L'Institut

I think I've lowered my standards for productivity. I sat down to write thinking I had accomplished quite a lot today, but the only things I would cite in elaboration are less interesting in retrospect:

-I bought tickets to James Blake and Jamie XX -- they're coming to Razzmatazz (a discoteca near where we live). The Smashing Pumpkins will also be there in December .........?

-I woke up early to volunteer.

-I did 20 euros worth of laundry, which I suppose is impressive in itself.

-I logged into the UPF website to find that I am finally, blissfully, miraculously matriculated into my two classes there.

In all honesty, my day could have started and ended with that last part and maybe a glass of cava or two, and I'd be thrilled. Getting into "Great Religious Traditions" (yes, it's just as interesting as it sounds, and our teacher sounds like Moaning Myrtle) and "Literary Topics and Myths" does not make for an exciting blog post, though, so I'll tell you about l'escola.

I arrived at the school at 10h, meaning I had to wake up about 5 hours earlier than I do on some Mondays (I don't have class until 17h...Barcelona). The idea of this whole thing is: I help out with English classes at a local school -- I serve as an extra reference for pronunciation, for outside help, for input on projects and exercises. The kids at the school range from age 12 to 18, which is a serious gap that would have terrified my 12-year-old self. The first class I sat in on was with 13- or 14- year olds, led by the teacher who seems to be coordinating the volunteer work. The second was a class with a substitute teacher and older kids (US high-school age).

I learned two things today from the juxtaposition of these drastically different classes (maybe three, if you count the phrase "half-board," which I'm hoping is a Briticism):

1. English as a second language blows. Why are thought, enough, bough all pronounced differently, and why does "I would" contract all the way to I'd?

2. I guess it's obvious, but if you as a teacher don't care, your students really, really won't care. In the English class with older kids, the substitute spoke in Catalan the entire class, uttering maybe six words in English the whole time -- and they were the answers to one of the two written exercises that the kids did during class (two exercise for the whole, hour-long class). The contrast with the other teacher's class was astounding. It felt like the 13-year-olds spoke English ten times better than the older students, but I'm sure the reality was that the older ones simply had no reason to make an effort.

On a completely unrelated note, we watched this disturbing video about a man giving birth

in my Género e Historia ("Gender and History") class at the Universitat de Barcelona last Friday. It's called "Por tu propio bien," it's feminist (?), and I'm really unsure what's going on there. My professor casually put it on during lecture, gave no explanation or analysis after it played, and completely switched gears to talking about Marx and historical materialism.