Dia del Estudiante

Guatemala has more holidays than I care to count. Today, I believe is Labor Day in the States but here we are celebrating students all over the country. It´s either a CA thing or all of Latin America. My two schools were fighting over who was going to get me on this day as Mondays are office days (even though Im almost always at school). One school had a disco going (what you know as a club) while the other school was going to a TuristCentro where thered be soccer and swimming. As much as I wanted to get down with my students, I went to the piscinas. Played soccer but didnt swim. The teachers each brought a plate of food and we had a cookout. The students brought their own food and cooked also. About half of the time there, the teachers were concerned with one student who you could say is the stereotypical punk rocker/emo. He has one of those chin piercings and it seems as he is influencing other students (there was A LOT of black worn on this bright sunny day). So I am going to try to talk to this kid because apparently he´s been kicked out of a number of schools and that is how he ended up there. Obviously, I don´t see his punk rockness (if you want to call it that) as an issue but he probably should get his grades up and we can´t let others fall. So I have no strategy for talking to him but I think it will start something like this, ¨So...you like Rancid, eh?¨Yeah. That´s all I got. Teachers and parents here though have a very defined idea of what normal behavior should be, disregarding the fact that they are adolescents and that´s what they do, stupid things, figuring out who I am kind of things, trying out this and that type of things. I mean I think back to middle and high school. I went through so many phases. In middle school, it was mainly the chola phase, with the dark lipliner sporting the various basketball jerseys with sports bras underneath and I was ¨in love¨ with a boy named David, clearly involved with the Latin Kings. Then came high school, pseudo preppy phase, wearing the Aeropostale and madcrushing on Bryan McNair...soon fell in love with Dan, turning me into a little Deftones fan. Although I guess I didn´t need Dan for that because Deftones own on their own. Then I had a whole indie rock thing going. Today I am an amalgamation of all these things. We try things out to figure out if they fit with what is inside. I am still somewhat of a little cholita, Deftones still makes me smile and I still dig certain preppy clothes. Ahh..being a teenager.