Teaching in Guatemala

coming back

2010-06-23T14:19:00.001-07:00

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

2010-06-19T06:36:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-16T18:59:00.001-07:00

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

2010-06-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-15T18:40:00.000-07:00

Juegos (games)

2010-06-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-14T05:26:00.000-07:00

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.

teaching for conceptual understanding

2010-06-11T16:07:00.001-07:00

I'm out sick with stomach stuff again, today. Quite irritating. Illnesses can really put a damper on the energy and enthusiasm for an experience like this. I was sick a lot when I taught elementary school. It wasn't very pleasant then, either.

For my math planning, I was given a math workbook, in Spanish, that mirrors the Guatemalan curriculum. I am supposed to cover what is in the book, but have some freedom with how I approach it. This is quite fortunate because this book is like most math workbooks: they demonstrate one way of solving a problem (algorithm), then provide a list of number problems, and expect the students to solve them in that manner.

The section of the workbook that I am supposed to cover is currently on factores and divisores. From looking at their math work on Monday, I was able to assess that many of the student had algorithmic knowledge of math, but perhaps do not have a solid foundation in the concepts behind these algorithms. I philosophically believe that its crucial for students to have conceptual understanding of math before they can truly be proficient in it.

On Wednesday, I was able to teach a conceptual lesson on the factors of the numbers between 1-20. My goal was for them to visually see and explore the rich relationships between factors and divisores. The lesson is really simple. All of the students have small, blank, centimeter grid-lined math journals. I had them use the grids to draw representations of the factors of each number. For example, the number "6" can include 1x6, 6x1, 2x3, or 3x2. The picture above shows how one of my students represented "6" (you can also see 8 and 9 to the right).

For my first class, this lesson went really well. They were up to the challenge. After I introduced the concept, I constantly floated around the room as they showed me their work. They like to either show me their progress or ask me if they're doing it right. I usually either say, "Excellent! Keep going!" (but in, Spanish, of course) or direct them to something they might be missing.

I found myself giving these kids a lot more clues than I would normally do to kids in the States (certainly more than I do my college students). In fact, I have a reputation amongst the elementary education majors in my college of never giving the answer. I believe that it's important for students to learn how to problem solve on their own and to develop these skills in such a way that they become confident on how their brain works. In the real world, we are confronted with many "problems." Should I buy this car? Why or why not? What is the interest rate? How much do I need to make to support it? In these instances, you don't normally have a math teacher nearby to ask, "Teacher, is this right?"

So, my dispersal of clues and hints in math instruction is much higher down here. I currently attribute this to 2 reasons: 1) My Spanish is intermediate and I do not have the command of the language to provide nuanced responses to students who may be struggling with a concept, 2) I am still learning about their culture and experiences and how I can best teach them. They seem to be very used to a teacher-centered model of classroom instruction (i.e. the teacher is all-knowing). I don't advocate for this model, but I must accept that it is what the students know and that in my three weeks here, I cannot undo years of teaching practices that run counter to my inclination. Since these kids are used to teachers supplying clues or answers, I feel it is my job to stretch them where they are. I feel I would overwhelm them if I expected the same amount of independent exploration as I would my students back home.

I took about 40 minutes of video of this lesson and have been looking at it. I mainly wanted to provide an indication of what it looks like and sounds like in the classroom. I took more than 1,000 pictures last time, but I'm even more excited about the possibility of video.

The video below is of me giving feedback, and a bit of coaching, to a student. I am giving feedback on a students representation of the products of 16. As you can see, she successfully found 16x1, 1x16, and 4x4. For those of you that need some translation, I basically said, "Very good, I see you have 16x1, 1x16, and 4x4. Are there more?" (Hay mas?).

Second Day

2010-06-08T20:22:00.001-07:00

The school now has a small room where they keep supplies and a library of about 200 children's books. Last time I was here I saw how much the children loved reading books. I had picked up a Spanish copy of Curious George at the Houston Airport. I was surprised by how much they got into reading. The punchlines of Curious George and Amelia Bedelia land quickly with the kids here. I acquired some more books while I was here and left them at the school.

Today, I was standing outside the school's "library" during recess. A girl in another class asked me if she could come inside and pick out a book. I said, "of course," and watched her look through the selection. She came out with 2 books, one of them a well-used copy of "Curious George." I asked to look inside the book and recognized my inscription to "los ninos de la escuela."

First Day

2010-06-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

Lots of thoughts on my first day back. First of all, it felt like I never left. It was like riding a bike. I just jumped back on it and began peddling as before. It was quite refreshing to be busy and doing something that I feel competent in.

I learned a lot from my prior experience last time with the kids, the school, the curriculum, etc. My expectations were appropriately calibrated for this experience.

I gave my students a lot of work. They had to copy a lot of things from the board and answer questions related to those descriptions. I did this on purpose, so that I could walk around the room and get to know my students. Every teacher knows the importance of the first day of school. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, as they say. I made sure that their first impression of me was a teacher who is in control, proactive, calm, happy, and is trying to learn their names.

The only rough spot of the day was the girls in the afternoon class. I'm teaching 5th grade students (ages 11-13). These girls are a lot more interested in the boys in the next classroom, than in doing work in my classroom. Once I separated them, they worked better, but there's a group of 4 or 5 of them that are as thick as thieves.

It's safe to say that the attitude of these girls irritated me. I really don't like when students play around too much in the classroom. It irritates me. Every good teacher has patience, but there are some behaviors that "get their goats." I was aware of my irritation and kept it well hidden, by staying consistent with my rules and interactions--staying light and relaxed enough to laugh at a joke or two that one of them made.

At the end of the day, it occurred to me that as a teacher, you are not paid to hold grudges. Even if a kid is an absolute terror in your classroom one day, you must wipe the slate clean and approach that same kid fresh the next day. It may not be fair, but it's absolutely what you have to do. It's some sort of Jedi trick to be learned.

Cumpleanos

2010-06-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

Friday was the first day back at school. It was not a "teaching" day. Instead, it was the monthly celebration of birthdays (cumpleanos). Each month, the whole school celebrates the kids who had a birthday that month. There's tostados with frijoles, pinatas, and presents. It's a lot of fun as well as a great photo-op.

I got to meet my students for the first time, too. I'm teaching 4th/5th grade. I also reunited with a few of my previous students. Some of them will be in my class this time, as well. One of them, Victor, acted like he didn't know me at first. I went up to him and asked him if he remembered me. He nodded. I asked him what his name was (I forgot most of the students names, not faces). He said, Victor. I said, "Victor Antonio?" remembering his last name. At that, his adolescent demeanor melted and he smiled.

Not all of the students came to school on Friday, but I got to meet some of my new students. During dismissal, the students had to line up according to their class. That was my first introduction to them. My first impression is that this age is dealing with a big boy/girl issue. The boys call the girls names, get them frustrated, so that they'll chase them around. It works the opposite way, as well.

Corpus Christi

2010-06-04T07:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a local commemoration of Corpus Christi--a Catholic commemoration of the sacrifice of the body (corpus) and blood of Christ. These sorts of things are quite colorful, as you can imagine. Each church commemorates it differently. In Antigua, lots of people bring in fruits to the central park and sell them.

It was quite festive, actually. In mid-morning, the congregation leaves the church and walks through the streets of the town following firecrackers, drummers, carrying candles, and singing songs. People place grass clippings and flower petals (see above) in arrangements for the procession to walk over.

Finding empathy

2010-06-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

As I eagerly await my return to the school (today!), I have been reflecting on what I learned during my last experience with this program. I really felt that last time, I gained a lot more empathy to my students--particularly young children. I may explore that a little bit more, but I've already addressed it.

As I've stated before, I've been dealing with some stomach issues. I've been to the doctor 3 times. It's a pretty quick (and inexpensive) process, but it's a doctor's office nonetheless--you want to get in and out of there as fast as possible. All of these visits have been conducted in Spanish. My Spanish is good enough for me to explain my symptoms and to comprehend what the doctors say. However, I'd say that there is a percentage of what the doctor's say that I don't get or simply interpret the wrong way. I do my best to ask them to repeat something if I don't get it. I may even repeat what they say in my own way to make sure that I'm understanding everything.

As a patient, you want to know exactly what's going on with your body, what you should do, and what you're being prescribed to take and why. I did my best to understand everything. However, after four days on the latest medicine, I'm better but not 100%. In the middle of the night last night, I woke up worrying, "is there something the doctor said that I didn't understand? Could I have explained my condition better?" If was basically a freak-out.

After a while, I felt that this must be a bit how ESL (English as a Second Language) parents must feel when they go to school for a conference or to a doctor's office for a consultation. It must be terribly frightening to not be understood (and understand) something so crucial as your child's health. Clear communication is so important in these instances.

Fortunately, I'm feeling better today.

Tropical Storm Agatha

2010-05-31T20:25:00.000-07:00

Guatemala received a lot of rain from tropical storm Agatha. For a hint of the damage, check out this frightening sink hole. The heavy rains caused flooding, more than a hundred deaths, and significant crop loss. More info here.

The government of Guatemala is canceling school this week and the GVI schools, where I am teaching, will be following that guidance. A lot of the kids are getting exposed to viruses and bugs because of the flooding, cold weather, lack of clean drinking water, etc.

We were told that one student in one of the schools lost his father and three siblings in the flooding. I don't know any more than that, but it seems so unimaginable and avoidable, this kind of loss. I really can't comprehend it. We were also told that many of the students' families crops have been ruined. Most of these kids have parents who own (or use) plots of land and grow corn and other crops. They don't make much money from this, but it's all they can do to earn money.

What do you do when you lose you're only source of money? It's simple, really. You don't eat. Many of these kids deal with starvation on a daily basis. Again, I can't imagine it.

As depressing as these pictures, anecdotes, and thoughts are, they are part of the reality of many of the world's children. And they help explain the context with which I will be teaching in very shortly (hopefully).

This podcast, from the NPR show "This American Life," profiles the situation in Haiti and the efforts of NGO's and local people to escape poverty. A lot of the same things apply to the situation here in Guatemala. It has really informed my view of the difficult decisions involved with alleviating poverty in developing countries.

Lift off

2010-05-31T15:03:00.000-07:00

So, I've now been back in Guatemala for 2 weeks now. The first week was spent going to Spanish school. The second week was spent fighting traveler's stomach. This week, I should begin teaching at the school. We were supposed to teach today, but because of a tropical storm, the school is closed.

Week 1: Spanish school

Each day, for six hours a day, I talked and completed exercises in Spanish with my teacher, Sylvia. Sylvia was my teacher from my last trip here and I was delighted that: 1) she was still teaching at the school and 2) that I was her student. At our first lesson, I could tell that my Spanish had improved tremendously. She even said so.

I was in a completely different place than I was 2 years ago when I went through this exact program. At that time, I barely knew how to conjugate verbs in the present tense.

I was given a new workbook for "Intermediate Spanish Speakers." It's a book of activities that the Spanish school has self-published. I was excited to be labelled "intermediate" and took some pride in that designation.

The first days were pretty easy. Sylvia quizzed my knowledge of irregular conjugations of verbs and various terms in Spanish. I completed this exercise with surprising ease. Those first two days, we went through various exercises. Most of them were reviews of terms I already had a decent grasp on. It kind of felt like the first day of school when you're a kid. The teachers basically review things you learned last year and you feel pretty confident ("I'm a 3rd grader now and this stuff is EASY!").

The third day was a bit different. The energy that I had on the first two days seemed to be missing, along with my immediate and ready knowledge of Spanish words and phrases to explain what I wanted to. Spanish at my level still consists of translating words from English to Spanish. I feel, with my practice, that I've learned a number of shortcuts and the limitations of my ability to communicate. It gives new meaning to the term "intermediate." My brain works as an intermediary between English and Spanish.

I don't "think" in Spanish yet. However, there are some signs that I'm sticking one foot into fluency. Repeated exposure to certain phrases become embedded in my brain and come forth immediately in speech and thought. For example, I find myself say, "Creo que" and "Creo que si" frequently. They mean, "I think that" and "I think so." I'm surprised by how often I used both of this phrases. They're very useful and they roll of the tongue easily (I don't have to search for them).