coming back

Unfortunately, it didn't work out for me to complete my final week of teaching this week. I got sick with a cold this weekend and it turned into stomach issues (surprise!). I went back to the doctor on Monday (visit #5) and he said that my stomach issues were related to my cold. I decided to cut the week short, come home, and get better.

You go on trips like this for an adventure, and sometimes you get one that you hadn't planned: the perpetual stomach issues, the Tropical Storm Agatha, two nights sleeping on a hospital floor, an erupting volcano, giant inexplicable holes in the capital city, and a sizable earthquake that woke me up the other night.

Mostly, I was sick for most of this and it made everything difficult and frustrating. I was only able to teach for 2 weeks out of a possible 5. However, I learned a lot from those two weeks and from the totality of the experience itself.

Right now, I'm thinking about how my Spanish has grown. It's hard to quantify, really. But, I've noticed a difference in my confidence as a speaker. I saw this video, earlier this year, by Amy Walker, who is an expert at speaking in different accents. She says that, in order to really get an accent down, you have to be "fascinated by it," to love the melody of it and really appreciate and delight in the idiosyncratic sounds of the language. I tried to do this mostly by active listening and by watching Spanish television and listening to Spanish music.

This week, I noticed that, when interacting with different people (pharmacists, tour guides, waiters, clerks, etc.) I was confident and relaxed. I knew that I would understand them AND be understood. I can't say I had the same confidence at the end of my experience last time. Although I felt capable of communicating clearly, I had to sort of psyche myself up and prepare my brain to speak Spanish and listen closely. I didn't have to consciously think about it this time, I just knew. I knew all the words necessary to get my point across in any situation and I also had fine-tuned my hearing to pick up what people were saying.

This is a huge difference and perhaps a significant threshold that any language learner enters. For example, when a young reader starts to feel confident reading aloud, a huge shift happens internally. The task of reading changes from being a struggle and a sweat to being a diversion and a vehicle for exploration. I feel excited to be entering into this new category, but I also am aware of how much more I have to go.

end of week 2

I'm waiting to go on a trip to Lake Atitlan right now and wanted to right down some quick thoughts.

1) The girls in my afternoon class are starting to warm to me, I think. I'm seeing smiles and respect, where I was seeing attitudes and misbehavior, previously. One of the interns suggested that I sort of joke with them, because they like to joke and kid. I had thought about the same thing, but at that time they were on my bad side (which is not helpful if you want to be an effective teacher). I decided that I needed to be flexible and loose and roll with what they give me, but also keep them on task. It's worked. I actually have received a few smiles and I'll take that as one of the week's major victories.

2) The conceptual activities in math continue. We were working on factors and multiple common factors, yesterday. The students often like to copy one another and this poses and an obvious problem for learning. For this math activity, I observed students working together, but in a way to check their understanding and discuss procedures, not just copy one another's answers. I also, for the first time, had a student who really got it help me explain it to other students. I do this all the time back home, but I wasn't sure how it would work in this classroom. He helped out other boys mostly, but it was a start!

OK, off to Atitlan.

A better question

I initially planned to study the impact this experience had on the two students that accompanied me on this trip. I knew that my prior experience helped me to gain fresh insight on how children learn, how I learn, and how we teach. I was excited to observe their thought processes, reactions, and insights. When they left, I felt I had no other choice than to deeply explore and document my own experience (heuristic research).

Recently, I'm starting to realize that a much more interesting question and subject area is studying what the other volunteers learn about teaching and children, during their experience. The people who volunteer for this project come from numerous educational levels, age groups, countries, cultures, occupations, etc. During my last experience, I taught next to a 19-year old woman from England who had not even started college yet. With no instructional training, she was a great teacher. I learned a lot from her.

I noticed this repeatedly that people who were not teachers and had little experience with children or teaching, came to this project and developed skills necessary for successful teaching. This project seems to level the playing field. I, the supposed "expert," feel on par with the rising junior teaching across the bamboo wall that divides our classroom. I like this feeling. I'm part of a team, not a hierarchy.

Last Friday, I had an interesting conversation with a volunteer from Australia. She's in her 40's and is taking 6 months to travel around Central and South America and volunteer with the GVI projects. She doesn't have kids and she admitted to me that she had never taught before or worked with children. She had been teaching for 4 weeks, and was telling me about some of the things that she was doing in the classroom to improve behavior and learning. She talked about being consistent, being firm but fair, not letting kids get away with things, introducing more hands-on activities, finding interesting songs that the kids loved, etc. The classrooms are humble and spare: no technology and a hardened dirt/concrete floor. In order to help her 1st grade students learn letters, she used chalk and had them right all over the floor, use their fingers to write it in the air, and to practice it in their notebooks.

Everything she shared with me was something our Department of Teacher Education at Lander tries to teach our students. We make it part of our curriculum. If one of my students shared with me what Karen shared me, I would feel proud of what we had "taught" her. This brought up a question I had been formulating for some time: how is it that someone with no experience or training, can learn so much about quality teaching in 4 weeks?

I had an intuitive answer, but I needed someone else to say it out loud today, for me to believe it. Over the lunch break, I had a talk with one of the interns here, Lynda. Lynda is an IT manager from the UK who, after working multi-million dollar projects, comes down to Guatemala and works as a volunteer intern at the school for 6 months or more. Its quite a contrast. This is her third time back to Guatemala and we talked about some of the things we had learned about teaching, ourselves, and this group of kids. During our conversation, she said something that I hear many of these teachers saying, "Well, I don't know anything about teaching, but..." and then proceed to tell me what she does (which shows a definite intuitive understanding of what good teaching is).

I told her that I was curious about her statement and how impressed I am with how quickly people rise to the occasion and find very successful (and sound) pedagogical strategies.

Her answer was quick. She said, "I think it's a heart thing. If you REALLY want to teach these kids, you'll do anything to find something that works."

I couldn't agree more. It completely aligned with what I saw in Karen's experience. You could tell she loved the kids, was engaged in this program, and wanted nothing more than to find things that would interest her kids and teach them successfully. Perhaps her lack of "teaching knowledge" was an asset. Because her perceived lack of experience and pedagogical knowledge, she felt free to try anything to be successful and knew she had to work hard to do it. If all of our students came out of our program with this disposition, we'd be happy.

This is a big question, how is it possible for people to intuitively teach with success? In this project, it is easy to just concentrate on teaching. All of our meals are taken care of, we don't have to drive anywhere, don't have to mow any lawns, clean the house, walk the dog, etc. You just get up in the morning, have your prepared breakfast, walk to the bus stop, get in the van, go to school, teach, come back home, plan a little, eat, and go to bed. The immediate distractions of home, do not interrupt us here.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts and questions about this topic and hope to have more in-depth conversations with other volunteers while I'm here.

more Math

In math today, I had the students look for prime factors (the lowest prime factors of a number, i.e. 8 = 2x2x2). This was the next page in the book that I'm using. Unfortunately, the book has a really confusing method it proposes. After staring at it for a minute, I could barely make sense of it and feared that my students wouldn't fair much better. I shared it with another volunteer here, who just graduated from college with a degree in elementary education. She said, "Why don't you do a factor tree?" And I said, "Great idea!"

So, after reviewing prime and composite numbers, I introduced the idea of a factor tree. To my surprise, some of the students got it immediately. Without mentioned or suggesting they use the shapes they drew to represent the factors between 1-20, I saw a student go back through his notebook and check the factors for 9. I was really excited. I could see my plan of laying a conceptual foundation working. The student didn't see this as an isolated task, as they often do, he connected it with his prior learning (see pic above).

The school day consists of a morning class and an afternoon class of different students. For the morning class, we have 2 1/2 hours of instructional time. I usually split it between two subjects. For the afternoon, we only have 1 3/4 hours. Therefore, my afternoon class does not get the depth of the morning class. Plus, it's in the afternoon, which apparently is a universal energy-zapper for young children. Morning is just a better time for learning, it seems.

Another reason for the success of my morning lesson was the student's participation in the math games. As I started my lesson for this afternoon, I was filled with confidence from the successful morning class. I began by reviewing what we knew about prime and composite numbers. You could hear the crickets. Nothing. Perhaps its just the afternoon, I thought. I threw out numbers, between 1 & 10, and asked if they were prime or composite. It was 50/50 for each one. They were obviously guessing. It was then that I realized that I had not introduced the math game to them. Because of the limited time, I guess I saw the math game as a "fun" extension and not an essential. Standing in front of the students, who could not tell me about prime or composite numbers, I realized how crucial introducing that game was for my morning students.

Vitamin C

Juegos (games)

During my last trip here, I relied on students copying and completing a lot of work from the big white board. I would spend maybe 4-5 minutes introducing a topic, and the rest of the time I would circulate around the classroom, working with individual students (mostly repeating the instructions I said at the beginning). This type of teaching is not very exciting (for the teacher or student). Due to my limited Spanish, I felt that this was my only choice. Since my Spanish has improved significantly, I've tried to create activities that are more interactive. Today was one of those days. I explained things and asked questions, gauged their responses and calibrated my instruction accordingly. It felt like I was actually teaching.

I think this means that I'm able to be more like the teacher I am in my native language. Because I can speak the language with much more confidence, I am also able to project more of my personality, which is important in teaching (if your personality is appealing to children).

One of the activities that I emphasize in my Math Pedagogy course is the importance of math games in math instruction. I teach my students how to use a simple deck of cards and teach their students how to play games that have mathematical significance. Today I introduced a new math game. It was simple, really. You have two teams and one student volunteer. The student volunteer holds and shuffles all the cards (with the face cards taken out). Two students come up to the front of the class, the student volunteer shows them a card. The students must either say "prime" or "composite" and they only get one guess. The first student to answer correctly gets a point for their team. The kids loved it, and they really started to at least recognize which numbers were prime and which were composite.

This activity, of course, was a practice activity that came after we had explored prime and composite numbers from a conceptual/foundational level. Last week the students explored the factors between 1-20, in visual and factoral form (see post below). Today, I had them search for prime numbers in their list of factors that they worked on last week. We talked about patterns we noticed in the factors between 1-20 (Which number has the most factors? Which composite number has the least? etc.).

After our game, we had recess (la pausa) and then started language arts. After students finish their language arts work, many of them ask to read. Today, a few students asked for the playing cards, so that they could play the prime & composite game. I was surprised by this request, for some reason. I guess I'm not always confident that they really enjoy everything I give them, like "they're only doing this to humor me"--which is NOT something I think about in my teaching back home. This only strengthened my belief in simplistic beauty of math games. These kids really loved it, and the ones that played it, deepened their knowledge of prime and composite number facts (at least to 10!). I'll take that as a victory.

Spanish and Metacognition

One way this experience informs my way of understanding children better is through my attempt to improve my Spanish. Because, in many ways, I am at an elementary level (upper elementary now!).

I've been interested to note that a lot of the conversations the volunteers have is about Spanish, how they're progressing, what they're doing to improve, and what works for them. Yesterday, my roommates (both volunteers) and I were talking about our Spanish lessons. I take 3 one hour sessions after school each week. Sara prefers 2 hour sessions, because she doesn't feel that she gets anything from the 1 hour sessions. Rachel felt that having a session during the week was too distracting and preferred the idea of taking a 2 hour or so class on the weekend. This type of conversation is typical and indicates that we all are trying to get better at Spanish (i.e. learn) and are trying to think of the best strategies to get us there (i.e. metacognition-thinking about how we think).

I am curious to learn when this type of thinking begins in children, and when/how we can facilitate young children to start thinking about how they think and what works best for them. I know I do a lot in my math class to allow for different ways of thinking, but I'm not sure that I focus on helping students acquire a better understanding of how they learn best. This to me seems so essencial. It also seems to me that a group of students should be serious about learning in order for these types of conversations to happen. I remember having these types of conversations with my friends in middle school, particularly when we talked about big projects or tests. However, these conversations would mostly focus on the number of hours we spent studying/preparing, not on our strategies.