fa sa teva feina!

This is a phrase I hear quite often in school: fa sa teva feina! (Do your work!) I teach some very gifted students in both the elementary and the high school, but there is also a large bunch who are, well, difficult to work with. Every day, I have to cajole them into maybe opening up their textbooks, perhaps to the correct page, and at that point, actually reading the book might be a little too much work for them. A telling example: There are about 20 English classes in the high school, so for the first few weeks or so, I rotated from class to class and we just did introductions. I asked students to tell me their name, where they lived, and one interesting thing about themselves. Most people answered with a greater or lesser degree of enthusiasm, but one girl, upon being asked her name, just said, “¡No me preguntes nada!” (“Don’t ask me anything!”) and returned to chatting with her neighbor.

The teachers’ attitude is that if a student doesn’t want to work, that student has every right to screw him/herself over—it’s not the teacher’s job to motivate the students, so the unmotivated students get left in the dust. Some of the teachers that I work with are naturally very motivational people, and it shows in their students’ progress, but there is no cultural push towards being a Hillary-Swank-Freedom-Writers-type teacher. That being said, I work with some excellent instructors, and I am learning a lot about what it means to teach well.

I’m still pretty shaky when it comes to controlling an unruly class: I haven’t got any tricks up my sleeve, and I certainly don’t have a steely glare that quells a restless student instantly. I’m not a figure that commands immediate respect—man, I gotta work on my take-no-shit principal’s persona!! Anyone have any suggestions for how to deal with bratty 4^th graders? Or for that matter, uncooperative 10^th graders? I was a pretty nasty 4^th grader myself, if I remember right, but I grew out of it. I’m sure the bunch I’ve got will turn into perfectly respectable human beings, but sometimes I wonder.

I enjoy teaching, though, and I enjoy explaining English to the students. I get to talk about the difference between British and American English—such as the words for “bathroom” (loo, toilet, and WC vs. bathroom and restroom… we haven’t gotten to “john” or “crapper” or variations thereof yet.) I get to explain how to make squid heads and octopus legs for the elementary kids (they’re all being sea creatures for a Carnival parade). Sometimes, however, I really don’t have a clue about what I’m supposed to do—for example, at the beginning of one high school class, the teacher turned to me and said, “While I correct the homework, could you explain the 1^st and 2^nd Conditionals?” Huh? I looked it up in the book: the 1^st Conditional is something probable, such as “If it rains, the grass will turn green.” An if-A-then-B statement. The 2^nd Conditional is something improbable, such as “If it rained, the grass would turn green.” This means that our grass is brown and it’s probably going to stay brown, because it’s not likely to rain. There is apparently a 3^rd Conditional as well, which the students learn later on: “If it had rained, the grass would have been green.” It ain’t never gonna rain. There might be a 4^th Conditional, but the book didn’t go this far: I’m curious about phrases like, “If it were to rain, the grass would turn green.” Does this express even less probability of an event happening? Or is this just a weird grammatical convolution that doesn’t exist in the real world? Anyways, I gamely set out to explain the 1^st and 2^nd Conditionals, and then I ran into the problem that the students haven’t learned the Conditional tense (would+infinitive), and then I had to explain how the Subjunctive tense really does exist in English (“If I were you…”) but that we normally just use the Past Simple forms of the verbs (“If I had a million dollars…”) and I had to explain all of this in English, because I’m not supposed to speak in Spanish with the students, and since I had never really thought about any of this before, it was a royal mess. The teacher took over after about ten minutes of confusion.

ANYWAYS, sorry for the side-trip into geek-grammar land. I’m super excited to go to grad school—I’ve applied for M.A. programs in Teaching English as a Second Language, and I’m going to get my nerdy fill of grammar. I’m so psyched! I’ll learn all about English syntax, morphology, phonology, and phonetics, and I’ll learn how we learn 2^nd languages, and then I’ll get to put all that together and learn how to teach English. I’ll also get to indulge myself in my one true love: historical linguistics, and I’ll dig in deep and write theses about Grimm’s Law and the importance of 1066. It will be divine.

Back to the present:

Sa meva feina (my work) is challenging and rewarding. If the students would do sa seva feina (their work) then it would make my life a whole lot easier, but we’re getting there.

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Here are a few fun Catalan/Mallorquín and Spanish phrases and words to send you on your way:

voy pitando: literally “I’m going honking,” this is a colloquial way of saying, “I’m leaving in a huge rush.” I translated this as “I got places to be.” Can anyone else think of an idiomatic English expression that we use to mean “I’m leaving in a hurry”?

arc de Sant Martí: the Catalan/Mallorquín way of saying “rainbow”: Saint Martin’s arc. The tradition goes that the devil wanted to make the sky go all dark, but Saint Martin wanted to make people happy, so he created the rainbow to brighten the sky. Anyone who wants to hear 3 minutes of Catalan can watch this educational video (and learn how to make a rainbow in your bathtub).

pastanaga: the Catalan word for “carrot.” In Catalan, a lot of vowels turn into “uh” sounds—for example, “Mercè” (a girl’s name) is pronounced more or less “Muhrr-suh.” “Pastanaga” is pronounced “puh-stuh-nuh-guh,” which sounds incredibly gross—just like carrots. I hate carrots. “Pastanagues” is the perfect word for them.

déu deu deu: this is a great pronunciation exercise. In Spanish, this would be translated as: dios debe diez, or “God owes ten.” In Mallorquín, each version of “deu” is pronounced slightly differently. The written equivalent is more or less “DAY-oo DUH-oo DEHH-oo.”