Maestra

Tomorrow is the last day of August. I have not written this entire month. It's not that I've disappeared; it's that life beyond the computer world has been hurtling me full-force through the past weeks, and I hardly have time to breathe, much less blog. I will not even attempt to catch up on everything that's been happening this past month, but I will start with a little glimpse of the biggest change tonight and take it from there.

I am a teacher. A "real" one. Not a teaching assistant. Not a student teacher. Not a volunteer professor of English in Cambodia. Not a para. A real live maestra de español. Since I last wrote, my classroom went from looking like this:


to this:


And voilà--I am a teacher. A sleep-deprived, overwhelmed, exhausted, and utterly inspired teacher. With 23 classes and nearly 600 students. And it is past my bedtime. Again. Hasta la próxima, pues.

Photo update

It's been a jam-packed July filled with adventures, and I've finally uploaded a bunch of the photos. Find them here in the "July" and "Brought to you by Greyhound" albums. Tomorrow I'm off to the East again for family and a wedding, so the next update may be a long time coming. Until then!

It's official!

As you may already know, I will be starting a new job as a Spanish teacher in just under a month. It's the same job that I interviewed for way back in March, the one that was offered to me the next day, taken away a week later, and finally given back to me in May. Needless to say, after the first round of making happy phone calls and then having to tell people that I didn't actually have a job after all, I was a little more hesitant to publicize this time around. I told myself I wasn't allowed to get too comfortable until I had a signed contract in hand. And now, as of this afternoon, I finally have it. Along with my brand-new English teaching license that came in the mail today after all my coursework and exams were approved. These Colorado licenses begin, "Be it known..." Yes. So be it known that Erin officially has a teaching job, and a third endorsement on her license, and her own classroom, and 600 K-5 students to teach in just a few short weeks. And she's really excited about it. In case you couldn't tell.

Transubstantiation

I baked the bread for communion this morning, and after punching down the dough (my very favorite part) and leaving it to rise a second time, I realized: the Body of Christ really does rise again.

Microcosm

I got caught in a rainstorm yesterday as I was exploring downtown Denver. It started out with the familiar wind and threatening clouds, and in practically no time, the slow, fat drops had turned into a downpour. I considered braving the elements for the 20-minute walk to my bike and the 30-minute bike ride home until a bolt of lightning seared itself onto my eyeballs and chased me under the nearest shelter, which happened to be the ampitheater at the Civic Center park.

Quite a crowd had already gathered between the Greek columns, trying to avoid the rain gusting in from either side, a real microcosm of the Denver that was not at work at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. I stood there, watching the storm and the random conglomeration of people it blew in, and getting rather wet until a white guy with a fauxhawk and a joint and dozens of tattoos informed me that I was welcome to stand in the shelter of one of the larger walls with his buddies, that they wouldn't bite. I laughed and politely declined, knowing that I couldn't even pretend to be part of their crowd, and made my way over to the shelter of the second wall, which seemed to be mainly populated by businessmen and tourists and homeless people, and where I felt I could be a bit less conspicuous.

Since the storm showed no signs of letting up, we got to talking (or rather yelling) to each other over the thunder. A cowboy-esque white guy, who seemingly had been sitting in the ampitheater since long before the rain started, told us all about the bizarre and unpredictable weather of Denver. Two guys from Italy, on their last day of a one-month tour of the American West, pointed at the flooded street and told me that they had come to see "the Denver River." There was a black businessman with a sopping dress shirt stuffed into his back pants pocket under his raincoat, and a homeless white man who looked a little perturbed that we had all interrupted his nap. A young Latino guy with his life and sleeping bag in a backpack came and asked if any of us had a cigarrette, and the homeless man sold him one for 11 cents. An older Latino man rode in on a bicycle with a stereo strapped to the back and played Bob Marley and the Barenaked Ladies while the rest of us tapped our feet to the music and chatted and watched and waited.

We watched people on the sidewalks sprinting from one building to another. We watched the druggies at the other wall run screaming into the fountain. We watched Colfax Avenue turn from a puddle to a stormy pond to a raging river. We all jumped at the same earsplitting thunderclaps and laughed sheepishly after looking up to make sure that the columns weren't crashing down around us.

All told, is was almost an hour before the rain died down enough for me to venture out to track down my bike and soggy helmet, but a fascinating hour it was, getting a glimpse into the lives of so many people I would've passed on the street with my eyes on the sidewalk on an ordinary day. Just one more reason to love thunderstorms.

The summer so far

I won't write any more about it here, but most of it's in the captions of two new Picasa albums of summer photos. Look at "Back East" and "Fun in the sun...and snow." Enjoy!

Dancing with Barack

I got to dance with Barack Obama today. At Machu Picchu. In French. As part of a French lesson, in fact. Never mind that "Obama" was really a Spanish teacher named Joshua, or that "Machu Picchu" was the staircase in the hotel conference room. It was still the highlight of my day...and I could tell you the entire story, in slightly imperfect French, without ever having studied the language before: "Il y avait une femme. Erin voulait danser avec Obama parce que Obama était intelligent et sexy..."

I'm in the middle of a three-day TPRS workshop in preparation for my new Spanish teaching job. (I don't think I've mentioned the job here before, which reminds me just how far behind I am in blogging, but I'll save that for a later date. If I tried to catch up on everything in one post, it would be scandalously long, and no one except my mom would read it.) TPRS is a relatively new language teaching methodology that stands for Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling. (For you other language educator junkies out there, it's no longer Total Physical Response Storytelling, although it still makes good use of TPR.)

TPRS is the main method I'll be expected to use in my classroom this coming school year, and I'm super-excited about that. In a nutshell, TPRS involves teaching a few new phrases or structures in the target language (in my case, Spanish) by using gestures or pictures or translation, and then creating a silly story, full of audience participation, using those structures and including celebrities and characters from the class. The students act out the story as it's invented, add funny details, and answer myriad questions about what's happening to get as many repetitions of the target structures as possible. The whole process is highly entertaining when it's done right, and it makes learning a language much more engaging than if you're doing worksheets and reading textbook dialogues.

During the practice sessions today, I got to teach a TPRS Khmer lesson to my group and had them understanding and answering questions--in Khmer--in no time. I'm sure my elementary kids will love this stuff. Heck, I love this stuff, and I'm a full-grown adult. When else would you get to disco with the President in Peru, or watch your classmate and Johnny Depp take the dance floor in McDonald's? Brilliant. I almost didn't notice that the teacher was speaking in French.