Cow Cow Cow.

A story:
I worked at a Jewish summer camp a year ago. I remember the Challah chant, where someone would yell "Cha!" and little kids would finish with "lah!" Then it gets silly, like "Chaaaaa, cha, cha.....Laaaaaaah, lah, lah." Get it?
I decided, in an effort to kill a little time on Friday, that we would do the "vaca" chant, which means cow. Simple enough. I say va, you say ca. But when I say va-va, the response takes on a slightly different edge. An online translator defines it like this:
caca f familiar
1 (excremento) poo: el niño quiere hacer caca, the boy needs to have a poo.

I lead over 20 second graders in the chanting "crap! crap! craaap!" and boy did they like it.
I was totally unaware until i noticed a few wide-eyed kids with their hands over their mouths. I'm still waiting to see if angry parents call me about my "teaching methods."

I've been reading in a book on how to teach the second grade, and one idea really made sense to me. There are two different classrooms. One has a teacher that stands at the front and because of some sense of authority or control, he or she demands that the kids work. Copy this, be quiet, read your book. Or, the teacher and the students can work on the same level, because everyone agrees that they want to learn. This allows the teacher to be a helper, moving about the classroom. This is what I want to do, but it is difficult. My class is cramped, and the students want to break free from their desks. And I only confuse them if we try to do an activity that doesn't involve copying from the board. I've heard that much of education here is copying and more copying. If I write fill-in-the-blank sentences on the board, many of the students copy the blank line and think they completed the task.
I'm realizing that much of the chaos in the classroom happens because they just don't know english. It's very discouraging to have most of your classes in a foreign language, I'm sure. I have to admire their creativity, though. They have mastered the technique of destroying pencils so they won't have to write. One kid even pokes holes in the screen wire windows and pushes his pencils out into the street. If they could just apply their creativity in other ways...
In order to build up their english, we're backtracking. This past week we did a lot of work with the ABC's and basic sentences. I feel like I'm making ground, because they are losing their inhibitions towards reading out loud and writing. I've made many mistakes, but another teacher here said hiring underqualified teachers is the only way that bilingual school's can run.

ps- Somewhere between the United States and Siguatepeque, suspended in mid-air, is a copy of radiohead's new album. I can only hope it will land in my mailbox.