Update+3

Notables for the day:

1. My field site is sitting on a fault line. I felt two earthquakes today, the first while fixing my morning coffee around 6:30am, and the second while sitting in an English class with a group of third-year students. The second lasted several seconds longer than the first, and the kids were ready to panic as the teacher yelled, "Todos tranquilos!" The tremor stopped, and once everyone heaved sighs of relief, nervous laughter broke out. We looked at each other, stunned, and a boy and a girl on opposite sides of the room laughed until they had tears rolling down their cheeks, remembering the look on the face of one of their peers, who'd turned in his desk, ready to sprint for the door, saying, "Dios, dios, dios..." The teacher finally sent the girl into the hall because she wouldn't or couldn't compose herself. []

2. Unemployment is up this month all across Andalucia, except in Almeria. Reports attribute this to the agriculture and construction sectors, which evidently hired more people this month than last. []

3. I pitched my photography project to a couple of fourth-year students who'd already done a first interview with me. I suggested that they might even use the photos as a fundraiser for their year-end trip, if we were to print them out and sell them to community members. One of them brightened at the idea. The other said, "Mi madre no compraria nada de eso. Me diria, 'Para que voy a comprarme una foto cuando puedo sacar mi movil y echar la misma foto?'" I'm leaving it up to them to decide how far they might take this idea, but the student's response indicates the extent to which artistic and cultural events--those bits of big-C culture?--are not really a part of people's everyday lives here.

4. I visited the senior social center across from the high school today and spoke with the social worker about doing interviews there. She said she would ask permission from Town Hall and get back to me. I think that talking with seniors would help me fill in some gaps in the local history. Yesterday in the paper, I also read that a professor in Sevilla just published an oral history/collective biography of farmers along the coasts of Granada and Almeria, and I want to track that down.

Questions/dudas: - Am I improvising too much? It feels almost instinctive and certainly logical to want to talk to the old folks in addition to the young folks--to get a wider, deeper perspective on how life has changed in this area. This is currently the most compelling narrative, in my opinion, but I don't want branch out so far that my study loses focus.

- Because I'm in an educational setting, when I speak with faculty I find they want to hear what kinds of recommendations I would make for improving things, based on what I'm learning. I don't feel at all qualified to do this, and I don't think my study necessarily speaks to the practical issues that concern them the most: conduct, discipline, academic performance. I would like for it to have some practical applications, but I don't know right now what those would be. This makes me feel like I could be in over my head.