A whole year?

Returning the favor

The exchange opportunity given to Chloe last year (given to her, yes, but she earned it) is about to directly benefit someone else. As is common now, mandatory community service is a part of her grade in her government class. She's going to work with a couple of agencies but what she's most excited about is working with a local literacy agency to tutor a 15-year-old girl whose first language is Spanish. The only thing Chloe knows about her is that she speaks well but needs help with reading English and grammar. Chloe's also hoping to help her with her accent because that is one thing she would have liked more help with in Pamplona. She asked people to correct her but most people are too polite to constantly correct a friend and the interruptions get in the way of conversation. It's not so much stripping the nationality from the person's speech, but of making it easier for the person to be understood. For instance, without the proper accent (and grammar) you might ask someone in Spanish if he will go to the dance with you, but he might hear "Will you go to the bathroom with me?"

How soon we revert

About that business of Chloe continuing the healthy Spanish habit of walking more instead of driving everywhere? Nah. If Chloe gets off the ferry in the afternoon and sees me on the dock with Scout on a leash, she knows I've stopped there while walking Scout and the dog doesn't ride in the car unless it's an emergency. She likes to see me sitting in the car in the parking lot; she's less happy to see me and the dog at the end of the dock because she knows that the car is still at home.

Baby soup

Baby, soup? We don't have any baby soup, but soup is on aisle five and baby food is on aisle seven.

That's the part of the conversation I heard at a grocery store between the checker and a boy and his dad, who looked like they could have been speaking Spanish (a safe assumption here). The checker confirmed that by cracking himself up with a "Si!" when I asked.

So I told Chloe to go ask them if she could help them. "No, I'm too embarrassed." Here's a kid who is now fluent in a foreign language and laments that she doesn't get a chance to use it and is worried that she'll lose it. I pushed her until she went to see what they needed, but they'd already figured it out. Don't know what they meant, but they stayed in the soup aisle.

Filling in

More Europe trip posts (and some photos) backfilled in, under Europe trip on the right under Categories. The new stuff begins July 8 (getting ready to leave Pamplona) and goes, so far, to July 10 (an audience with the pope - us and thousands of other people).

Nothing learned is ever wasted

The older we get, the more we wish we would have paid closer attention to history classes in high school and college. Who knew at sixteen that we'd be at the Roman Forum when we were adults, wishing that we could remember what they did among all those Ionic and Corinthian columns? Traveling through Europe and visiting major attractions before coming home gave Chloe an opportunity to use what she'd learned last year in school. She'd had to memorize all the popes and was excited to be able to use that knowledge to better understand what she was looking at while at the Vatican. That was also a good lesson in understanding that learning about religion is not necessarily religious education, and that it's impossible to talk about world history and avoid talking about religion at the same time. None of what she learned in school last year counts as prerequisites for required classes here (which makes school this year a little harder in the short term), but the general knowledge she learned has made her a more well-rounded person who is able to see things from a broader perspective than before she left, and gives her a sound base to rely on when learning about many disparate subjects.

School dazed

Chloe is really happy to be back at school with her friends. She is not happy to be back doing homework. In Spain they listened (or didn't) to the teacher, took notes, and went home and studied. Few assignments to turn in, mostly just tests. And certainly none of this:

Spend an hour alone in a quiet, natural setting. Open your senses and pay attention to what you observe, hear, touch, smell. What might be the essentials of life according to this place? See if you can learn what it has to teach.

You're guessing that this is a Psychology of Humankind's Place Within the Cosmos class? Don't be silly: it's American Studies. I can just see the head-shaking and muttering of Americanos back in Spain. Alicia's parents could not understand why we have school sports because playing games has nothing to do with school: school+sports=wasted time better spent on academics. When told that kids sometimes miss class to participate in those sports, they felt that the conversation had taken such a preposterous turn that there was no use discussing such nonsense any further. Imagine what they would think of the above assignment.

I have to say that I like Chloe's school and the teachers there. I know why they do this sort of thing (and it has a lot to do with the last seminar they attended). Teaching the whole student, engaging all the senses for a hands-on learning experience instead of rote memorization, etc. But this is my twenty-third year as the parent of school-age children and I'm just a little tired of assignments that ask the students personal questions that demand that they analyze their psyches in public. Other than that Chloe is an American, I'm not getting the connection between "the essentials of life according to this place" and American Studies.

The school day here is much more fun and Chloe is happy to be a part of it. Not just fun in the goofing-off sense, but in the interactions between students and teachers, extra-curricular activities, a much more relaxed attitude, the various teaching methods. She often lamented the amount of studying (reading and memorization) she had to do in Spain. But (of course, but), after last year she feels like many of the assignments here are not much more than busy work, that the students aren't trusted enough to simply study and pass tests to prove their success at remembering what they've been taught. She's also afraid that's a snobby attitude. And she's probably partly right on both counts.

One indication of Chloe's maturity: she's figured out that her year as an exchange student in a foreign country is a goldmine laden with buzzwords that come in handy when answering the many self-examination questions: grown, matured, other cultures, ethnocentric, tolerance, bigotry, broadened, acceptance, culturally sensitive, self-reliant. A twenty-minute walk to Hemingway Plaza in Pamplona is the source material for a five-page paper.

Back to life

The last morning to sleep in. Tomorrow it's 5:30 AM and out of the house by 6:30 AM. If Chloe is a minute too late she misses the ferry and the next one puts her at school almost an hour and a half after the school day starts and, as the secretary is quick to remind everyone whether they ask or not, "That's not an excused tardy!" It's been more than a year since she's had to be out of the house so early in the morning. Even worse, though, is that Steve now leaves for work before it's time to take Chloe to the ferry so now I'll have to get up early as well. I'm drawing the line at lunch-making, though. If he doesn't have time she can make her own or take one of my lunches and the kind her brother preferred - a few bucks to buy it.

This weekend she was with some friends in the land of Nothing To Do at Night. At 2:30 AM she and a friend who was in a South American country on exchange last year were a bit sad that almost everyone was already asleep. At 2:30 the night should be barely half over. There should be dancing and talking. But Chloe is very happy to be home with her friends no matter what time they go to bed and it's fun for me to be reminded of how nice and supportive they are of each other.

Tomorrow is a half day at school so she'll get to test out her new schedule, the one that has to include last year's requirements as well as this year's, the one where it's impossible to work-in the second half of chemistry (schedule inflexibilities are a downside to small schools). Because she was gone last year when she would have taken chemistry and pre-calculus she can't take physics or calculus this year. She gets academic credit for her year in Spain but it doesn't help her in specific classes. I don't know who to believe about the relative importance of that on her college admission chances. We expect a good but not stellar SAT score because she's missed a year of American knowledge. She won't even have a full year of chemistry. She's taking regular instead of AP classes where possible because she has such a tough schedule already (the principal all but did a song-and-dance routine to "Do not take AP. Do not take AP. Do not take AP. Do you want any sort of life outside of homework?" The principal is a big believer in the kids finding their passion, good advice that is not often given to high school kids.

Everyone says that college admission committees love to see foreign exchange on a transcript, but do they really? Does that excuse not taking physics? Or substitute for AP classes? The people who make such pronouncements have never been on a college admissions committee. She's not looking for admission to Stanford so we have to keep looking at the bigger picture.

An unadvertised benefit

One of the advantages of being bilingual: in the movie Anchorman, there is a sign outside of a Mexican restaurant. In big letters it says, in Spanish, "We spit in your food." Definitely worth a year in Spain away from home.

Not seventeen!

Today Chloe is 17 years old. One year ago tomorrow she left for Spain on what was one of the worst days of my life. Such a cliché, but it's hard to believe that was a year ago. Hard for her dad, too, who came home today with a small box. We had friends over for dinner and, from the kitchen, I heard,

"Did you buy Chloe jewelry for her birthday?!" That was news to me and brought me out of the kitchen in a hurry.

"I sure did. For my little girl's 16th birthday!"

"Uh, she's 17 today."

"No way. She's only 16."

We reminded him that she left the day after her 16th birthday a year ago. "But, no way, then I missed her whole 16th year!" Yeah, and that was quite the topic of discussion around here for some time: you remember, "not for a whole year?!" Now it will take him a while to come to terms with the fact that his youngest child, his daughter, is 17, soon to be a senior in high school, and soon after that to be away at college. I sense a theme of denial as well as a potential new title: She's only sixteen!

Among the many changes from a year ago is that she's getting birthday greetings in two languages from two continents. Another cool thing about exchange programs: Chloe now has friends at home, friends from her host country, and friends from other parts of the US who were in Pamplona on exchange at the same time and she's received birthday greetings from each group (in Pamplona there were only American Rotary exchange students, all girls). When we sent her away for almost a year I hadn't thought about the people she'd meet and friends she'd make from parts of the world other than Spain.