Grrrrrrbrrrrr Borges bah!

Okay, I'm cranky. Let's start there. The remnants of my cold flu whatever, are making me feel more tired than normal, and I'm not sleeping well. I took a nice nap yesterday evening because I was exhausted, and then couldn't sleep last night, partly because of the nap, partly because of this cough, and partly because I don't sleep well anyway because of sleep apnea. All leading to me waking up at 9:00 this morning, and not feeling very rested.

I took my clothes to the laundry and headed towards Avenida de Mayo to my tango lesson. I stopped at a cafe at the Plaza del Congresso and had another healthy breakfast of coffee with three medialunas (croissants) and then headed over towards Marcelo's. Fortunately, I pulled out my phone (for some reason) and there was a message from Marcelo that he was still sick and had to cancel our lesson. Urghh! I wouldn't have minded so much if it was nice out, but it was cold today, and here I was with an hour to kill before I could eat lunch.

I wandered up Rivadavia Avenue and popped in some little shops along the way seeing if I might discover that "find", like the "crap" bags we found last summer in Korea, but alas, I still haven't found it, whatever it is.

I finally decided to go to school and sit in the cafeteria and read Mafalda, which I did. At noon, I went out to have lunch nearby, and at 1:00 returned for my class.

Nancy and I sat in the classroom waiting for our mysterious teacher to show up. We didn't know who our Tuesday/Thursday teacher was going to be. Finally, one of the guys who works in the little office with a window who helps run the show came by and said he was our teacher. Great, I thought, because he's cute, and fun and nice. But he was only kidding. Instead he gave us a reading on Rosa Parks and told us to do it and when we finished to go to room 310 to watch a video on Borges. Huh?

The reading had blanks we were to fill in. If I didn't know the story of Rosa Parks, I never would have been able to do it. There were no instructions and the missing words did not fall into any patterns (i.e. verbs/nouns, etc.) Nancy was frustrated. But we did it, compared notes and then went up to room 310.

Finally Claudia showed up with the level 6 students. Apparently our teacher is in Uruguay because they didn't know there would be a level 7. Our teacher is Martin, who we had before, and who Anna really didn't like. I'll reserve judgment until he returns and teaches us again, but I am really losing patience with these teachers.

They are trying, but they just aren't getting it, or they just don't know how to teach (I'm beginning to wonder if I do).

So today with a combined class, we first did an exercise on reported speech that was not clearly an exercise when we first got it. But after some confusion, we all figured out what to do, and we went over the answers, which were not always clear. It was a fairly formulaic exercise that I don't think helped us a whole lot.

Then we moved on to Borges.

I have decided I don't like Borges. I really don't like him.

Claudia asked us what we knew about Borges, and I told the class what I learned from our exam last Friday (so now they know what will be on their oral exam - if they were paying attention). Claudia tried to explain how someone could say things like that, but I didn't understand her explanation - I think her point was that some people, especially literary people, enter their own world and are not always aware of the real world that exists. She also said that he lived in elite circles and was coming from that place. Sorry, doesn't excuse being an asshole. She said that a lot of people criticized Borges because of his political beliefs and it was one of the reasons why he never received the Nobel Peace Prize - hmmm... excusing the massacre of thousands of indigenous people and not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize? How could that be?

The good thing about today's lesson was that before showing us the video, she tried to activate some of our background knowledge on Borges (which we really didn't have), and she put some questions on the board for us to focus on.

We took our break, returned and started the video.

This is the 2nd interview I've seen with Borges where he is near the end of his life. He is blind and is talking about his whole life, but kind of rambling. In this case, there was no interviewer, so it was not clear if he was answering questions or just talking for the hell of it.

The sound on the video was bad and the sound on the TV was bad, and we just didn't understand it. Well, except for a few Brazilians in the class, who could understand because they speak Portuguese and it is close enough to Spanish (especially Argentine Spanish) that they are mutually intelligible.

Claudia didn't see that the rest of us were completely and totally confused. She stopped the video, asked some questions and only these two Brazilians answered. At one point she said, what were some of the words you didn't know, and one guy said, "I couldn't hear any words", the rest of us agreed. But she kept saying, "ok, listen again and write some things down". It was torture. I started dozing off because I was so tired and it was soooooo boring.

Even after Claudia and the Brazilians explained what he said, it was still not interesting. He talked about how he was a mixture of different nationalities -English, Norman (he is such an elitist he doesn't even say French), Jewish, etc. - who cares! He said literature should not be tedious or people wouldn't read it. I found the video tedious and didn't want to watch it.

After watching and discussing a bit, Claudia put us into groups. I was with a Brazilian guy and a girl from Croatia. The Brazilian guy, Gustavo, is a new student in level 6. He understood the interview better than anyone. As we sat there, not sure what we were supposed to do, he started explaining some things because I said I didn't understand anything. He then started speaking English to me which really pissed me off. I didn't understand the video, but I do understand Spanish! He told me that the way he learned to be able to listen to things like this interview was to watch TV - he didn't seem to get the fact that being Brazilian, and speaking Portuguese (and having a grandmother who lives in Buenos Aires who he has visited several times) may have also been contributing factors.

By the end of the class I felt like I had once again become a cranky, uncooperative, bad student. Claudia gave us homework to choose one of the themes from the video and write about it. I don't want to do that. I didn't like the video, I thought it was a horrible lesson, and I feel that writing about it would just be a waste of my time. I'm going to get a paper back marked with corrections that will not help me.

Grrrr.....!!!!

I walked home down the Avenida de Mayo and stopped along the way for empanadas. I thought I'd go to the tango district and look at shoes, which I did. I didn't see anything that caught my eye, other than a pair of faux leopard shoes.

I'm glad to be in. It's cold out, it's cloudy and damp and I want to relax tonight. I might go see a movie later just to get out, but I'm afraid I will fall asleep.

Larry is recovering from some major dental work today and Hernan had a wisdom tooth pulled today - I'll check on him later to see if he's ok, but for now, I need to rest. Maybe I won't be so cranky.