Lectures, Class, and Friends
I can't believe it's almost May already. This experience is flying by, but I'm having a lot of fun as well. This week was mostly uneventful. I did the usual grocery store run, went to class, and had my conversation clubs.
On Monday, I started with a new group for the convo club. It was fun, but I only knew two people in the class. Also, only 9 of the 25 people that signed up ended up coming, but on Wednesday I had 17 people. Everyone keeps signing up for one day but coming a different day and some people with basic English signed up for my advanced club. It's been a little hectic not knowing how many people I am going to have every day and not knowing the English level of the people who come. I'm sure as the weeks go by, it will end up getting sorted out eventually.
I had class with the professors on Thursday and Friday. Both classes were fun and the professors like to use me in class to ask questions to, to answer questions everyone else is too shy to answer, and to ask me to lead activities. I lead an activity on Thursday where you draw a card that has the name of a famous person on it, but can't look at it. You put it on your forehead and go around asking people questions about your new identity and see if you can figure out who the celebrity is. The students really enjoyed it. Friday is a literature class, so we read a poem, talked about it's meaning, and then wrote our own line for the poem, which I liked a lot. Both classes have been fun so far and I look forward to seeing how they go.
I also presented a lecture by myself on Thursday. Alexa and I have a lecture series we are doing, but we decided to do some separate lectures so that we can plan our own thing sometimes and so that we can have some breaks. I presented over the Education system in the U.S. It was a lot of fun for me and I hope it was interesting for everyone to listen to. I know some people just attend things to get credit for the hours, so I wasn't too bothered by the people sleeping in the back. Many more people were interested and asked very good questions. I even had some people from the computer science major come up afterwards and talk to me about the high school electives I talked about. I mentioned I had taken a computer programming intro class in high school and they were so excited to know more about it. It's amazing that I can have an impact not only on my English students, but on the community and the other students who attend the college.
I've been going to a Spanish class at the library on Fridays, but last week, the teacher said we only have two classes left. I hope to get involved in another course because it gave me something to do and helped me meet people while speaking a language I already kind of know. I also became kind of famous in class because I was speaking English with my housemate that goes to class with me and some of the others noticed. They asked where I was from and thought it was really cool that I am a foreigner living here in tiny Apucarana.
Friday night was a lot of fun as Alexa and I got invited to a birthday party. One of our student's friends was having a party for his mom's birthday and it was a barbecue. It was a bit awkward since I barely know Portuguese, but a lot of the people my age spoke English. It was a lot of fun until one of the girls got drunk and kept yelling at me any time I spoke English with my student. She was trying to encourage me to speak Portuguese and to make my student only speak Portuguese with me, so I could learn the language. The intention was good, but imagine someone yelling at you to only speak Hebrew or Swahili because you need to learn it. I don't know enough Portuguese to hold a conversation and her yelling at me just made me want to go home since I couldn't speak the only common language I have with my student without getting yelled at and basically had no way of communicating with anyone then. I just ignored her and tried to have fun. Eventually she got distracted and left me alone and I had fun the rest of the night, but I'm not really looking forward to hanging out with her again.
We had another churrasco (barbecue) at our house on Sunday with our landlord. There were only two of my housemates and I at the house, but our cleaning lady and our landlord and his wife came too, so we had enough people to have fun. After that, I watched Iron Man 2 with my housemates and then just hung out for the rest of the day.
Today I have my second Monday conversation club. I'm hoping more people come than last week, but it should be fun either way. It's been nice only having two conversation clubs and two classes each week. I have a lot more free time that I did at first and it's nice to be able to relax and also have time to hang out with friends.
Sorry it's been kind of a boring week. Thanks for reading though!