Seeya Later

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Ooh, Blogger has a new template for writing posts! I hope this fixes the thing that was really annoying before. I can't remember what that is, but I'm pretty sure there was something that really bothered me.

Anyway, I just wrote to say "bye", because tomorrow I'm leaving for a week-long vacation. Next week is "Semana Santa", or Holy Week, and I'm going on a trek to a Lost City that was only discovered about 30 years ago! Crazy. I'll be sleeping in hammocks and wading through rivers. I've already written a song for the trek: "Jungle Frisbee" to the tune of "Jungle Boogie", because Elizabeth is going to bring her frisbee.

I haven't been blogging this week because I've actually been blogging for another site - with the baseball season fast approaching, I had some season previews to write for Batter's Box, a Blue Jays fan-site. My preview of the National League East Division went up on Thursday, my Boston Red Sox preview will go up on Tuesday, and the Record Prediction Contest I run will arrive on April 4th. Keep an eye out!

Okay, bye.

The (Separate) Rise and Fall of Colombian Sports

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Over the last two months, I've been playing two sports on a regular basis. Every Friday, the teachers and janitors (at this point, mostly janitors) play soccer after school (this has been going on since the beginning of the year, actually). And since school started up after Christmas, I've been playing school-yard baseball with a bunch of my grade 7 boys at lunch, which I started doing because I was assigned to lunch-time duty in the outdoor gym area. Needless to say, duty is way more fun than it was before.

These two activities have evolved over time, and in the very recent past, both have taken a dramatic turn for the worse/better, respectively. Actually, better isn't the right word. More like hilariouser.

Sometime in January, we played our second match against a rival school, and the first since the famous pants incident linked to above. During the match, one of our players, who is not a soccer player at all, and was only there because he was the one who set it up because he used to work there or something, suffered a serious ankle (+/- one bone away) sprain (+/- one degree of seriousness) (the uncertainty factors are given because his lack of English prevents me from knowing exactly what his injury was), and had to miss a couple weeks of school. Then, last week, at a regular Friday intra-squad scrimmage (somehow I doubt anyone else refers to it this way), one of the tech guys broke his wrist/hand (bad injury for a computer guy).

So now it seems soccer is over for the rest of the year. (Except today, for some reason. I never really know what's going on, but I think the deal is this: the director was upset because of all the injuries, so now we can't play anymore, but the director, the high school principal and the dean of discipline are all away right now for various reasons, so we're gonna play in about an hour and shhhhhh.) Which is too bad, because it's really fun, and I was planning on bringing my friend Ben to play a game when he comes to visit in April. It's definitely one of the most Colombian things in my normal routine.

On the other hand, lunchtime baseball has really kept me on my toes in the last few days. I mentioned in the last paragraph that the head honchos of the school are away; well, one of the reasons is that there's a big sports tournament all week in Cartagena, a city about 2 hours from here. One of the effects is that the phys. ed hut is locked at lunchtime (because there are no phys. ed teachers), meaning the boys can't access the baseball equipment. So they've had to make do with what they have. Which means, basically, coconuts and pylons.

The game that has become the default game this week is basically soccer baseball with a coconut. The most entertaining aspect unique to cocosoccerbaseball is that when the pitcher rolls the "ball", it has the potential to veer wildly off-course, resulting in some idiotic-looking kick-flails. (The other most entertaining thing is when the boys forget to save the coconut from the last recess, they get a new one by standing on a ledge and throwing their shoes at the coconut tree until one drops.)

One day they had a tennis ball for some reason, so it became a slightly more civilized version of the previous game, tenniscocosoccerbaseball. But that ball mysteriously disappeared, and today it was back to the coconut version.

But the best game came a couple days ago when I arrived to find the boys each holding a pylon, chasing after the coconut, and trying to score on the basketball net. Though initially confounded, I eventually figured out the rules: it was coconut-basketball, but you could only pass the ball by throwing and having your teammate catch it in their (mini) pylon. And when the coconut was not caught, there was a mad scramble until somebody trapped it under their pylon, giving them the coconut-rights.

Even though I often join their game, this time I decided to be a neutral play-disturber (major team sports should have more of these). So I picked up the one huge pylon, and meandered through the game, randomly lowering the pylon over kids' heads while they were trying to shoot, and trapping any coconut that came my way in my huge "glove".

I'm sure that regularly-scheduled-baseball-programming will resume next week, which will be fun, but it's no CocoPylonSketball. What a week.

The Most Amazing Barber

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I got a haircut last week, and it marked the second consecutive Colombian (oops, check that, South American, the last one was in Peru) haircut that I've really liked. I wasn't a fan of the first one I got here, but 2/3 is pretty good, especially considering I can't remember the last one I liked in Canada - it's been years. (Aside from Mom haircuts.)

I think part of the reason I can't get a good haircut in Canada is that I don't know how to describe what I want, which is a problem because North American barbers just do exactly what you tell them. That's not really the way things work here - in many ways the culture is more about taking care of the customer. I noticed this particularly when I was on vacation in Peru and travel agents did basically everything for me, including picking me up in cabs from my hotel to take me to whatever tour I had booked, and then reserving me a bus ticket for the next day, etc etc.... And of course, there's the fact that everybody has a maid. This isn't necessarily better - in some cases, people might prefer having control over these sorts of things - but sometimes it's nice to be taken care of, to walk into a barbershop and respond to the question "so, what'll it be?" with "a haircut, please".

That was the right choice, in this case. Now, the "amazing" mentioned in the title didn't refer to the haircut itself. It's good, but not earth-shattering. Rather, I'm referring to a couple of observations the barber (Gati) made while doing his thing.

First, he figured out fairly accurately how long it had been since I had had my hair cut. He actually underestimated by a couple weeks, but as a matter of fact he left my hair longer than the last cut, so an underestimate makes sense. I wouldn't be at all surprised, given what's coming next, if he in fact left it two weeks longer than the last one.

A few minutes later, he said something which I didn't quite understand. When he saw the confused look on my face, he dug into his little knowledge of English and came up with a word that I sort of understood, but I couldn't figure out if he was saying "blonde" or "born". Turns out, he was saying both, and was asking if I was blonde when I was younger.

Well, I was. When I was about 5. How in the world did he know that?

I love when people in the service industry appear to truly be experts in their field, and this was the most impressive example of that I've ever seen. Comparable incidents which I hope to experience someday:

• supermarket cashier remembering that last time I bought tortilla chips, tomatoes, cheese, peppers, onions, refried beans, and jalapeno peppers, and asking how my nachos were
• bartender using my skin complexion to serve me the beer my mom drank when she was pregnant
• bus driver studying my pattern of eye movements to determine where I was headed, and taking me door to door even if it isn't on the route
• same as the last one but on the subway

New Look

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This is something I've been meaning to do for a while, because let's face it, my previous design was uglissimo (which is the Spanglish word that literally translates to "ugly to the max"), but never found anything I really liked among the Blogger templates. But they just released some new design tools, which are much more customizable than what was previously available, so I just spent one of my Friday afternoon prep periods playing around until I got this. The part that took the most time was deciding on a background image - I went with laundry machines because, honestly, who CAN'T relate???!

Hope you like it! And watch for upcoming posts about prophetic barbers, racist currencies, and so much more!

Opposite Movies

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One of my favourite blogs, Videogum, did a post today where readers were challenged to come up with opposite movie titles. I spent the bus ride home thinking up a bunch - feel free to add your own. By the way, some of these are not at all opposites, but whatever, it's fun.

• Casanegra
• Lord of the Uneven Bars
• 8 km (opposite of both 8 mm and 8 mile... boo yeah)
• Mr. The Netherlands' Opus
• Mr. Holland's Xpus
• Donnie Dpizzikato
• (1/pi)rates of the Caribbean
• Close Encounters of the 3rd Selfish
• I Have No Idea What You Did Last Summer
• I Still Can't Figure Out What You Did Last Summer
• A Clockwork Purple
• South By Southeast
• Sapphire: Based on the novel "Precious" by Push

Block Creations

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So, the blogging has been a little light lately, and I think I figured out why: school has just been totally consuming. The trimester ended last week, so every day the students came to school, wrote an exam, had 2 regular classes, then went home at 11. The end of the trimester meant I was furiously finishing marking tests from before, then finishing up all my pre-exam marks, making the exams, then marking the exams, and now finalizing the marks and doing report cards, and (still to be done) making 3rd trimester plans.

I don't mean to say I haven't had time to blog, it's more that I've had nothing to tell you about that isn't school. So, my solution: maybe I will start to write about school a little more. I have a lot of thoughts about education, if you're into that kinda thing, and of course I always have all kinds of crazy stories about my students saying ridiculous things. Unfortunately, I usually forget to write them down, but if even 10% makes it through the sieve that should provide frequent content.

Anyway, the last few days I've done an activity where I gave my students, in groups of 4, a set of math manipulatives like cubilinks, those different-shaped tiles like yellow hexagons, green triangles, white diamonds, etc., and different-coloured squares, and challenged them to create various things which I wrote on the board (spaceship, robot, Mr. Dave, Colombia, any animal, soccer match, Chavez). It has nothing to do with what we're studying, but I still think it has a lot of value.

Anyway, here are some of the things that impressed/entertained me the most:

• one group made a candle, and used the multi-coloured squares as "solar panels". I don't know why you would need a candle when there's sunlight, but whatever.
• Most of the spaceships were pretty generic and 2-dimensional, but one grade 7 who is rarely an impressive student made a sweet 3-D one, and then even drew it pretty well (which was part of the assignment).
• On the topic of spaceships, a group of grade 8 boys made a pretty amazing replica of the space shuttle launch system, with the launching tower separate from the rocket. There was also a second launching pad, which they told me was actually a Pokeball, because of the colours I guess.
• The same group of boys, when unveiling their soccer match, brought out a blackberry and played a clip of a soccer goal (it was the "stadium scoreboard") while simultaneously acting out the goal with their block players.
• Pretty much all the groups elected to make a model of me (which I always included as an option, of course), and they all found it hilarious when I tried to emulate the pose my geometric counterpart was striking, which usually involved pointing my toes straight sideways and folding my arms into my body while sticking my hands straight out, but my favourite was the group that didn't know what to do with their last few pieces and so made "Mr. Dave with Sombrero"