Dia de los Muertos

Day of the Dead> is a Mexican/Spanish holiday honoring the lives of the deceased. The first I ever heard of this holiday was my freshman year in high school in Spanish 1. A bit of background on this. My Spanish teacher was HORRIBLE. She rarely had control of the classroom, she cried probably once a week in class because the students wouldn't listen to her. She would take weeks (and sometimes months) to grade and return assignments. We did a food unit and she left the leche (milk) setting on the table for 4 days before a student finally took it and threw it away. During the same unit, a student in the class threw one of the fruits at her. She spins around from the board and demands "who threw that?" The person that threw it had picked up the other piece of fruit to lauch it as well and simply sat there with his hand in the air, holding the apple and just didn't move. Apparently she didn't notice because she demands again "if someone doesn't step forward, I'll have to punish everyone" Then she turned back to the board and continued writing. The student proceeded to throw the apple at her again. Students would show up until after she took attendence and then leave the room while she wasn't looking to go to lunch early. She never figured out what was happening. Her comment always was "hm, I thought they were here, I must have done attendence wrong but it is too late now" She had "Pesatas" that she gave out for participation in class. Her student assistant took her master and made tons of copies of it and passed them out to everyone. Then, instead of participating, all we had to do was cut out 5 (you only needed one a day) and hand them in at the end of the week and we would get an A for participation. It took a few months, but eventually she figured out that no one was participating, yet we were all handing in enough pesatas. She bought a cutsie little stamp (I want to say Cabbage Patch Kids, but I can't remember for sure)and stamped the backs of all the pesatas she handed out. To combat this, her assistant took her stamp, brought it to lunch and stamped all the copies he had made. She never did figure out what was happening. There were 2 Spanish 1 classes and at one point in the year, we took a test. Spanish 1 5th hour did much better on the test than Spanish 1 4th hour. She decided to add a curve to the grades but curves the classes seperately. This caused the people in 5th hour to have a general cow because they were all very competative about GPA, even during freshman year. We argued with her, explaining that class rank wasn't broken up 4th hour and 5th hour and the freshman class was the freshman class, that curving the grades seperately caused some people to lose their spot in the class rankings and that wasn't fair. She was having none of it so one of the girls in the class announced that she wouldn't participate again until the grades were curved together. Several of her friends were in the class and backed her and the idea spread to the rest of the class. We all sat silently and refused to participate for nearly 10 minutes. At that point, she had asked several questions and had gotten nothing back except silent stares. That was all she could take and she broke down bawling and promised to fix the grades and BEGGED us to "please, please please just start answering questions again. It isn't fair for you all to sit there and not say anything" She did fix the grades and it caused several people to score over 100 on the test, but there wasn't a lot she could do, aside from just teaching and hoping we retained something without participating. 6 weeks before the end of the year, she was moved out of the classroom, into a large closet in the home-ec, where she did lesson planning. She was replaced in the classroom with a sub whose only Spanish background was the fact that she taught in Texas for a few months. We learned little or nothing that year and from that point forward, all the Spanish classes were remedial, trying to catch us up to were we should be.

Anyway, all of that is because somebody mention day of the dead and it reminded me of her trying to celebrate it with us. She made Pan de Muerto, which is "bread of the dead" and brought it in. We had only been in school a few months but we already knew she was totally insane. The bread is supposed to have licorice in it but she went totally overboard. The whole room reeked of it for 2 days. I wouldn't touch it and neither would most of my classmates. Afterward, we termed it "Death Bread" because it probably would have killed us if we tried to eat it!