This week I tried to start teaching the kids in my morning class music. I was still unsure how I'd go about teaching the subject to kids who have never even seen a page of sheet music in their lives (they didn't believe me the first time I showed them a page of a music book and told them it was written music) so I tried starting with the very basics. My plan was, if I could get them to be able to read the different lengths and pitches of notes, I could get them playing basic songs on the recorder or keyboard. My success was limited. The style of learning here is, unfortunately, very much copying and memorizing orientated, so while I could get my students to recite "um semibreve tem quatro batimentos" ("a whole note has 4 beats"), getting them to understand what this meant was something else entirely.
Since I don't give homework or tests, I thought it'd be best to assess what they've learned in a sort of Jeopardy game with two teams, each getting points by answering questions right, etc. Again, limited success; they were fine once they got going and a lot of students proved they had indeed learned the material, but getting them into teams in the first place was a feat in and of itself and of course there was plenty of bickering throughout the game. When the game had ended, one of the students, Victor, was being particularly obnoxious so I thoughtlessly whapped him in the head with the cloth we use to clean the chalkboard. Perhaps I hit him in the eye or maybe he was just faking for attention (that happens way too often) but he started crying. I made my second mistake by trying to hold him back after class and talk to him which was dumb because a) it was just giving him the attention he wanted and b) I don't speak Portuguese, so my attempts at communication were simply feeble and ultimately pointless. It hung over my head all day and I honestly wondered if Victor, or any of my students for that matter, would come to my classes any more. I shouldn't have worried; Victor was there the next day and classes went on as if nothing had happened.
This week has been a exam week for the high school and I wasn't sure what that meant for the primary school kids in my classes. For my afternoon class, it turned out this meant only the girls from the orphanage came along with one boy named Edigar. This actually went very well though; you can get a lot done when you have a small group of students, all eager to learn. We spent the week doing basic addition, and by the end they were able to add double and triple digits and even carry numbers.
Because it was exam week for the high school, my sister didn't have to teach any classes but she did have to supervise a few exams everyday. Otherwise, she spent her time studying for the GMAT which meant by the end of the day she was utterly drained. We unwinded by spending the evenings in her room, cooking food on her hot plate, and watching TV shows on her laptop. In retrospect, we agreed it would have probably been better for me to have eaten dinner with the sisters as far as improving my Portuguese and integrating into the community but it was nice just chilling with my sister.
On Friday we went to Ann's and had another excellent meal to mark the end of a long week: matapa and no-bake cheesecake. We watched "District 9" which was interesting because it was loosely based on the system of Apartheid in South Africa, something that'd we'd be earning more about in a couple of weeks when we would be going to Cape Town.
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