Back to school

This is wierd, I haven´t studied to this extent for many many years, but after the last year of stagnating at work it really is quite refreshing to be challenged again and learn some new things. I guess its even easier when your classroom looks like this:

I am currently enroled for 3 weeks at http://www.sanpedrospanishschool.org with a brilliant maestro called Julio, and living with a family up the hill in town for complete imersion style learning. His style of teaching of chatting all day then remembering that we should maybe write a verb or two on the board suits me down to the ground, as you learn so much by speaking constantly without the parrot style memorisation normally associated with learning.

Normal day is up at 7 for breakfast with the family, then in school from 8-12, quick lunch with the family then back to school to teach (well, ish, was meant to be teaching them long division today but do you know how to do that?! my answer was ´adults use calculators´) in a volunteer project for proper poor kids from 2-5, despùes another hour of class followed by either a lecture on Guatemalan culture or salsa classes, dinner with the family at 7 leaves my brain like jelly but I´ve learnt more in a day than I would in months of classes in london! Its not all dossing around on beaches out here you know...

A little tangent back to the world of work seems apropriate now to explain where I´m at with my study: a wise women once explained a kind of learning curve graph to me, but for the life of me I can´t remember what the axis´s were, think it was something like ability/ knowledge or vice versa. But in essence the red area where I am now can be sumorised to ´a little knowledge is a dangerous thing´.

Today it really applied as after a week or so of study I have got a vague grasp of the language and lost my initial inhibitions of keeping to simple things like ´hello´, and got some rather strange looks when I supposidly asked if I could sleep with my neighbors cat.

p.s. if you´re reading this then please remind me what it was all about, I was listening honest ;-)