robertjerl wrote:
I taught most of my career in East Los Angeles (grades 7-12 at two schools), 95-98% Hispanic students and most of them Mexican-American (my wife is from East LA). One year at the Senior HS I got in a "mood" and before school on the morning of May 5th I took down the calendar from the bulletin board and replaced it with a sheet of poster board with 5 of the little squeeze packets of mayonnaise glued to it. Now my classes opened with a 5 minute "Free Writing" exercise-stream of consciousness writing whatever you are thinking about followed by 10 minutes of silent reading (I had school supplied class sets of the same book with one on each desk.) The first thing they had to do was put the date on their Free Writing paper. Every period I got "Where is the calendar?" My answer was "The date is on the board." It took a couple of minutes in one or two classes but at least one kid always caught on and counted in Spanish, uno, dos...cinco while looking at the packets of "mayo". I got a lot of groans etc. and at least one kid told me not to give up my day job for a career in comedy. And 4th period, just before lunch, a kid tried to get me to give him the packets - they were having cheese burgers for lunch and would only let each student have one packet of mayo, mustard or ketchup and he liked mustard with lots of mayo mixed on his burgers.
I taught most of my career in East Los Angeles (gr... (
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