"I wanna go to Macy's!" "God, why do you say such random crap all the time?"

The past week has been all kinds of crazy, from hitting Portland for my second weekend, to working at the school bookfair, to being a translator for parent-teacher conferences, and getting a new student.

1. Portland

Once again, I'm loving the fact that I live less than 2 hours from Portland, and got to spend a weekend there hanging out with Andrea, Lauren, Liz, and even Wyatt. At one point I was literally surrounded by friends from practically every part of my life, from elementary, to high school, to college, to the trailer life. It was pretty sensational. Of course, the weekend was also packed with sampling lots and lots of fine Portland cuisine: my personal favorite was eating grilled cheese sandwiches in an old school bus, though drinking dutch chocolate pudding ("VLA") out of a milk carton (or watching Andrea do it) was also a highlight. We also got to visit a couple of breweries, I think I sampled a total of 14 different Portland beers that weekend. AND I got to drink my first Starbucks peppermint mocha of the season. Merry Christmas to me. (Christmas sidenote: there is a mysterious wooden christmas tree on the side of the street on which it says, 'Christmas in the Mountains--December 5th!' What does it mean? I don't know, but I'm excited).

2. La llegada de Bernarda

So I lost Noe, my 17 year old student who I just started working with, to Mexico. Yep, lost another one, but this time I gained a student, and she has a lot of work ahead of her. Apparently Bernarda just showed up at school at the end of last week with no paperwork or evidence of educational background. She also has zero English, and was put in freshman classes even though there's no way of knowing how much she really knows. Apparently her older brother is her guardian, and when he was being interviewed, he was very hesitant to give much information that could be useful in placing her, so she is still an enigma. Maybe I can get something out of her.

Anyway, I've mostly just worked with her in math class, and she seems to be ok at that (that usually seems to be the ESL kids' strongest subject). She's been put in all the same classes as another ESL girl, so I guess that girl can translate for her when I'm not around. I'm excited about the challenge of working with her, but I'm automatically skeptical about how long she'll be sticking around.

3. Mossyrock seems to love taking their half days, and this past week, 3 of the 5 days were half days so teachers could do parent-teacher conferences. Since I didn't have classes to help out in during the afternoon, I staffed the bookfair. I actually thought it would be a lot more exciting than it was, but it was mostly just sitting around and occasionally working the cash register. On Thursday Liz read Harry Potter aloud to me while we waited to be done, that was one way to stay entertained. I would say it was cool to see kids get excited about books and reading, but they seemed more interested in computer games, comic books, etc. I got to see some class-A parenting too while sitting in there, with parents constantly telling their kids to shut up or threatening them with punishments if they didn't do this or that.

4. Translating at conferences, on the other hand, was a real trip. I was a bit nervous because I don't think I've ever officially been a "translator" before, only done it casually. For the most part, the parents seemed grateful to have me there because they really only spoke Spanish. The teachers would just go through the report cards, what each letter meant, etc., and I would explain that. I still don't think they really got what the components of the report card meant, but they got the gist. The hard part was, for the majority of these students, there were lots of subjects in which they were very low, so I had to be the one to explain to the parents that they their kids really couldn't read, spell, or do math. The main thing I had to communicate was the importance of the kids practicing reading at home, but that's hard to imagine them doing since they can't read with their parents, seeing as how the parents themselves can't read a word of English. The parents also seemed the most concerned with their kids' behavior, sometimes even more so than with academics. But behavior was not usually an issue.

Though I don't like delivering bad news, and am concerned that there's so so much work to be done to get these kids up to where they should be, I really enjoyed being the translator. I would definitely do it again (and surely will have to on various occasions).