHOULD get married and raise babies to make the world a better place??  And anyway, as commenter Dave says, “can’t that institution just be ‘marriage’? What need is there to refine it to ‘heterosexual marriage’?”

Let people live and love as they want.

Right…  I’m sorry, how is this a valid argument against gay marriage?  Sometimes when I listen to these people I feel like I’m playing that game where one person has a phrase but they have it in different words and the other person knows what the real phrase is, and the person keeps saying the slightly different words that sound EXACTLY the same but they still don’t get it, and you’re just sitting there like, “YES.  DON’T YOU HEAR YOURSELF?  YOU’RE SAYING IT.  WHY DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF YOUR OWN MOUTH.”  (Please, if anyone, like Hayley, could remind me what the game is called, let me know because now it’s driving me crazy.)  (UPDATE: Thanks to my savior/friend Meg, who has told me that the game I’m talking about is Mad Gab.  You should all play it.  I’ve discovered that you can play it online here.)

Human nature is what it is, though, and no-one of a conservative outlook can take lightly an attempt to carry out a radical overhaul of a key human institution, in a direction pointed directly at widespread (though I think normally mild) human emotions of disdain and disgust.

Again, a little presumptuous with the whole ‘marriage has always been the same since forever’ thing.  As commenter Torrentprime pointed out, plenty of other past shifts in marriage in Western culture, like the shift from marriage for dowry or property or convenience to the choice of marriage for love, amounted to more sweeping changes to the practice as we know it than allowing same-sex couples to get married — nothing about the vow of commitment, fidelity, and love changes by allowing same-sex couples in on it.  Whether their arguments are secular or not, these odd assumptions keep coming from people like Miss California Carrie Prejean and her new sponsor, the National Organization for Marriage, who are “just here to protect marriage … who respect marriages and people who support it.”  The NOM campaign complains that their “freedom will be taken away.”  Gay marriage will, apparently, literally take away their freedom.  I’m not sure what they actually think gays want to do to marriage.  Because the ‘marriage is for babies’ argument obviously doesn’t hold.  People who “hold marriage dear to [their] heart”, like Miss California, should be happy that so many people want to celebrate love and family and commitment by getting married. They want to be able to BE MARRIED like the rest of us can BE MARRIED.

Americans discover Tunisia, cont’d

In response to this post, a reader writes:

I’ve been to several Muslim countries and have warm receptions in each. I found your site b/c I want to travel to Tunisia next. I do find it sad, and a bit weak that you have a ‘well practiced Canadian mode’ because I think it’s important to be proud of your nationality and by showing people that we Americans are not stereotypical jerks. By lying about where you are from, you are strengthing the stereotypes.

To an extent, my story was hyperbole, as so far in my travels and during my stints in Spain, I’ve never said I was from Canada and I’ve never been in a situation where I thought I might have to, and I think it’s quite possible that I never will.  Also, perhaps I should have qualified what I meant by “anti-american sentiment”.  I’m not referring to just negative attitudes or the sneer that might appear when someone finds out where I’m from (because that I’ve experienced).  I’m referring to the bellicose kind, any situation where I would actually feel that my safety was in jeopardy, especially if I were confronted with a group rather than just one person, and particularly since I am a woman.  (And quite small.)

Thanks to my mom for sending me this Bizarro edition!

As I don’t know the reader, I wonder if it wouldn’t boil down to a fundamental difference in views on pride, nationality, and patriotism.  While I love where I’m from and in some ways I feel I’m lucky to be from there, historically I’ve not been enthusiastically proud of my country (that has started to change since the 2008 election), nor have I tended to curse it for being a terrible place.  I’m not someone who has always felt closely tied to my American nationality, as so many of us came from somewhere else relatively recently — on my mom’s side I’m only the third generation born in the U.S. — and in many ways I believe that being American is more a way of life and a system of political beliefs rather than a nationality.  And I don’t think I can say that I’ve ever been a super-patriot.  Actually I’m an expatriate, which, while I wouldn’t agree with them, some Americans equate with being anti-American.  There are definitely situations in which I would be willing to die for my country, but more so because that implies many lives rather than caring specifically about American lives, and there are lots of others where I can tell you that I don’t love being an American so much that I wouldn’t pretend to be from somewhere else if it meant saving a life…  The fact that I’ve even seriously thought about my Canada idea — and the fact that I’m not the only American I know who has one — says much more than the idea itself.

I do believe it’s good, when abroad, to try to represent your country and your country’s people as best you can.  In fact, it’s my job.  My gig here with the Spanish government is twofold: to help the students and teachers learn English and to be a cultural ambassador.  And while I understand that my reader doesn’t like the idea of hiding one’s nationality, I have difficulty seeing how not showing pride in being American, if confronted with anti-American hostility, would perpetuate our stereotypes.  The worst of our  stereotypes say that we’re arrogant, gluttonous, uneducated imperialists, not spineless, self-loathing apologists.  I can’t say if a foreign America-hater would consider it weak or not, but I can’t imagine it playing worse than an American tourist displaying pride in his or her nationality when it would be dangerous or inappropriate to do so, or being aloof and boastful without regard to the environment. Indeed, I do not agree that it’s important to be proud of your nationality.  I think it’s ideal to be able to be proud of your nationality, but saying it’s important to be proud of it is presuming an inherent obligation to your nationality and country, and to a fault. 

Still, I’ve been pondering my reader’s comments and his/her words did sting.  There have been times, while contemplating lying about where I’m from, when I have felt the guilt of a  perfidious expat betraying who I am.  But I’m not convinced that lying about your country of birth can be likened to recanting your religious faith or something in which you fiercely believe in the face of persecution…  Am I wrong?  Right?  Thoughts?

Here — enjoy another one of my pictures from Tunisia! 

Recent creepy/amusing/intriguing searches

I was excited to discover upon switching my blog over here a while back that in Blog Stats you can see lists of search engine topics people enter that lead them to your blog.  Only recently, however, did I start paying any attention to them, and the amusement that has ensued has had me scouring the archives to see all the wacky and strange things that bring people to my site.  Of all the things I write about, so far among my most visited posts are ones that deal with popularity and mean girls, punishment, and fashion.  (Every day there are several if not dozens of searches for “mean girls” that bring people to my site.)  Here’s are some of the “best” searches so far, along with my guesses on who could be the searchers — and feel free to send me your guesses:

• “middle school sluts” (dirty old pervert; horny middle-school pervert; middle-school girl either considering becoming a slut or pondering her slutty schoolmates)
• “bad girls high school” (see above)
• “women getting sluttier” (see above above, except adults)
• “exposed girls” (obvious, and I’m not sure yet how I feel about these searches leading people to my blog…I’ll let you know when I decide)
• “overalls fashionable” (someone wanting to know if they are; someone who delights in oxymora; someone who delights in oxymora and is possibly a native Spanish-speaker)
• “dinosaurs+taping+thumbs” (surely someone who knows about this; someone I might want to be friends with)
• “social hierarchy posers tools” (trying to figure out where they are in the pyramid?)
• “legs pre teen girls” (dirty old pervert; pre-teen girl experiencing self-esteem issues)
• I’m not actually putting this one down but it was a URL and it led to a rape-fantasy site (yikes)
• “what was the name of the book chaza gave” (assuming they were referring to Chávez giving Obama a book, someone who should read more)
• “emo girl at hotel” (?)
• “ways of hanging out with the populars” (obvious; or someone doing research; the sad part is that I searched that to see what popped up and the first result was a forum where a girl was saying that her mom wanted her to be popular and tried to get her to hang out with the popular crowd…moms like that should be punched in the ovaries)
• “raped girls video free” (AAGGHH)

More as I get them.

¡Ni una sonrisa! Madrid’s police force is insane.

We went on a very strange field trip yesterday.

It got off to a rough start, after our administrators had told us to take our thirty-one kids to the busy plaza by our school to wait for the bus.  It was cold outside.  The kids are rowdy.  After about twenty minutes, we called the school, and the vice principal said she’d call us back.  A few minutes later the bus arrived, the driver saying he’d been waiting outside the front door of the school for half an hour.

Off we went to a police station on the outskirts of the city.  The main goal of the excursion was for the kids to learn about what the police to do help and protect them, a supplement to the educación vial sessions they had earlier in the year where cops came to the school and taught the kids about traffic lights and looking both ways.  Not as fun when you’re not in Safety Town and don’t have movies narrated by Jiminy Cricket.

The cop running the show seemed energetic and friendly.  We all filed into a cold, concrete room and our kids took up the first few rows, waiting for some kids from another school to arrive, and he explained that anyone who doesn’t want to listen to him could go wait on the bus.  Fair enough.  Establishing authority, discipline, and I don’t blame him because our kids need it.  But then the other students — interesting, new, different, fascinating children from another school — come in, something that will obviously catch the attention of a third-grader, and our kids turned their heads to examine the newcomers.  The cop, let’s call him Franco, goes into this whole spiel about how he doesn’t want to see a single kid turn their head around, not once.  And when he starts the PowerPoint presentation and does his narration, they are not to look at him while he talks, ONLY the screen, and NOTHING else and he doesn’t want to see ANY heads turning while the screen is on.  (And I can assure you that for all the technology that the Madrid police force touts, PowerPoint is not their strong suit and the kids would not have missed out on anything by just looking at the floor the whole time.)