Spreading the gospel of Keyboard Cat

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might have noticed a bit of dissatisfaction with my time here, and if you did notice it, you'd be correct. Things are moving very slowly here, which is just a bit how Colombia rolls, but there were also several interruptions: the department head was abroad for the first week, my advisor got in a car crash the second week, holidays meant the school was closed for a few days, then my step father died in the third week and I had to take a week off to go back to the US. Now there's another interruption: an enrichment week in Bogotá with all the other Fulbright ETAs. This means the main core of my responsibilities here won't have started until a few days shy of two months after I started my job. And considering I like my job, that sucks. That sucks in a very big way.

This is nothing against Fulbright. Most other ETAs are well situated in their programs by now and hopefully are having the blast I expect to be having. But it just so happened to strike at an inopportune time for me. On the other hand, it's an all-expense paid trip for a week in a nice hotel with fun people, so I guess I can't complain too much.

Lately, though, things are getting more interesting around here. This is partly because I've kicked my advisor out of the driver's seat, and now I basically go around organizing my own stuff and then tell him later. For example, this week I stopped by two different organizational meetings for the English teachers here to introduce myself, and by the time I left, I had scored myself a whopping eleven class visits!

Yesterday, I had five in one day. I spent the day running around and left the university at seven o'clock, which makes for a long day when you're up at four in the morning. By the time I got home, I was so tired I couldn't do anything but buy an arepa with cheese, stuff it down my gullet, and fall down face first on the bed and pass out. It was my most rewarding day here yet.

Even better is that I think I made a good impression on most of the teachers and students, which bodes well for getting students to come to the conversation clubs, which was my primary reason for making so many visits this week. I did my best to take another professor's advice and try to teach them about the interaction between culture and language, the kind of things that they won't find in a text book. Since they were in a technology unit, I decided to teach them about texting and internet acronyms because it was one of the more confusing things for me when I first started making friends in Spain. Like how was I supposed to know "x" meant "por"? I mean, I see why now. "Por" is used in the same sense as "times" as in "two times three is six," hence the use of a multiplication sign to stand in for it. But when you first see it for the first time, you just kind of wonder if it's a typo. 

I spent the second part of my time talking about United States internet culture, particularly different words and a few things that hadn't seem to become international phenomenons, such as the words "derpy" and "troll," explaining the internet obsession with cats (such as cat bread, grumpy cat and keyboard cat), and using the "ermahgerd" meme to explain not only explain how speech is often written phonetically on the internet ("2morrow" or "gr8") but what Goosebumps books are and how memes work in general, which ended up leading to this gem.

I was happy that I noticed that I was even teaching the teachers a few things. I noticed some would write things down so that they might incorporate some of this stuff into their future classes. It's great to think that I not only educated some students under the guise of showing them YouTube videos about cats and how to text like a pro but also helped some teachers develop their curricula further. Of course, there were some teachers who were less receptive than others to my presence, and with the ones who I sensed didn't really want me there, I did my best to just talk about conversation clubs, do a little bit of an activity, and then get the hell out of dodge. It is, after all, my way to not stay where I'm not wanted (re: New York). But if this was any indication of how conversation clubs are going to be when they start, I think we're going to have a great time. Things are about to get a whole lot more interesting around here.