The Land of Lost Things

First off - Lottie I deleted your comment and I am SO SORRY. I couldn´t read the pop up box in Spanish, but I got your comment and I´m glad to know you´re checking it out.

I’m a bit behind here with the updates, so this blog will be about last Thursday and all the exciting stuff that happened, and in a couple of days, I’ll post about my site visit, which was very interesting and helpful.

So, when I got here, I could talk for maybe about 30 seconds before I couldn’t talk anymore. Last Thursday, I gave a 45 minute charla IN SPANISH. The secret is to have the kids do as much as humanly possible. We talked a little bit about organic and inorganic garbage, and then we played a game with two teams where the kids had to come up to the front of the room and say whether the example I pulled out of the bag was organic or inorganic garbage. It was a lot of fun, and I feel like all of our charlas went really well.

A bit of background. Each of us is currently assigned to a different class at the school. We observed for a week, and then we each did a dinámica with our classes. Well, sort of. Two of our classes weren’t there that day, so we practiced with other random classes, and then another class had their doors open and really wanted to play the game too, so we did it with their class just for the extra practice. Finally, a charla. We chose a topic that would be relatively easy to explain, and an activity that had the kids moving around a lot. We had one charla on Tuesday, and then the other three on Thursday. Mine was the last one on Thursday, and I was very nervous, since the three previous charlas all went really well. Jenny especially had me rattled because she used to be an elementary school teacher and she has that type of animation that kids are just attracted to. Here she is a giant Barbie-esque magnet. The advantage of being last was that we had the routine down, and the three people who weren’t the main teacher helped manage the class and prepare and such, which was a big help.

But back to the method of this madness. The Peace Corps really stresses participatory education, and our purpose in being in the schools in our training sites is to learn from our teachers what’s working for them, and help them learn more participatory educational methods, since most of what happens now is largely didactic. It’s a cross between a teacher training program and a teacher exchange. We have this great Guía that has a lot of lessons, projects, and games that can be adapted to a lot of different subjects, and we are expected to share that guía with the teachers we work with, and eventually work toward a co-planning relationship.

The nature of participatory education makes giving charlas in Spanish both easier and more difficult. Participatory education means that students read all the papelógrafos we prepare (big white sheets of paper), answer lots of questions and get up and participate a lot (big surprise). There’s not a lot of standing at the front of the room explaining information. This is good. However, participatory education means that I need to be able to understand what all the different students answer to all these questions, which can be difficult as each student has their own little version of their language (as you linguists out there know). Before giving the lesson on garbage, we looked up all the words we could think of that the kids could give as common answers, but sometimes a student will still throw you for a loop, and you just have to figure out what to do while you’re in the situation. Participatory education also means the kids are often up and moving around, which requires management skills. This was always something that was difficult for me at the high school level, mostly because I felt ridiculous telling kids who were almost grown that they needed to stop throwing crayons at each other. It’s easier with the younger kids to feel like they need the guidance, but the additional complication is that we need to learn a whole repertoire of classroom management commands in Spanish. Are you sensing a recurring theme? Our current language level is probably our biggest challenge. Spanish makes things harder, but I also keep thinking about what an advantage it will be to come back to the states and be a fluent Spanish speaker with a teacher background. There are a lot of places in the states where that will really come in handy.

As usual there are pictures:

After teaching all afternoon, we then held our youth group meeting where we gave our first charla on destrezas para la vida, or life skills. This one was about decision making skills, and we split the kids into groups and they had to act out a scenario and decide what steps they would take to make a decision in that situation. Then we talked about the possible steps and which ones were the most important. Once again, as participatory a method as possible. I’ve also mentioned in the past, the two age groups we have present in our youth group. Once again, this worked to our advantage because we were able to assign one older member to each group with two or three younger members. The older kids worked really well with the younger kids. They explained when we couldn’t, and they helped them come up with a skit. It’s like having junior camp counselors around. The older members of the youth group have shown a lot of dedication and have been a real asset. I only hope that over the next two months we can convey to them how crucial their help has been.

Also, on Saturday before we left for our site visits, we went to Catarina, a nearby touristy town, and ate pizza and looked at Laguna de Apoyo, which is a caldera lake. I also bought some earrings and presents from a host family in San Juan de Orienta. In San Juan de Oriente, just about everyone makes pottery, including the national representative of pottery for Nicaragua, Luis Perez (check spelling!!!) lives there. They make this beautiful stuff out of clay (barro in Spanish). Here’s a picture of one of my favorite pots and some pics of Laguna de Apoyo, and there are more posted at Picasa. I’ll try to get some pics of all the furniture stores in Masatepe, as well as some pictures of San Juan de Oriente.