Nothing More Dear to My Heart

Today passed with no grand adventure of any sorts. I followed T2t around today so that I could get a feel for the average day in the life of a student. You know what I don't miss? Being a student. I learned a good bit from the classes taught in English, but trying to keep up with Maths in Dutch was a little beyond my capabilities. Dus......... yeah (that's the one Dutch phrase I've learned that's stuck... my language acquisition skills need work... it's means "so" in the context of an awkward silence... also, I've probably spelled it wrong, I've only been here a week, cut me some slack)

On to more pressing things:
1) I heard a teacher use the sassiest phrase I have ever heard in my whole life today and think it bears repeating. One of the T2t girls was being disruptive and this teacher looked at her with a glare that could have frozen Hitler in his tracks and said very calmly,
                 "If you continue to disrupt my class, disrupt your afternoon"
Then went back to teaching like nothing ever happened.

2) In that same class the teacher expressed her concern that meat packaging companies in the States were using mice in their meat. I hope I wasn't lying when I said that the FDA is trying to crack down on that. 'MURICA

3) Here I will speak about something that I have grown to admire about the Dutch. It is a habit that I've been working to cultivate in myself because I'm so impressed with the skill. Now, if you haven't figured out that I'm real big on food, you must be a new reader, because well, I have no qualms about sharing my love for food and the art of eating. So it really should come to no surprise that the quality in which the Dutch have most captured my heart is food related.
Based on my observations, at each meal, a true Dutchman will grasp his/her fork and knife - one in each hand - and wield the instruments with the most ambidextrous of talent, scraping every morsel of food from the plate with amazing precision. It involves a fair amount of metal meeting porcelain screeches, but the dexterity in which they are able to glean every edible element off the plate circumvents any ear discomfort.  Not only do they manage not to waste anything, they also perform this at speeds unlike I've ever seen. Normally I'm always the first one done with my meal, but man, these people put my speed eating to the test. My goodness, one minute the food is there and the next minute it's gone. Amazing, absolutely amazing. Finally, a people after my own heart.

Blue Monday

The Dutch call today “Blue Monday” because it’s far enough away from Christmas to no longer be exciting, right around now people start giving up on their New Years resolution, and the weather is quite dismal. I shouldn’t laugh that it falls on the same day as Martin Luther King Day. I shouldn’t laugh that it falls on the same day as Martin Luther King Day. I shouldn’t laugh that it falls on the same day as Martin Luther King Day.

This morning started off… well, let’s just say I was riding the struggle bus. I awoke before everyone, who had later starts to their morning. All was well and good as I got ready, packed my lunch and so on. Then came time to go catch the bus. Now, I have a key to the house and can let myself in and out, no problem. But, attached between the house and the garage is a wrought iron gate. Most mornings, I am not the first one to leave, so the gate is unlocked. But this morning I found the deadbolt drawn. Using my key to the back door, I jostled the lock a little with no avail. Glancing at my watch, I feared missing my bus and lost all sense of propriety. I lowered my teacher bag over the gate, stuck my piece of toast into my coat pocket, and proceeded to climb the fence of my own home. I probably looked like the world’s worst burglar, vaulting over the spikes in my teacher pants (this is all before the sun had even come up). Delightful. I did miss my bus, but managed to catch the next one and got to school with plenty of time.

This is my first week of really having an idea what’s going on and being able to work with the kids, so I team taught in T1 and T2 during the morning. We had a fun question and answer session with the classes, where the students could ask me anything about myself and/or American culture, then worked on practicing Present Perfect tenses. I was given a group of advanced learners to work with and their teacher just told me to have them write a story using present perfect, so, I showed them a picture of me feeding a giraffe from a few summers ago and told them to let their imaginations do the rest of the work. The kids got really into it. I don't believe many giraffes gallop wild through the tulip fields of Holland so they thought it was really cool that I got to feed one. 

 Later in the afternoon one of my supervising teachers and I started doing someconcrete lesson planning for the upcoming weeks. Starting next week, I’ll be taking over large portions of class time. I found out that I’ll be reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the T1 class which I’m really excited about. Naturally, because I’m a fatty who sorely misses her junk food, on my way home from school I went to the supermarket and bought a big Dutch chocolate bar so that I could appropriately read about Charlie’s grand adventures. I’ll be following T2 all day tomorrow so that I can get a better feel for the overarching academic experience. These days it’s almost like I’m a real teacher or something… 

Finishing the Weekend

Saturday

If I could go back in time, I would visit my teenage self. I would arrive right as my high school alarm began its morning cacophony, and slap myself upside the head for thinking that Georgia mornings are anything close to cold. Have I mentioned that the Dutch are calling this a “warm” winter? Anyway, my present day alarm went off at 10:00, but my butt didn’t get out of bed until at least 10:30. I didn’t have the willpower to abandon my wonderful down comforter. After giving myself series of inspiring pep talks - “you lazy waste, get out of bed” – I finally found the courage to get myself together. I’ve learned quite quickly about myself that I can handle almost any situation as long as I know my surroundings and my schedule. When those two pieces of information are missing, it sends me into a minor system shut down. So there you go, blog readers, if I have a Luke Skywalker out there, you now know the weak point in my Death Star (wow, that was a little dorky...). Anyway, my point in sharing this, is that I have just started to have a concrete schedule, so the only thing left to do was get my bearings. Bundling up in scarves and jackets, I walked down to the ‘downtown’ part of Renkum – one street of shops. Which really isn’t that different from Auburn. I haven’t gotten a ton of exercise the past week, so my legs were feeling like they needed a good stretching. I didn’t feel like cutting my walk short by actually going in the stores, so I just kept on down the road until it spat me out on I guess what the Dutch would consider their highway (not in the sense of four lanes both ways kind of highway, but two lane road where cars can go faster). As signs pointing toward Wageningen appeared, I started to regret my steady diet of Doritos over Christmas break, and began looking for a bus stop. I found one that I recognized, managed to get on the one going the wrong direction, and spent the rest of my afternoon hours on the bus. Not a particularly wild adventure, but I’m glad I got my bearings by foot, for obvious reasons and especially for my shenanigans later on that evening…

The other American teacher who I’ve mentioned before, Shawna, has kind of taken me under her wing. I’m not one to throw the “you’re such a blessing” phrase around… like really, I never use it unless I’m trying to make fun of someone. But I legitimately don’t know how to describe Shawna with any other terms. Don’t get me wrong, all of the teachers have been the warmest, most friendly people I have ever encountered. But it’s just nice to have someone who knows exactly what I’m going through and what I’m talking about. So, on Friday made plans to go for a drink on Saturday night. She had given me the name of the bar, which I had written down phonetically and thought “how off can I be? I’ll look it up later”. Thank the high heavens I also had her phone number, because what I wrote in my agenda was “Flomm Ceros” and where we were going was called the “Vlaamse Reus.” Again, so. glad. I. clarified. Shawna was particularly excited about showing me this bar because it is home to the “beer bible”, a book with pictures and descriptions of the hundred odd beers that they serve on tap.  In our clarification conversation Saturday afternoon, she invited me over for dinner with her and her husband AND told me that she had found me a bike that I can use. My American friends might not understand the significance of that, but in the Netherlands having a bike is comparable to having a car. All the buses stop running around midnight and if you’re not on that last bus home, you’re just S.O.L.

Late afternoon I hopped on the bus and headed to the city of Rhenen where Shawna was waiting for me at the bus stop. She showed me parts of Rhenen including the original city wall, which is precisely what you think it is – the wall that surrounded the city. For dinner, she cooked an Asian stir fry dish and treated me to all sorts of Dutch junk food and sweets. I might actually not be able to come back to America after eating Dutch truffles, although if I’m going for greasy: bring it on American style. The Dutch have these snacks that look like a Connect Four boards, with the consistency of a packing peanut and with a stroke of 21^st century genetically modified food genius, have made this crunchy snack taste like ham and cheese. It’s repulsive. The other snacks are better. After dinner, she introduced me to my bike and the three of us (Shawna, her husband, and myself) set off toward Wageningen and the Vlaamse Reus.

Now, I learned to ride a bike as a child and have done it fairly frequently during Hilton Head summers, but I swear I must have looked like a one-legged toddler with vertigo during that bike ride. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But Shawna and Hans took us racing down the Rhine river banks and through back wooded area, mind you, this is 8pm so not only is it freezing, but pitch black. There were lights on our bikes, but those only sufficed enough to reveal potholes immediately in front of you. Meanwhile, my native bike riders are chatting the whole way as if conversing on two wheels is the most natural thing to do. After thirty minutes of woodland trails and sidewalks, we finally made it to Wageningen in one piece. The “downtown” area is shaped in a circle around an old church, with lots of little hole-in-the-wall bars and restaurants. A few minutes after we arrived, we were met by another Marnix teacher, Saskia, who joined us for a few hours of swapping stories, planning future adventures, and laughing at my unrefined taste for beer. Apparently in a country with such easy access to the “best beer in the world” (Belgian beer), my taste for Bud Light in a can doesn’t quite meet their standards. Go figure.

Caitlin meets the Beer Bible

 After a few hours, Saskia decided to head home and Shawna wanted to know if we should go elsewhere. Now, admittedly, I was a little tired and a little wary of the fact that I was biking home, but when in a new place I have a fairly strict policy of saying “yes” to everything, unless it seems potentially life threatening, of course. So off we went to the pub across the circle. Threading through the crowd we started to notice that most of the patrons were considerably older and threaded our way back out. On to the next bar. There was quite a good band there and as we were listening, Shawna noticed a sign advertising that we had somehow stumbled upon a jazz festival at all of these local pubs. Tickled at our luck, we pressed on to the next location to listen to a band who takes the genre “jazz” very lightly – more of what I would call 90’s rock, but who am I to split hairs? At our final stop on the tour we found two older gentlemen playing some old school folk music. With a banjo and a harmonica narrating the scene, I could’ve been at any Alabama bar. You know, except for the scattered conversations in Dutch. Around 1:30 in the morning, we opted for some late night snacking and went to the equivalent of a McDonalds/Taco Bell, but instead of gorging ourselves on Dorito Taco Locos (man, I really have a thing for Doritos, don't I?), we enjoyed foods whose names I can’t even begin to tell you, but will describe:

a fried cheese pouch – like fried pastry dough with cheese inside it

something whose meat resembled a hot dog but spicier, with Indian ketchup (it kind of tasted like spicy barbeque sauce)

a rice nugget thing – like a chicken nugget the size of my fist, but instead of spare parts chicken inside it had flavored rice

Overall, greasy and delicious.

We decided to call it a night after that, and headed back to the bicycles. Shawna and Hans guided me back to the main road, where I put on my big girl pants, despite the voice in my head that said – what the what am I doing cycling home at 2 in the morning in a foreign country – and assured them I knew the way home. I had been told over and over throughout the week that cycling at any time of the day is completely safe and normal in Holland and figured, when in Rome…

I had seen the road from the bus window on my morning commute and knew I was going in the right direction but was soooo very glad that I had made most of that trek by foot earlier that day because there were definitely parts of the ride that if I hadn’t seen in person, I would’ve convinced myself that I was lost. As you may have guessed, I made it home in one piece.

Sunday

The morning after my midnight bike ride, I got up fairly early and went to church with my host family (just the mother and daughter). Their church services are very casual, and I was very taken aback when one woman approached the pulpit at a random part of the service to whisper something in the minister’s ear like it was no big thing. The service was in Dutch, so I didn’t get much, except for the Lord’s Prayer – but that was less because of understanding the words and more recognizing the pattern. It wasn’t until the benediction that I realized that I could understand what she was saying, for a second I thought that some miracle Pentecost-like miracle had occurred, and then realized that she was speaking in English for my benefit. Literally, just for me, she said the benediction first in English then Dutch. Naturally, I spent the remaining minutes wondering if I stick out that obviously. Turns out, the woman who had approached the pulpit during the service, was letting the minister know I was there. It was a fairly small congregation, so it wasn’t that big of a deal, but I still don’t know how I feel about that attention.

Regardless of whether or not I understood the majority of the sermon, it was still a nice service and it was nice to be with my host family for that time.

The remainder of the afternoon was dedicated to Skyping my parents and working on lesson plans for the upcoming week, until that evening when my host mother came in to offer me an apple pastry thing that she was making for the rest of the family. I accepted, and spent the rest of the evening talking to her and Janne, telling Janne about American high school – how I was afraid to admit it was not just like Glee. I’ll leave you with the following thought: throughout the world, people think that the average American high school is like Glee/what they see in the movies. Yikes.

Unapologetically Behind

“It’s been a weekend, and I’m terribly sorry to keep you all waiting. Here’s what I’m going to do, I started writing Friday’s post during school on Friday and I really don’t want to go back and change the tenses, so I’m just going to hit all three days like I’m not lazy” was what I intended to do for this post when I started writing mid-afternoon. But life is not so simple as being able to sit down and write for hours on end without interruption. And let’s be real, I got the chance to hang out with my host family and as much as I want to enchant you all with my stories, my host family is a little more local so bonding with them seemed far more important. Besides, it’s currently 22:15 and although my alarm is going to go off at 6:30, I’m betting the chickens will start around 5:30. So you’re getting this weekend in installments. If anything crazy happens tomorrow, I will notify you post haste, but until then, see if you can tide yourself over with a snippet of the weekend, here we go:

Friday

One of my favorite parts about this experience is seeing how students, no matter what nationality or country or culture, are the same everywhere. As I approached Marnix this morning, eyes smarting from the brisk wind, I was met with a scene I hadn’t seen since my own days in junior high. Or rather, I should say that it hit my other senses before reaching my eyes. My ears became aware first, the distant but familiar hiss of liquid becoming aerosolized. Next the assault on my nostrils – the thick, singe-your-nose-hairs “fragrance” of middle school boys everywhere: Axe. Only after I had taken a quick trip down memory lane to the hallway outside the boy’s locker rooms at Crabapple Middle School, did I see the three boys assaulting each other with streams of spray from their body spray cans. Ah, middle school.

The day lingered on, class to class to class. I have three pages worth of pedagogical observations about that, but you’ll need to request it specially. When lunch rolled around, I made my way down the hallway to meet another English teacher, Ester, and two male students who were furiously looking over their notes and (good naturedly) ribbing each other. Marnix College does a speaking competition, I believe, every year. Any student is eligible to enter, regardless if they are part of the bilingual program or not, but they must deliver a speech, in English, on a subject of their choice. That’s it, pick a topic and wow us. As I came in, the English department was reaching the end of preliminary eliminations (all apply, they do their speech in front of their English class or a few teachers, then the students who pass that round will go before a panel of teachers, and then the ones who pass that round will go to the final “big deal” competition later this semester). So, Ester had asked me to sit with her and help with judging because well, being the sole judge is awkward. I was introduced to the boys, who I’m going to call A and B for the purpose of this story. I realize that using their names would be so much easier but I’m terrified of using a student’s name in anything but my academic research, just too much liability when dealing with minors. We went round the usual, “I’m an American, I’ve come to teach, blah, blah, blah” spiel and in the best of “what a small world”, A told me that his father lives in a village (yep, they call towns ‘villages’) south of Atlanta. Next I learned that the boys entered the completion solely to complete against one another, and apparently that’s what they do, compete against each other in everything. Ester and I took our seats, and A delivered his speech and all was well and good. Then, B took the stage, shaking like a leaf. With a mixture of the cockiness that only high school boys who are completing against their best friend and an obvious disappointment look apparent across his reddening face, he revealed that since he was simply trying to beat student A, he had prepared a speech about “Why A Should Not Participate in MarnixTalks” but, I had thrown a wrench in his plan. The first driving point of his slander campaign, revolved around student A’s American roots… which makes for awkward conversation when one of your judges just happens to be American. Whoops. Of course I laughed and told him to bring on whatever he had prepared. So with a face who’s shade of red would’ve made a tomato jealous, he proceeded to “convince” us that student A’s American roots, habits of procrastination, and lack of mustache made him a completely inadequate candidate.

For the record, student B will be advancing to the next round.

After school, I was invited to go back to Ester’s home with a handful of other teachers. We purchased microwavable spare ribs (not as good as Southern barbeque, but A for effort) and sat around the table in her normal-for-Netherlands, smallerthanmycollegedorm, but nonetheless cozy living room, enjoying dinner. After the guys had killed of their crate of beer, we hopped on the bus to the central part of Arnem where the group shot pool in the back of a dingy bar while Ester and I swapped travel stories – which was mostly her giving me really good advice for traveling Europe and me thinking for the thousandth time that I need to start carrying a notebook to write all this stuff down. 

Real life... kind of

I didn’t write yesterday, by the time I got around to doing it I didn’t feel like thinking anymore. In the wake of Monday’s shell shock, each day has gotten better and better. I’m learning people’s names more permanently, getting a feel for the layout of the school and surrounding area, and starting to feel more comfortable in my role as more teacher than student. All of the English/TTO teachers have been wonderful about sharing nuggets of advice and information about the ins and outs of teaching Dutch children – sometimes I feel like a bobble head I spend so much time nodding my head and making noises that indicate agreement or understanding. So, yesterday I spent the morning in the lower form. I’ve always said that I prefer high school students and that middle schoolers are the worst, but was pleasantly surprised to find that I loved working with the T1, T2, and T3 students (that would be the equivalent to honors-ish 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th grade). As the T1s worked I milled about the room, my favorite was when a girl flagged me down to come to her desk. As I crouched next to her (small ears and a loud room makes for very difficult hearing, especially for the shyer speakers) she looked me square in the face and said, “I can understand your accent good, because I watch MTV”. My first thought: “good grief, she is way too young to watch that trash”. But decided to vocalize my praise for her practicing American-English and asking what she liked to watch instead. I bounced around in the lower forms for the rest of the morning then spent the afternoon over at the upper form. Toward the end of the day I met with my coordinating teacher and we discussed plans for the coming weeks. Things are still a little up in the air (and to be honest, I still don’t really grasp the schedule) but I’ll be teaching a little bit next week in her T4 class. Monologues vs. soliloquies vs. asides on Wednesday and present perfect tense on Friday. Should be interesting.

After school, it was raining quite a bit but I needed to run to the bank, so on my way home I got off the bus in Wageningen which I believe is pronounced [vah-ne-ah], although I’m not totally certain about that. When I talk about it I just make sure to make a “vah” sound followed by a glottal slide and people seem to get what I’m talking about. All I can say for sure is that it definitely is not pronounced [wagon-in-gen]. I know that tidbit from experience. There’s a university in Wageningen and it promised to be kind of a cool area, but the rain kept me from anything more than wandering around lost for a half hour until I found the bank I was looking for. Hopefully we’ll get a day that isn’t too terribly wet so that I can explore a little bit.

As for today, another day at school. During the last block I sat in on a T3 class (9^th graders) who were reviewing for their reading test tomorrow, but for the last few minutes I got to tell the kids a little bit about the American education system and culture in the United States, then they were allowed to ask me questions. True to pubescent fifteen-year-old fashion, they were all embarrassed to ask questions in front of each other. So I told them a little bit about the accents from the North and South, and how if they ever visited the South they had to try fried pickles. It was fun to see them wrinkle up their noses at that. After class ended, a kind of good-naturedly cheeky boy asked me if there were a lot of red-necks in my area… looks like I’ll have to dig up some (school appropriate) photographs from Rodeo to show them.

Outside of school, things are going well. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but I’ve noticed that the Dutch are very musical people… well, Dutch men are very musical. Lots of humming and the occasional chorus from male teachers and Hans at random intervals. It’s quite nice.