Adventures in Mexico

This year I have taken on an adult education “diploma” in Latin American Literature. In August, I completed a small interview to make sure that I was ready for the course and wrote a cute essay about what I would do (good conditional tense testing) if I found an abandoned puppy. My other gringa friend and I both passed the literature ready litmus test and we felt exhilarated, like we had passed an enormous step in the hazing that is second language learning. We were assured that UNAM (the national university with a stellar reputation for research and very difficult to get into) would provide us with support and the highest level of interactive educational technology when we attended the class by videoconference in a neighborhood near our houses called Polanco

 (you see, we live and work about an hour a way and after a long day in the Mexity pressure cooker and the last thing you want to do is put yourself in a hot sardine can of a metro, only to be stink-eyed by fellow passengers and shouted out by visually impaired people selling CD’s of musica romantica! I mean, my friend and I felt that we could handle this gritty soup of humanity only once a week.)

With the resolve to get cultured, to meet a goal, to improve our academic skills in Spanish, my friend and I arrived at our class to find two screens, one with our mugs staring disconcertedly right back at us and on the other we saw our professor and an occasional panoramic view of an entirely Mexican audience (we thought that as the class was offered through the center for foreigners, we would not be alone, but it turns out we were very, very outnumbered). We acted like Jane Goodall’s chimps would after being given a mirror, alternating from pointing at the screen and laughing to adjusting our hair to discover what part really suited us. Meanwhile, a voice with as about as clear of resolution as the teacher on Charlie Brown (bwa, bwa, bwwaaaaa,bwwaww but with some rolled r’s) lectured at us, taking us by surprise with occasional questions that we only knew to be questions because they ended with the following tag ¿Ustedes en Polanco? (You all in Polanco).

We bumbled through the first five weeks, sometimes attending the class live to avoid the screen, often times stuttering, very often answering the wrong question or making comments where the window had closed for appropriate timing. The whole thing was a scene from David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, except for that our blathering “Me thinks there symbolism at the part of the watch because time are should go forward”was televised in front of an almost permanently scowling group of native speakers, our television audience. 

Unfortunately, with the arrival of a new professor, our class dwindled in numbers and  disintegrated from whatever educational quality it had before.  You see, the arrival of the sunken-looking, hyper talking Geney who seems to have a penchant for talking two hours with the speed and endurance of a Kenyan marathoner, and usually not about the author being or reading material assigned for the day.  His idea of participation is to make us read an occasional power point slide aloud in front of our studio audience, which now includes another team of stranded learners from the southern state of Oaxaca.

As all students do when they feel like they can’t participate or they are failing or that their attendance is completely inconsequential, my friend and I have been behaving like disinterested teenagers and at times full-on delinquents. We have taken to calling our screen room the espantalla, a, to us, witty mixture of the words for screen (pantalla) and utterly frightening (espantoso). We often do our grading, look at recipes or write imaginary personal narratives written from the perspective of the people we seen on screen, the consumptive instructor whose thin fingers cut through the air when he speaks; the father-son duo: the son has an oral fixation and is always sucking on pens or discarded water bottles and the father is very clearly the teachers’ pet;  the young woman who has been, at age 17 or 18, seduced into the cult of post-modern thinking and is constantly fingering her infected-looking lip ring. Yes, we are full on delinquents.

However, we do take our papers seriously as we know that it is the one circumstance where we can show our professor, that even though we may be stuttering and Tarzan-like in speaking, that our heads aren’t filled with Cheese Whiz.

This worked well at first. Our first professor, Horacio, would return our papers promptly with a "very good,"  "good" or " that just plain sucked" three-tier grading system. I was crushed when my first paper came back with no comment except for “Ojo (careful) with the accentos.” But then I got smart and began to ask three to eight native speakers- who are often as helpless with accents as I am- with the editing. When we got the consumptive, hand talking, post-modern professor, we stopped receiving any feedback. We still listened for our assignments and did them loyally, but as we knew less and felt that our work was less of a consequence to anything or anyone, we lost interest.

We just submitted our final essays this Wednesday. With a feeling of exhilaration of ticking something odious-- like an in-grown toenail removal session --off a to do list, we felt that we had done our work, completed the arbitrary and inconsequential requirements for our 3^rd out of 5^th class.  On Friday, I went to the espantalla, armed with coffee, plenty of recipes and paper to scribble letters to my friend who was not attending that day.

The class started as normal with the Charlie Brown voice squawking from the screen. I stared at the same power point slide (lately we can’t even see the teacher, just can hear his voice).

Suddenly I heard the professor address “Ustedes en Polanco”  and surmised a sound that turned out to be a rustling of papers coming from the screen. The professor explained that he had some gifts for some of us. This simple sentence was disconcerting and oddly exciting. It also was quite a departure from his normal, two-hour run-on sentence pontifications on the role of literary criticism in his life. 

The power point slide was off the screen and I saw the professor in his bright red sweatshirt that said ARMY on the front. He looked more tubercular in the face, but there was a certain fire in his eyes, like he had just planned an invigorating learning experience for this otherwise dull class that would motivate and excite us to drink the Koolaid of post-modernism. Well, it seems, that he had created his own essay competition for our class (of 12) using our homework.  He announced various places of winners and the grand prize that predictably went to Francisco the father of the bottle-sucking son, the only guy who talks, seems to hold a sycophantic admiration for the professor and offers him rides home. This seemed kind of exciting, a change from the dullness which is two and half hours of listening to a muddled voice speak from a black screen, but then the professor proceeded to read the names of the people in order of how much he fancied our essays. My friend was comfortably third from the bottom, sandwiched between two native speakers. I came in dead last, that’s right, the peor, the worst.

I sat in my screen room and heard the echoes of my name as the last-ess, the worst-ness of it resonated in silence of the air. I thought instantly of my own students and how everything I do in my own teaching is to recognize the good and keep discreet, the bad.  I thought about how completely de-motivating this kind of technique is to a non-native speaker, who after a year and a half in the country is attempting to write academic papers. I felt indignation, utter frustration, rage, and humiliation. It was hard to go back to reading my recipe for chicken with poblano chiles, so I left. An hour early. 

I write this now still feeling a little choked at the idea of returning (am more than half done) to sit in front of my television audience who know all about my special needs and my inability to express myself in Spanish. Some of my editors (yes, I still have my paper read by between 2-5 people) insist that the paper was good and that possibly this was a move on the professor’s part to show the gringa imperialist that she is not welcome to write about Jose Martí at his university. I don’t think it’s that, although I appreciate the protective attitude of my friends, and think that if I did something similar with a class of all native speaking U.S. students and two Latinos, I would get a pretty strong finger wagging, as well as be called a racist. I think that, rather, this kind of move, reflects the utter lack of knowledge that this professor has about pedagogy and working with non-native speaking learners and, worse a paucity of empathy and inability to imagine what it’s like to try to express yourself in writing in a language that is not your own.

# posted by mexitymaestra : 7:33 AM