People pay me to speak English.

Although it can get tiring traveling around the city from one class to the next, my students never fail to find ways to entertain me. It's very cliche, I know, but sometimes I feel like I learn just as much from them as they do from me.

For example, on Monday and Wednesday evenings, I take a bus to the edge of the map to teach a small group of businessmen. This is the same group where one student accidentally "outed" another in the middle of class. Awkward. Anyway, we recently had a new addition to the group, a young guy from Madrid who speaks amazingly. So, the new guy, who we'll call Antonio (because that's his name), asked me about popularity in the US. He had been to New York and seen plenty of movies where the main goal was to be as popular as possible by playing football or at least dating someone who does. I told them about a typical American high school hierarchy, and as I was explaining it, I was thinking how much I couldn't believe it's actually true. How is it that, for decades in the US, your acceptance among your peers has been based on how many goals you score or where you buy your clothes? At Concord, most of the football players and cheerleaders were well-known, everyone sat with their own "group" at lunch, we had the stereotypical mean girls who spread rumors about each other and everyone else, and we paraded the elected Homecoming King and Queen around on floats like they were true royalty. At Brandywine, they even had an end-of-the year superlative to decide who was the "Most Desirable". Come on, really? There are a lot of stereotypes about Americans that are off (we're all Bush-loving, Big Mac eating reality TV show contestants), but this one is actually pretty true, at least in my experience.

The point is, I never realized that the quest for popularity wasn't a universal, international phenomenon. My student told me that, in his high school, people would rather hang out with their own friends and stay relatively anonymous than to try to draw attention to themselves by being the star of a team, por ejemplo. Everyone knows who they know, there aren't cliques, and all this energy isn't wasted on trying to be or be respected by the chosen few. It made me wonder how people would be different in the US if they didn't have to spend 4 years (or more) trying to conform or facing the consequences of rebelling.

On a lighter note, it's been girls' week this week in my favorite class since the one guy is in India on vacation. We shared travel pictures, from Rosa's mind-opening trip to Africa to Magda's adventure in New Zealand, and it was great to get them to open up and speak in English without having to concentrate so hard. During the next lesson, I was teaching them about false cognates (words that look and sound the same in 2 languages but have different meanings), and they kept laughing to each other. After a few minutes, they shared with me that the word "cognate" sounds like the slang word for a certain part of a female's anatomy, so these 50something women were there giggling like little schoolgirls. Good times.

It's time for me to take a nap, teach one more class, then start my 4-day weekend. I'm very grateful for the multitude of Spanish holidays. I leave you with several pictures of BCN graffiti, one of my new fascinations. It's interesting that a lot of it is written in English...