Thursday, March 09, 2006
How come I keep getting colds?
This afternoon, I was in my evening class of beginners, which consists of three kindergarten teachers from my school, Rocio the secretary, a mother of a couple of my students, and a “chemist” who is the friend of a student in my advanced class. We were practicing how to describe people, so I had people describe a person and the other students had to guess who it was. When one of the kindergarten teachers described me, she said, “She is tall. She is wearing blue jeans. Her tennis shoes are white, blue, and gray.” Another kindergarten teacher said, “Is she sick?” And the first student answered, “Yes. She is sick almost all of the time.”
I have managed to catch a cold once again. I had just gotten over that last infection that lasted for weeks. I don’t understand what’s going on.
The teacher continued in Spanish that I catch a cold whenever the weather changes. Sure enough, the weather has been strange this week. It has been warming up a lot the last few weeks, but during the last few days it has been colder and very windy. Also, some other people were sick, too, earlier in the week.
One of my students told me to buy medicine called XL-3. So I went to the pharmacy just now and got a box of it. It has paracetamol and what looks like phenylephedrine, so I’m going against my usual refusal of symptom-relieving medication and ingesting some heavier stuff than chicken soup and hot water with lemon and honey. Hopefully it will get rid of this dumb cold before going to Guadalajara tomorrow for Julia’s birthday!
Which reminds me, Cesaria Evora cancelled her concert. :(
A funny thing happened on the way home from the pharmacy. I was getting off the bus and there was this group of about six guys on horses waiting for the bus to pass them before continuing down the road. One of them said to me, “Señorita, quieres dar una vuelta conmigo en mi caballo?” (Would you like to go for a spin with me on my horse?) I declined, “No, gracias,” which is already my automatic reflex whenever strange men talk to me on the street. Then later I thought to myself, what would’ve happened had I said yes? They weren’t all that bad-looking, which is pretty rare here in Arandas, and I’ve always wanted to ride a horse. Would he really have gotten off his horse and helped me on, and would we have ridden down General Arteaga with all its speed bumps and traffic? Sometimes I think these guys don’t expect girls to say yes and would be at a loss for words if one did.
Luis told me that I have to eat better, or I’ll get sick again. The other day I told him I was giving up cookies for Lent, but I said it in Spanish, and what I probably said was that I was fasting on cookies—eating nothing but cookies. Oops. So of course he told me I shouldn’t be fasting. No, no—on the contrary, I have been gaining a bit of weight, what with all the cooking Rocio and I do at my house during the week. We almost always eat some kind of meat with tortillas and vegetables. We make milaneza (breaded filet of chicken or beef) or albondigas (meatballs with rice in soup) or alambre (kind of like fajitas mixed with lots of cheese) or my chicken chili or spaghetti Bolognese or something like that. And I’ve become dangerously accustomed to the 10:30 “breakfast” at the school. I have a bowl of cereal before school, and then a couple hours later I’m eating eggs with salchichas or tacos or something with the kids. So now I have four meals a day. No danger of me fasting here.
Maybe I got sick because of stress. This week has kind of been a nightmare for me, because I became extremely angry with the school administration, meaning my principal.
Monday morning, a day after the stupid weekend-long course ended, the principal called a meeting. We talked about some programmatic stuff that doesn’t really relate to me (how we have to decorate the classrooms with spring stuff and Benito Juarez—all of which is irrelevant to me because I don’t have my own classroom), and then near the end of the meeting, she asked us all what we thought of the courses that weekend. A bunch of the teachers said, “Muy interesante!” and I thought to myself, “What a pack of liars.” None of the teachers with whom I had talked had wanted to go to the classes. In fact, they were rather unhappy because they have to pay high fees for them even though they are mandatory. I don’t have to pay for them, but I don’t understand why I still have to go. I guess to be treated like all the other teachers.
One teacher said, in a more honest and frank fashion, “It was very difficult this time because the teacher wasn’t as dynamic as the last ones. But I did learn a lot more this time.” And then the principal turned to me and said, “Jeanne, what did you think of them?”
I paused, partly because I had to formulate the Spanish, but also because I was trying to find a way to soften the expression of what I really thought of the courses. “I didn’t like them,” I said rather sourly.
“Why didn’t you like them?” she asked me. “Was it because you didn’t understand them or what?”
“At times I didn’t understand them,” I said. “But also, I’ve done stuff on learning styles already, on my course in Guadalajara, so it’s not new information for me.”
“So you’re the one who wrote on the evaluation that you didn’t want to go to them?”
“Yes,” I answered, somewhat defiantly and proud to be telling the bold truth in front of everyone. I had not scored the course highly, but I had not scored it poorly either, on the final evaluation, which I had understood to be anonymous and confidential. I had also written in explanation at the end of the evaluation that this was because the courses were mandatory and that I didn’t want to go to them.
Then the principal said to me, “You are going to have to write a letter of apology to the teacher.”
“But it’s the truth,” I said, indignant.
“Maybe it’s the truth,” she said, “but sometimes we have to keep quiet rather than tell the truth.”
What a hypocrite, I thought, as I remembered her lectures to the children all during February about how we always have to tell the truth. I was seething with anger—everyone could see it. The room was absolutely silent.
She continued, “The teacher didn’t feel good at all about that evaluation. You have to explain yourself to him. And to those of you who did not come to the courses this weekend [because there was one teacher who didn’t come at all, and two who didn’t show up for the last few hours on Sunday]: if you want to stay at this school, you have to fulfill your responsibilities to the institution” and blah blah blah and on and on.
After this meeting, I was angry and tense all day long. It took great effort on my part not to let it affect my teaching. At one point, I walked into my first-grade class with a cup of bright red jamaica in my hand, feeling very tired, and I thought to myself, what’s the point? But I caught myself and milked cheeriness out from somewhere inside.
I think I milked most of it out already, because I couldn’t find it anywhere during my last class this afternoon. I have just had it with my second-graders goofing around whenever I want them to read their storybooks. I think I play too many games. All my students in all my classes expect games when I appear in their classrooms, and I usually end up playing them because it’s the only time they really repeat sentence patterns and learn vocabulary and pay attention. But that means I can’t get them to do much work.
Monday afternoon, the day I couldn’t stop being mad at my school, I had visions of myself quitting and moving to Guadalajara.
Some of the other teachers spoke with me that day. The one who had been chastised for not showing up was also indignant. “I don’t like that she did that in front of everyone. She didn’t have to do that.”
Another teacher sympathized with me. She was the teacher of the fourth and fifth graders until recently, when the fifth graders were moved to the second-grade classroom with another teacher. “This is the way the school is, Jeanne. A couple weeks ago I was angry for about a week, because the principal told me that I was not handling the fourth and fifth grades well. But I had twice the work of any other teacher and getting paid exactly the same, and then she blamed me when it didn’t go well.”
Later with Rocio while we were cooking, I went off on a tirade that was building up all day and had no way of venting till after school let out. “There is no way I am going to write any goddamned letter of apology for telling the truth. What happened is not that I offended the teacher, like the principal said I did. Most likely I offended the principal, because I explained to the organization offering the courses that the school had made them obligatory for all the teachers, whether or not they wanted to be there. No, I’m not writing any letter, nor am I going to go to anymore of these courses.”
I tried later that evening to have a peaceful yoga practice, but I couldn’t stop thinking of what had happened. I kept thinking of what I’d say to the principal if she brought up the letter again. I kept thinking how I’d chew her out. I have a contract, and nowhere in the contract does it say I have to give up eighteen hours over one weekend per month to go to courses for a diploma that I don’t need. It specifies school hours as Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. And she cannot fire me, firstly because she needs me too much, but also because then she’d have to pay me until the end of the contract period anyway.
The next day, I was calmer. I was actually able to return to a semblance of the former rapport I had had with the principal, which is usually very friendly. She did bring up the letter again. She said, “You don’t have to apologize, but you should at least explain to him that you’ve studied this before, and that is the reason why you evaluated the course the way you did.” I just made a face and said nothing, but I thought about the message I had already composed the day before, which would explain that I had nothing against him or even the courses but was unhappy that I had to be there when I didn’t want to be, which is the fault of my school and its principal. Her request showed that she had also thought about the demand she had made of me, that I apologize to the teacher, and that she perhaps had realized that she had been too hard on me.
But I have still not written any letter. Nor do I plan on returning to the courses when they come up again, perhaps at the end of this month.
I thought about some of the career tests I had taken back at the end of grad school, when I was worrying about what I would do with myself after graduating. One of them had characterized me as having a low tolerance for working with others, and that I would do better in a job with little supervision and which allowed me to work at my own pace with my own ideas. What kind of job is that, I wonder. Someone had remarked to me, jokingly, that I need a job that caters to my lazy and spoiled personality.
The point is that I do poorly in the face of adversity or criticism in the workplace. I don’t exactly comport myself diplomatically. I like people to know I’m pissed off. This is, unfortunately, not a good tactic, especially in cultures like Mexico’s or Taiwan’s, where I also ran into numerous problems, and in the workplace in general. This must be something that can be learned—how to be professional, cool, calm, collected, nice. I do sometimes like that I am on occasion very frank and that I tell it like it is; I think it’s admirable to fight conspicuously for what you believe in. I suppose those are the advantages and disadvantages to being the way that I am. I have to learn how to choose my battles.
I have managed to catch a cold once again. I had just gotten over that last infection that lasted for weeks. I don’t understand what’s going on.
The teacher continued in Spanish that I catch a cold whenever the weather changes. Sure enough, the weather has been strange this week. It has been warming up a lot the last few weeks, but during the last few days it has been colder and very windy. Also, some other people were sick, too, earlier in the week.
One of my students told me to buy medicine called XL-3. So I went to the pharmacy just now and got a box of it. It has paracetamol and what looks like phenylephedrine, so I’m going against my usual refusal of symptom-relieving medication and ingesting some heavier stuff than chicken soup and hot water with lemon and honey. Hopefully it will get rid of this dumb cold before going to Guadalajara tomorrow for Julia’s birthday!
Which reminds me, Cesaria Evora cancelled her concert. :(
A funny thing happened on the way home from the pharmacy. I was getting off the bus and there was this group of about six guys on horses waiting for the bus to pass them before continuing down the road. One of them said to me, “Señorita, quieres dar una vuelta conmigo en mi caballo?” (Would you like to go for a spin with me on my horse?) I declined, “No, gracias,” which is already my automatic reflex whenever strange men talk to me on the street. Then later I thought to myself, what would’ve happened had I said yes? They weren’t all that bad-looking, which is pretty rare here in Arandas, and I’ve always wanted to ride a horse. Would he really have gotten off his horse and helped me on, and would we have ridden down General Arteaga with all its speed bumps and traffic? Sometimes I think these guys don’t expect girls to say yes and would be at a loss for words if one did.
Luis told me that I have to eat better, or I’ll get sick again. The other day I told him I was giving up cookies for Lent, but I said it in Spanish, and what I probably said was that I was fasting on cookies—eating nothing but cookies. Oops. So of course he told me I shouldn’t be fasting. No, no—on the contrary, I have been gaining a bit of weight, what with all the cooking Rocio and I do at my house during the week. We almost always eat some kind of meat with tortillas and vegetables. We make milaneza (breaded filet of chicken or beef) or albondigas (meatballs with rice in soup) or alambre (kind of like fajitas mixed with lots of cheese) or my chicken chili or spaghetti Bolognese or something like that. And I’ve become dangerously accustomed to the 10:30 “breakfast” at the school. I have a bowl of cereal before school, and then a couple hours later I’m eating eggs with salchichas or tacos or something with the kids. So now I have four meals a day. No danger of me fasting here.
Maybe I got sick because of stress. This week has kind of been a nightmare for me, because I became extremely angry with the school administration, meaning my principal.
Monday morning, a day after the stupid weekend-long course ended, the principal called a meeting. We talked about some programmatic stuff that doesn’t really relate to me (how we have to decorate the classrooms with spring stuff and Benito Juarez—all of which is irrelevant to me because I don’t have my own classroom), and then near the end of the meeting, she asked us all what we thought of the courses that weekend. A bunch of the teachers said, “Muy interesante!” and I thought to myself, “What a pack of liars.” None of the teachers with whom I had talked had wanted to go to the classes. In fact, they were rather unhappy because they have to pay high fees for them even though they are mandatory. I don’t have to pay for them, but I don’t understand why I still have to go. I guess to be treated like all the other teachers.
One teacher said, in a more honest and frank fashion, “It was very difficult this time because the teacher wasn’t as dynamic as the last ones. But I did learn a lot more this time.” And then the principal turned to me and said, “Jeanne, what did you think of them?”
I paused, partly because I had to formulate the Spanish, but also because I was trying to find a way to soften the expression of what I really thought of the courses. “I didn’t like them,” I said rather sourly.
“Why didn’t you like them?” she asked me. “Was it because you didn’t understand them or what?”
“At times I didn’t understand them,” I said. “But also, I’ve done stuff on learning styles already, on my course in Guadalajara, so it’s not new information for me.”
“So you’re the one who wrote on the evaluation that you didn’t want to go to them?”
“Yes,” I answered, somewhat defiantly and proud to be telling the bold truth in front of everyone. I had not scored the course highly, but I had not scored it poorly either, on the final evaluation, which I had understood to be anonymous and confidential. I had also written in explanation at the end of the evaluation that this was because the courses were mandatory and that I didn’t want to go to them.
Then the principal said to me, “You are going to have to write a letter of apology to the teacher.”
“But it’s the truth,” I said, indignant.
“Maybe it’s the truth,” she said, “but sometimes we have to keep quiet rather than tell the truth.”
What a hypocrite, I thought, as I remembered her lectures to the children all during February about how we always have to tell the truth. I was seething with anger—everyone could see it. The room was absolutely silent.
She continued, “The teacher didn’t feel good at all about that evaluation. You have to explain yourself to him. And to those of you who did not come to the courses this weekend [because there was one teacher who didn’t come at all, and two who didn’t show up for the last few hours on Sunday]: if you want to stay at this school, you have to fulfill your responsibilities to the institution” and blah blah blah and on and on.
After this meeting, I was angry and tense all day long. It took great effort on my part not to let it affect my teaching. At one point, I walked into my first-grade class with a cup of bright red jamaica in my hand, feeling very tired, and I thought to myself, what’s the point? But I caught myself and milked cheeriness out from somewhere inside.
I think I milked most of it out already, because I couldn’t find it anywhere during my last class this afternoon. I have just had it with my second-graders goofing around whenever I want them to read their storybooks. I think I play too many games. All my students in all my classes expect games when I appear in their classrooms, and I usually end up playing them because it’s the only time they really repeat sentence patterns and learn vocabulary and pay attention. But that means I can’t get them to do much work.
Monday afternoon, the day I couldn’t stop being mad at my school, I had visions of myself quitting and moving to Guadalajara.
Some of the other teachers spoke with me that day. The one who had been chastised for not showing up was also indignant. “I don’t like that she did that in front of everyone. She didn’t have to do that.”
Another teacher sympathized with me. She was the teacher of the fourth and fifth graders until recently, when the fifth graders were moved to the second-grade classroom with another teacher. “This is the way the school is, Jeanne. A couple weeks ago I was angry for about a week, because the principal told me that I was not handling the fourth and fifth grades well. But I had twice the work of any other teacher and getting paid exactly the same, and then she blamed me when it didn’t go well.”
Later with Rocio while we were cooking, I went off on a tirade that was building up all day and had no way of venting till after school let out. “There is no way I am going to write any goddamned letter of apology for telling the truth. What happened is not that I offended the teacher, like the principal said I did. Most likely I offended the principal, because I explained to the organization offering the courses that the school had made them obligatory for all the teachers, whether or not they wanted to be there. No, I’m not writing any letter, nor am I going to go to anymore of these courses.”
I tried later that evening to have a peaceful yoga practice, but I couldn’t stop thinking of what had happened. I kept thinking of what I’d say to the principal if she brought up the letter again. I kept thinking how I’d chew her out. I have a contract, and nowhere in the contract does it say I have to give up eighteen hours over one weekend per month to go to courses for a diploma that I don’t need. It specifies school hours as Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. And she cannot fire me, firstly because she needs me too much, but also because then she’d have to pay me until the end of the contract period anyway.
The next day, I was calmer. I was actually able to return to a semblance of the former rapport I had had with the principal, which is usually very friendly. She did bring up the letter again. She said, “You don’t have to apologize, but you should at least explain to him that you’ve studied this before, and that is the reason why you evaluated the course the way you did.” I just made a face and said nothing, but I thought about the message I had already composed the day before, which would explain that I had nothing against him or even the courses but was unhappy that I had to be there when I didn’t want to be, which is the fault of my school and its principal. Her request showed that she had also thought about the demand she had made of me, that I apologize to the teacher, and that she perhaps had realized that she had been too hard on me.
But I have still not written any letter. Nor do I plan on returning to the courses when they come up again, perhaps at the end of this month.
I thought about some of the career tests I had taken back at the end of grad school, when I was worrying about what I would do with myself after graduating. One of them had characterized me as having a low tolerance for working with others, and that I would do better in a job with little supervision and which allowed me to work at my own pace with my own ideas. What kind of job is that, I wonder. Someone had remarked to me, jokingly, that I need a job that caters to my lazy and spoiled personality.
The point is that I do poorly in the face of adversity or criticism in the workplace. I don’t exactly comport myself diplomatically. I like people to know I’m pissed off. This is, unfortunately, not a good tactic, especially in cultures like Mexico’s or Taiwan’s, where I also ran into numerous problems, and in the workplace in general. This must be something that can be learned—how to be professional, cool, calm, collected, nice. I do sometimes like that I am on occasion very frank and that I tell it like it is; I think it’s admirable to fight conspicuously for what you believe in. I suppose those are the advantages and disadvantages to being the way that I am. I have to learn how to choose my battles.
