By Walter Agnew Moore II

In Mexico— 14 June 2003

I teach a TOEFL class every Friday night. The TOEFL is a long bubble-test that checks your ability to speak and understand English. My students are mostly people with plans for grad school in the US or Europe, and they have to make a high score on the TOEFL to get accepted.

My job is partly conversation, partly grammar review, and partly giving them lots and lots of practice TOEFL tests.

I couldn't understand why they miss so many questions— they are all bright, their English is decent if not spectacular, they are highly motivated, and they always realize why they got something wrong when we go over the answers.

I decided it must be the stress of the test itself. We discussed this, and they agreed. In fact, we decided that I would try to give them *more* stress than usual on the practice tests, so that the actual TOEFL would be a skate.

So, we started doing like this: If the practice tests say they are supposed to get 50 minutes, I give them 40. I open the windows so the jackhammer from the construction site is good and loud, and I stalk around the room doing my best imitation of a drill sergeant: "You will *not* fail my TOEFL test, private! The standard is 49 out of 50 correct! I allow you to miss ONE question on my TOEFL because only GODDD is perfect, and you are manifestly not GODDD. Quit eyeballin' me boy, you got 29 minutes left, MOVE MOVE MOVE."

They were digging it. But it was time for a break, so last night we ditched the tests and went and had Conversation Practice at La Turca restaurant, where beer is two-for-one all day long. For 2 hours we kicked back, and they talked in English 95% of the time.

WHAT MY TOEFL CLASS THINKS ABOUT THE WORLD AFTER 3 OR 4 BEERS:

THE USA: "Why the hell do you call yourselves 'Americans', it's like you think you are the only ones? We are sitting in North America right here, we could just as well call ourselves 'Americans'!"

I promised to shoot off a letter to George Bush about that, and they were happier. But then I said, "OK, Mexicans are from Mexico, Canadians are from Canada, Brazilians are from Brazil. But I am from the United States of... America, so there you have it." They agreed that "Unitedstatians" would be a weenie name, and allowed us an extension to come up with something better.

FRANCE: Could be a great country if everybody wasn't so afraid of making mistakes.

IRELAND: Drunks, the lot of em.

ENGLAND: See "Ireland".

AUSTRALIA, ANY OTHER ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRY: See "Ireland".

CHINA: Not able to hold their liquor, but not their fault, their bodies don't have the right enzyme to process alcohol.

JAPAN: Aw, they just copy everybody.

AFRICA, MOST OF EUROPE AND ASIA: No real opinions expressed.

SPAIN: Nice place to visit, but Mexico is better. General agreement that the level of Spanish spoken in Mexico was far higher than that spoken in Spain. As my memories of Spain Spanish are of people trying to say 20 words a second without moving their lips, I wholeheartedly agree.

ARGENTINA: Surprising level of hostility towards Argentinians. Said to be terrible snobs with nothing to back it up. One woman liked the Argentine accent, but was shouted down by others who said "that sorry bad-Spanish fake-Italian accent had to go". One student relished the day that Argentina should ever challenge Mexico at anything, because if they did, a smack-down was in the works for those uppity folks.

I would have learned more, but we paid the tab and left.

 

 

In Mexico—15 June 2003

So yesterday I was sitting on the couch working on an exam, watching the clouds move in, and I thought, "It would be nice to get a little rain".

FOOMP. All of a sudden the roof over the atrium was gone. Then the rain started.

I figured better a little wet on me than a lot of wet all inside the house, so I grabbed the ladder and took a hank of cord and dodged out back up the garden wall onto the roof.

The drops were coming down thick, wind still gusting. There is a sort of steel cage over the atrium, and there had been fiberglass panels, held down by heavy steel beams. "No need to tie them down, they are heavy", had said the land-lady.

Now the fiberglass panels were all over the roof, except for one that had completely disappeared, kiting halfway to the Pacific by now I suppose. The heavy steel beams were here and there wherever the wind had tossed them.

I scrambled around on the cage over the open roof, a monkey in the rigging, reassembling the missing parts as best I could with rain beating sideways, lashing the panels and steel beams back down with cord while lightning crashed a quarter-mile away.

Then I decided that standing on a flat wet roof amidst a forest of metal during a thunderstorm was not a career decision, so I tied the last knot and went scuttling back down.

When the rain stopped an hour later, the black clouds were gone and you could see the volcano from the roof.