Challenge Clarke pt 2: Shoes of Doom

Refreshing once again, if I may, the iron clad gauntlet laid down to me by my good friend back in the UK, Ms. Polly Williams;

1) Ride something not of the equine world (i.e. no horses allowed)
2) Find out about Mexicans before the Mexicans, as it were
3) Purchase, and enjoy parading in, some handmade footwear

One of these now lies defeated, as those who have seen my childlike screaming captured on video will no doubt testify. Owing to reasons of impending need to pertain more appropriate footwear or risk social exclusion and utter bone idleness to research the anthropoligical history of Mexico, I´ve prioritised the third part of the quest.

Owing to the helpful comments of fellow teacher Martin that, in cirumstances of purchase of any one of the multitude of beautiful pairs of leather sandals adorning the tourist shops around the central plaza, my shoes would, in a short space of time "Smell like ass", I decided to consider other options. My feet have always exhibited a propensity for excessive perspiration, and I needed a more rigourous solution.

Combing the back streets away from the tourist strip, I happened upon a hole in the wall enterprise, similar to the countless alternatives dotted around the town and propiented by two small boys. This one, however, contained a pair of sandals that I deemed fit for purpose and after a laborious and drawn out exchange with the two "assistants" I managed to walk away with my toes singing songs of freedom to the open air. All was well until I noticed that that one of the straps was torn almost to point of breaking; the two miniature entrepreneurs had just sold me a dud.

Flip flopping back to the same hole feeling somewhat aggreived, I confronted the salesmen with my sandals and asked in my abysmal spanish for a replacement pair. This request was gleefully denied and it was at this point that my language aptitude left me high and dry; I could request a replacement, but had no hope for understanding the reasons for a rebuttal. An old lady sauntered onto the scene as the intensity of the discourse between the boys and I increased, but unfortunately she proved to be no better at communicating a solution; my admission of lack of comprehension was only met with a different slice of rapid fire language, and with the cackling and shouting at me by the pint sized fiends I had the feeling that my incomprehension was greatly at my expense. Despite trying everything from trying different routes of explanation to issuing threats to rubbish their reputation about town, the best that I could do was explain that I would return with a translator within 5 minutes to develop a more productive discourse. Returning shortly afterwards with Padre Javier I was almost unsurprised to find the shutter pulled down over the lot and not a sign of life to be found.

Anecdotes about fighting children for shoes aside, this serves to illustrate one of the greatest challenges that I struggle with every day, that I never comprehended before I arrived and still struggle to articulate now. I´m surrounded by people and circumstances that operate on a completely different language and this, to a huge extent, strips me of the familiarities, securities and comfort that I took for granted in a place where I was in command of communication, and able to articule and play with the spoken medium. For the first time abroad, Im not cocooned with the comfort of an english speaking populus in tourist routes and locations, or the knowledge that I´ll be moving on from somewhere within days as part of a trip. I´m here to learn the language, so I have to force myself to confront my inability to communicate every day, and at a teeth grindingly slow pace start, little by little, to circumnavigate those barriers.

Not understanding a language that I live amongst is, without doubt, one of the hardest things I have experienced. Some days, every laugh or joke seems to be at my expense, every comment made seems impatient or condescending. On those days my Spanish lessons seem to achieve nothing when I try and instigate a simple conversation with anyone, or understand a kindly comment put my way. Other days, I can feel the fragments of understand align for just long enough to give me a glimmer of hope that somehow, in the coming months, all this chaos and incomprehension will being to make sense to me. There have been times where I´ve managed to raise a smile or a laugh from somebody with a joke that I´ve tried to make; the connection between us, however brief, forges a link that buries itself deep into my conciousness. For that moment, I can understand that despite all the stuggle, confusion, embarrassment and frustration, it´s going to be worth it.



For the benefit of Ms. Williams, I can confirm that I did manage to claw back a replacement from that shop, but even with Javier´s explanation I was still no clearer as to any justification beyond bloody minded stubborness as to the original refusal. For the benefit of all those due to meet up with me at some point during the future tenure of my sandals, I can also comfirm that they do not (as of yet) smell like ass.

Chiapa de Corzo
28th February 2009

Another Top Notch Weekend

Just outside town, Im fortuate enough to have a very nice selection of waterfalls and natural climbing walls. These have provided me with an excellent couple of weekends, and adequate training for my adventure based future existence post teaching, no doubt hacking through jungle, scaling mountains, looting ancient temples etc.

Somewhere outside Chiapa de Corzo
21st February 2009

Teacher Jon, Figure of Authority Amongst Seven Year Olds

Many thanks for your patience, chaps. I seem to have broken the back (at least for the moment) of my new workload. I am now at liberty to discourse, once again.

Contrary to what many of my imaginary loyal subscribers may believe, I have not spent the vast proportion of my time thus far in Mexico sodden by booze and languishing in the depths of an eternal party; I´ve actually been training to teach English as a Foreign Language. For those of you who do not know what this entails (I certainly didn´t when I reluctantly parted with the cash for the course), the purpose of the training is to allow a qualified individual to impart aptitude in spoken English onto a local population that doesn´t understand a word of the language. It´s all a bit colonial, like back in the ruddy good old days when we refused to acknowledge that the natives were probably an awful lot smarter than us, and things could be done much better if we paid some attention to the way that they lived in their natural surroundings. Nevertheless my experiences have been well worth the investment, and I´ve been instilled with a great deal of respect for the teaching method.

Trawling back through my journal reveals an interesting progression over the course of the month´s training. It´s probably worth noting that the school at which I trained (The Dunham Institute; a wonderful and highly commendable enterprise) has a specific way of doing things, both in the execution of their teaching and their TEFL staff training, and my experiences were most likely somewhat different to other ways and means of obtaining qualifications. The essence of the course, from the outline in the front page of our nice blue folders, was to put trainees through as much classroom contact time as possible, with a wide a variety of teachers and their students as was feasible, maximising practise, observation and teaching contact time. This was, naturally, a methodology that we all heartily agreed with.

Starting out fresh faced at the beginning of January, my course mates and I were cheerfully informed that we would be teaching an hour long class within 3 days, and leading classroom exercises by the following day. This naturally caused some minor concerns within the trainee encampment, and unfortunately for us this proved to be agenda by which the graduates of the Dunham Institute were persecuted with, generation after generation; either get thrown into circumstances over one´s head and survive or, alternatively, leave. The comparative quantity of teaching time in my current undertakings put my early shaky steps into rather stark perspective, but initially, leading an 15 minute exercise with ten little confused faces staring up at me as I tried to convince them to sort paper slips of nouns into two highly obvious columns on the floor was a teeth-grindingly hard challenge that I hadn´t faced before.

The key thing in the classroom that became apparent very quickly was the lack of comprehension of the things in language that we take for granted as native speakers that are simply not present in a learner. The language and mannerisms of the teachers I observed and eventually took over from were conducive to simplicity, and represented everything absent in the trainees; clear logical progression and linking between ideas, rigorously re enforced learning motifs, processes and patterns (repetition was a huge part of dealing with the earliest beginners) and slow, steady speech complimented by just about every medium of communication available to a human being; mime, dance, sounds, pictures, movement, body language and countless other routes by which the students could be brainwashed into understanding the significance of English vocabulary and grammar without the benefit of their mother tongue. It was these things that we all, without exception, managed to get thoroughly knotted in the early days, leaving the poor students with furrowed brows and slack jaws.

I became aware over the course of my training of the pains of lesson planning. As an exercise, planning a lesson is much like anything else; define your objectives and specific goals, and then break down preparation, actions and review process with these in mind. What caused the first few lesson plans, artfully conceived over long stressful hours to levels of intricacy equalled only by the choreography of a West End musical, was the black cloud of panic that descended upon us as we attempted to predict how a room of children, accursed agents of chaos, would react to our schemes. It was this, regrettably, that also caused our beautifully constructed 50 minute opuses to fall, for the most part, to dust. In trying to sculpt every aspect of the lesson, we became restricted by our rigidity.

Aah, English grammar. I was all too aware of my ignorance before I started the course, and I´m not in the least bit ashamed to say that my awareness was set on foundations of granite. Learning alongside trainees who had studied language in college, I found myself screaming up a near vertical learning curve, wrapping the loose strings of my brain around infinitives, tenses, prepositions, conjugations, participial adjectives, reported speech and all the other wonderfully cryptic terms used by linguists that I still, on most occasions, am completely confounded by. The scope of my grammar orientation was prescribed to the nature and progression of the TEFL process and I was led through the concepts as they would be introduced to students from a state of complete beginner to advanced. It was, by and large, incredibly interesting to see how my native language was constructed, and certainly a great help in catalysing my appreciation of Spanish language construction for the lessons that were due to start on completion of the course.

A couple of the more interesting things to crop up in my befuddled circumnavigation of English were;

1) Nouns (object words) are countable and uncountable i.e. they can or cannot be assigned a numeric quantity. For example, you cannot specify a quantity for the following; milk, traffic, sunshine, honey or chocolate. You can, however, assign quantity to loosely affiliated objects or measurements for these items; 2 bottles (of milk), 5 miles (of traffic), 3000 Joules per kg/greys (of sunlight) and so on, thus creating a world of confusion.

2) Statements can be classified as "passive" or "active" depending on the orientation of the "subject" and "object" of the statement. For example, "Steven (subject) read the book (object) to the class" is an active sentence, where the focus is on the subject. In the passive sentence, "The book was read to the class by Steven", the focus is the book, and not the reader. It´s mildly amusing to note that a particular use for passive constructions is in the formulation of excuses, when someone wishes to distance themselves from an event e.g. "The vase broke when I was in the room". It makes one wonder what other tendencies for language construction are wired into our skulls, ready for the knowledgeable amongst us to interpret...

1) There are 3 different types of conditional statement ("If..."), ranging in application from universal statements of certainty e.g. "If you heat water to 100 degrees centigrade, it boils", to those that wistfully proffer desired alternatives to events that have already happened e.g. "If you had done your job properly, we wouldn´t be in this mess right now".

As the course progressed and the colourful cross section of grave errors unfolded in my teaching practice, I stoically towed the line that anything that happened, however awful, during the classes would serve as a stronger learning experience, not repeated once my head was tucked inside the foxhole of eduction, my teaching campaign having actually begun. It was, for the most part, this simple maxim that dragged me through the training process and the seemingly impossible increasing intensity of the course requirements until, suddenly I found myself two days from the end of the course with all my task boxes ticked and my feedback sessions returning pleasingly positive responses. The heartless and despotic doctrine of the Institute had given me as much time as humanly possible practising the job that I would be doing, and poked and prodded me forceably in the right direction with rigourous peer and qualified teacher feedback for all my student contact time.

I would continue to make untold errors over the coming weeks with my class of completely fresh faced beginners, but my confidence and aptitude leading classes was a world apart from the first shoddy student activity that I´d fumbled through. Incredibly, I´d passed the course with distinction and was the unashamedly proud owner of a shiny TEFL certificate. My sense of pride was only overshadowed by the subconsicous terror of managing a workload four times of that experienced during the training within a few days of graduation, but I managed to hold this off with magnificent execution of flat denial, escaping to the seaside.


It´s been a highly liberating experience to cast myself into a completely new vocation and accepting the humility that comes with being a beginner, enjoying the white knuckle ride of a fast learning curve and appreciating the personal development that happens in such a short space of time. However, I´m glad it´s February; I´m bloody knackered.

Chiapa de Corzo
21st February 2009

A Brief Note of Apology

Jon wishes to express his regrets for his recent lack of additions to his blog. This is not due to a distinct lack of subject matter on which to communicate, but rather a surplus. This state of affairs may, regrettably, continue for a short while while he grapples with his new and highly intensive teaching and spanish lesson schedules.

Jon wishes to thank you for your patience.

The Management
Chiapa De Corzo
15th February 2009

Snow, you say?

Noting with surprise the pictures on the BBC website today, I thought it would appropriate to share the details of my first "Mexican holiday" in the depths of Chiapan winter that filled the gap between the end of my TEFL training and the start of the teaching semester.

All three of the freshly qualified teachers, myself, Martin and Laura, took a trip to Boca De Cielo, the closest peice of coastline to Chiapa de Corzo, roughly four hours away. The main beach of said town forms one of the extremities of a 40km long, narrow island that lies a few hundred metres off the mainland. The rest of the island is covered with coconut trees and palm leaf roofed cabanas, a tranqial getaway that was apparently enjoyed in a low season lull; in Semana Santa in April, the place is mobbed by Mexican tourists. On the mainland that we arrived from by way of a short boatride, the land rises up into a mountain range that sits hazy in the distance, seemingly a world away.


Winding our way down through the mountains from Chiapa de Corzo, I saw the same range for the first time through the window of the collectivo crested by a sheet of cloud that sat like a blanket, stretching for miles along its length. A short walk along the beach yielded a wonderful range of houses and camping plots perched on the edge of the other side of the spit, steadily being advanced upon by the eroding tidal current, a product of the unfortunately short sighted act by locals of destroying the mangroves to improve access and generate more beach front. In the mornings and evenings between games of beach football with local children and body surfing the waves, we gorged ourselves on fresh seafood, and afterwards lay under the stars in the warm night breezes.

The trip for this long weekend marks my first excursion from CDC since I arrived; it´s been 4 weeks of incredible pace, change and excitement since I walked out of that UK departure gate. Sitting on the buses as I moved progressively closer to the coast brought back nostalgic pangs of exotic trips gone by and I felt a strong desire to keep moving, further South and deeper into Latin America; I´ve been walking the same few blocks for the last months, wrapped up in the rigours of teacher training and the incessent festivities of January and it´s not been until this point, where my horizons have broadened and allowed me the opportunity to reflect, that I´ve realised how insular and focussed the last month has been. It´s going to be a great catalyst for my desire to use my spare time to travel, and keep opening doors to new adventures.

Boca de Cielo

3rd February 2009