Last week, as has come to be the norm, I found out about lots of days that I wasn’t working. After making the hour journey to work only to be told there was no school Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday, I went to the Projects Abroad office to insist (for the zillionth time) that I be given a project where I’d actually work. Much as everyone likes to give me a hard time about how nice it must be to have so much vacation, it’s actually incredibly frustrating. While it’s great to have occasional breaks, I’m here to work and I felt like that’s exactly what I wasn’t doing.
So after last week’s “I want more work!” saga (which included Skyping with my wonderful program director at Rice and some emails to the US Projects Abroad office), things finally appear to have taken a definite positive turn. Marielos, the PA teaching coordinator, talked with the teachers at my school to see what needs there were and how I could be helping. I told her I was willing to do non-English work if that’s what needed to be done, just as long as I was doing something…anything! She met with my teacher, Clara, who remembered what I’d told her about loving science and also told Marielos about my comfort level in the classroom with Spanish and the students. They paired me with a second teacher who is the science curriculum coordinator for the school as well as a fourth grade teacher. I started working with her on Friday. We spent the morning looking up different craft project ideas to teach the kids about recycling and making a overall lesson plan for next weeks’ science classes (I mostly watched since I really had absolutely no ideas what she wanted, let alone what kind of ideas I could come up with). That afternoon, we went through her regular class routine. Unlike Clara, who jumps from room to room in 35 minute segments, Lizeth has her class for a whole 5 hours and is responsible for all subjects except computer, PE, and English. I got to help with Math, Social Studies, and even [triumphant music] Spanish! I absolutely loved Lizeth’s class, more than any of the others I’ve met so far. I don’t know what my continued involvement will look like on the science side of things, but I’m optimistic.
That morning, Clara also left me with the class to myself. While it’s normal for her to wander off for 10-15 minutes at a time (doing I have no idea what), she told me she had to go to a meeting at another school, asked if I’d be okay leading the activity, and headed out. While I enthusiastically agreed to take the class, I didn’t really look at the exercise she’d given me first. It was just matching…with first graders…who don’t know the words…but who thought they did. Seven verbs and pictures can be combined in a lot of [very wrong] ways. By the end of the class, only about 5 of them had shown me the correct combination. The rest just kept showing me different incorrect iterations. After the first couple attempts, I even put all of the correct answers on the board and had them explain it too me, but their papers still looked like balls of yarn that an angry cat had attacked.
Not directly related to teaching (actually, not related at all), but last Tuesday was a great day at Playa del Coco. There were a bunch of us who didn’t have school and so we spent the day at another one of the million beaches within a couple hour radius of Liberia. We got to stay for sunset which was stunning. The link for the pictures is at the top of the last post.