My Canadian Mexican Mom

My Canadian Mexican mom moved to Germany for two months to spend time with Justin, her second born who lives in Berlin with his fiancé. I’m going to miss her dearly. Angela is originally from Toronto but has lived in Querétaro and raised her family there for the last 35 years. Angela has taught me a number of different recipes, such as a baked fish with jitomates, cebolla, calabazas, and papas. And a salsa verde with tomatillos and chiles. The one I hope to master are her black beans. I don’t know what she does to those legumes but they are damn delightful! She starts by making frijoles de la olla (whole black beans cooked over the stove top), and then after a couple days she will mash them a bit into a mix of whole bean and refried. And the last day she turns them all into refried. It is the most wonderful cycle of black beans that is delicious at each stage.

When we were heading into winter and Jamai had just left from his first visit and I wouldn’t see him for a couple months until New Years, Angela taught me to knit. She suggested it’d be good to do something creative and told me to knit Jamai a scarf so I could think about him basically as much as I wanted and do something productive. Or watch three seasons of Scandal right in a row and not feel bad about it.

Measuring my progress with a selfie

And going into Spring, she taught me how to oil the joints of her old, steel, Singer, lace it up with some hilo and load up the bobina. She instructed me in starting an apron as my first project and once the cloth was cut, told me to “just bang it out”. I passed all of my free time over two days in the sewing room until I walked out wearing my delantal, with a bright red border and two carefully placed pockets.

 

Angela worked as the director of a bilingual program at a school in Querétaro for 30 years and constantly helped me navigate working in a Mexican educational institution. She also taught English for many years and helped me plan lessons for a pretty challenging class I taught in the late fall.

She invited me into her home and made me a part of her wonderful family. I am forever grateful for having had the opportunity to know her and am excited for her on her German adventure.

Things I have taught

In January I started teaching in Jaime’s Saturday afternoon English class. Once he asked me to teach a class on the present simple tense and daily activities. The first thing that came to mind was Atmosphere’s song Like Today. It was one of those wonderful moments in teaching when the entire lesson comes to you at once. And here is how it goes:

Set-up:

1.) Write a bunch of daily activities on a bunch of strips of paper, like “make coffee”, “read”, “listen to music”, “people watch”, “put on [leave space to insert pronoun] shoes”, “hit on a man/woman”, etc.

2.) write a bunch of “s” and “es” on other little strips of paper

3.) Write whatever pronouns you will need (i.e. he, his) and a bunch of others to be confusing (i.e. theirs, she, ours, us, her, they, we, etc.)

3.) tape them all to the white board

Warm up:

1.) Read through all the strips of daily activities together

2.) Students ask for clarification of new words and pronunciation

Lesson:

1.) Hand out lyrics of Atmosphere’s Like Today to all students with a few present simple verbs left blank

2.) Play song twice and have students fill in blanks with missing verbs

3.) Go through missing verbs together as a whole class

4.) Have whole class use the word strips to list the things he does in the song in the correct order

5.) While arranging word strips, read actions out loud and ask if anything needs to be changed. Students will tell you to add “s” or “es” to conjugate for the third person singular, i.e. he listens to music

6.) Model adding in linking words like “first”, “next”, “after that” and then have students suggest what to add.

7.) Students talk to partners about their perfect day.

Assessment:

Many students knew to add the “s” from the very beginning and knew when to add “s” and when to add “es”. The “s” sound in the third person single is really hard for many English learners so this lesson was meant to emphasize it and practice using it. The class has a mix of levels so the higher level students led the way on the whole group work but I think it was good for the lower level students to listen to their peers make corrections and use new vocabulary. When listening to pair conversations, there was a good level of fluency amongst most students and they all were very descriptive about what their perfect day would look like, using a wide range of vocabulary. Grammar still needs some work.

Reflection:

I’m not too sure how to correctly conjugate “people watch”… do we say “he people watches”? Is it a verb we conjugate or only use in the infinitive? Students really loved learning “people watch” and “hit on a man/woman”, I got a good chuckle out of them for those two. Had to heavily scaffold the word strip activity. The song is pretty tough because it has some slang and uses descriptive language that is subtle and hard to interpret. 

Vocab list

My favorite word that I’ve learned this year is “enchilarse” (en-chee- LAR- say). It means to over do it with the chile. Me enchilé, I say nearly every other day, I over chile-ed myself. Eyes watering, sucking in thin tubes of air to cool off my mouth. Waving my hand near my face because that helps the most. 

Zihuatanejo

After my Fulbright reunion in January, Allie and I hopped the overnight bus to Zihuatanejo. We arrived at 9am and metup with our Couch Surfing Host, Jai, a Portugese scuba diving instructor that would turn out to be one of the most generous people I have ever met. He let us stay in the spare bedroom of his perfectly central apartment for five entire days. Jai greeted us at the basketball court when we got out of our taxi and showed us around town. We first stopped at a Vegan farmers market on the white sand beach where we tried raw food wraps and bought a bottle of home-brewed kombucha. Allie has her master’s in biology and has since become very interested in fermented foods and is a major home-brewer of kombucha herself, so this was a pretty magic moment to say the least.

Zihuatanejo is a cute, super-laid back beach town next to the resort-filled Ixtapa and just a bit north of Acapulco. There are a number of U.S. Americans and Canadians from my parents’ generation hanging out for a few months at a time. The woman who brews the kombucha is an American who has been living in Zihua for about 12 years. She invited us to her house to get some bulgaros (water kefir cultures). Used to brew a probiotic drink) and check out her kombucha setup. While there, she taught us how to hang upside down in her yoga hammocks and stretch it out. We walked home a bit in awe of this ex-pat yogi.

Jai also brought us to a beach a bit off the beaten path, Playa Larga, where we ordered fresh fish, swam in the ocean, and played with his greyhound mutt pup, Ellie. We snorkeled at Las Gatas and stayed in the water until our faces hurt from our snorkel masks and then went in later to find the stone Jesus statue hidden in the water. On our fourth day, Jai offered to take us out on the boat with him and his scuba class so we could snorkel off shore by some giant rocks. It was like the day before but magnified. Gentle waves pushing the groups of vibrant blue fish back and forth, the hint of fear that you’re way far out in the ocean, and endless little corners to peek into. 

           After snorkeling, Jai took us to our fourth and final beach, Playa del Ropa. A group of mariachis approached us and I told them I go through the Mexican side of customs in the airport and would they give us a deal on two songs por favor? Allie didn’t think it was worth it at first, but once they started to play she got up and didn’t stop dancing until the very last note was played. She learned the important life lesson that mariachis on the beach are always a good idea. After some chips and guacamole, Jai went back to work and Allie and I continued swimming in the ocean and sipping on our coconuts. We finally had to leave to get some dinner (sushi for a second time that trip) before we took our separate overnight buses to our separate cities of Querétaro and Pachuca. Hugging and promising to see each other soon, she left first. I took some Dramamine and waited for my turn to head home.