One Month In

I’ve been incredibly busy, but time seems to be passing slowly. I feel settled in and like I’ve been here forever, and it hasn’t even been a month! Our three weeks of intensive Spanish class have come to an end. And not that I didn’t enjoy the class, the teacher, or spending time with my classmates, but I’m relieved. Just having to be somewhere from 8-12 and then 1-3 every day was exhausting, as 1 hour for lunch is barely enough time to squeeze in a nap. And plus we usually had to meet afterwards to either run our youth group or plan for it. And it also isn’t to say that the Peace Corps is giving us free time now as a reward for our improved Spanish skills. We had to make detailed schedules of how we would spend our time during this week, and any open chunk has been designated as “self-study”, a term I understand to include studying our grammar books, reading the newspaper, reading Peace Corps homework assignments, writing my blog, and practicing the guitar. I also shamelessly include an entire hour for “lunch”, followed by a 30-minute siesta every day. We have some wiggle room, too; our Spanish teacher told us that a weekly “jam session” to write a song in Spanish could qualify as self-study. I’m also planning to meet twice a week with my friends Caroline and Alba to discuss news stories and compare respective angles from the pro-government “El Nuevo Diario” and the opposition’s “La Prensa”. I’m so glad we’re doing this, because it forces me to find time to read the newspaper and inform myself. One of my favorite stories from today’s paper was about Justin Beiber vomiting during a concert. His comment: “Drinking milk was a bad idea”. (side bar: I had another slightly-comical Beiber moment when I asked my two host sisters, ages 11 and 14, about which famous Americans they knew, either actors or singers. They were silent for a few moments, so I prompted them by asking if they knew Justin Beiber. They both looked at me scornfully and informed me that Justin Beiber was, in fact, Canadian.) One striking contrast between news stories here and elsewhere is that there are many more graphic images. I don’t know if it’s because crime scenes aren’t cordoned off very well, or just different cultural norms, but I routinely see bloodied and mangled bodies on the nightly news. 

Last week was my first week co-planning and co-teaching in the local high school, Instituto La Salle. I think I mentioned in my previous entry that Caroline and I are going to be co-teaching with an English teacher named Claudia. Caroline is working with 11^th grade (the senior class in the Nica education system) and I will be working with 10^th grade. My first class was uneventful, mostly due to the fact that Claudia’s activity took up most of the time so I didn’t do very much. The second day of teaching was a train wreck of such improbably mishaps that it is comical in retrospect. I had prepared several “papelografos” for the class, which are large pieces of flipchart paper. Students don’t have textbooks, so we use these to write readings or questions for the students to copy, so the teachers don’t waste class time copying them onto the board. As I gathered my things to leave for class, I realized our puppy had entered my room and partially chewed up my papelografos. Fortunately she’d only gotten the top part, but there was no time to fix it, so I cut off the damaged area, grabbed some extra paper, and ran out the door. I managed to fix part of it when I arrived at the school, but I had no idea what the other page said so I couldn’t re-write it. So I was waiting, 3 minutes before class was to start, and still hadn’t seen Claudia, my co-teacher. I called her cell phone, and she was still at home. Oy. It’s usually all but impossible for classes to start on time, since there is a single bell to indicate the end of one class and the beginning of another, with no time allotted for teachers to wrap up lessons or move to their next classroom. But I’d thought the first class of the day would be a little more punctual. This proved to be a misconception, as the minutes passed and students were still streaming though the doorways. So we finally got class started, and halfway through the 90-minute block (I hadn’t even finished my homework vocabulary review) we were informed that there was an “acto” that all the students had to attend. Apparently these happen once a week, at a random time, and each class takes it in turn to present something. I saw dancing, singing, rapping, and the principal making some sort of announcement. No student in the back half of the crowd was paying attention. So class resumed halfway through my second scheduled 90-minute block, leaving us with half the amount of time anticipated. 5 minutes in, a teacher walked by and announced that Claudia had a mandatory meeting to attend immediately. Oh, and did I mention that my 4 fellow volunteers and my Spanish teacher were observing this class? Why they observe during the first week is beyond me. So Claudia abandons me to finish teaching the class, which I begin to do in a very flustered manner. And then I realize she has taken all the whiteboard markers and eraser with her. One student donated a marker and another a crumpled ball of paper to erase, until one of my friends rescued me by offering an eraser she had in her backpack, thank goodness. And well, somehow the class ended and I survived, and I have nowhere to go but up, right? The good news is that the students are generally well-behaved and quiet, though I am unsure about the comprehension level. I was shocked when, during my 10A class, Claudia opened with a lecture about paying attention and asked all students who were failing to raise their hands. 75% did so. What? That’s so many! Yet when I checked their homework this week, they had all written substantive paragraphs and drawn pictures as I had asked, some with color. Claudia had told me they rarely did their homework and were too lazy to study, but they did at least this one time; we’ll see if the pattern continues. 

On a side note, I was not the only one with epic blunders on the first day; we were all observing Caroline’s first class, and she managed to write all over the board in permanent marker, a fact she realized with horror when she tried to erase it. We all learned a useful trick that day: if you write over permanent marker with whiteboard marker, you can then erase them both. Something about the acid in the whiteboard marker ink. Yay chemistry!

Claudia is definitely the best of the 3 counterparts at our school. She worked previously for two years with a Peace Corps volunteer named Maria, and regularly tries to incorporate review games into her lesson. I came into our planning session yesterday with the idea of acting out scenarios related to helping the environment, and Claudia showed me the lesson plan that she had already started to write with the exact same idea. Great minds, I guess. I rarely see Claudia make a grammar mistake, though her pronunciation is heavily-accented. Again I wonder how much the students understand when I talk.

As for this week…well, we had been warned that only about 70% of classes actually happen, due to unforeseen interruptions. For this reason, the Peace Corps pushed us to start as early as possible. I initially scoffed at this as unnecessary; we have to teach 8-10 classes, but we have 8 weeks at 3 classes a week. What’s the hurry? Well sure enough, I got a call last night from Claudia saying both my block classes were cancelled because she is the head teacher of 11^th grade, and needs to spend the morning meeting with the other 11^th grade teachers and preparing for parent meetings. Since block classes count as 2 periods, of my scheduled 10 class periods I was supposed to teach last week and this week, I’ve only taught 4. That’s 40%. Wow. 

We’ve also been continuing to work with our Youth Group twice a week. We have a guide from the Peace Corps that tells us what type of activities we should be doing with them every week, but there’s still a lot of freedom for us within that framework, and we usually have one meeting each week where we can do whatever we want. Last week we did stations such as tongue-twisters, telephone, mad libs, and teaching them to sing “This Little Light of Mine”, which is apparently a very southern song, according to our two resident Alabamans. This week we have to give a 20-minute talk, and we’ve chosen to give it on why to learn English. We’ve set it up so they do most of the work, thinking about how English is relevant to their lives and why they should learn it. We hope that if they see the connection and relevance, they will become more interested; but maybe that’s unrealistic.

We’ve been attending Peace Corps workshops every Friday from 8-5 and Saturday from 8-12, and starting this week we’ll have a half-day on Wednesday afternoons, as well. Though spending an entire day indoors listening to presentations is not exactly my idea of a good time, especially on a Saturday, the information presented has been incredibly helpful and motivating, and the presentation format usually includes and interactive component which makes it more enjoyable and meaningful for us. Plus it’s the only time all 14 of us TEFL volunteers (“Tefleros”) are together, and there are always amusing stories. My favorite from two weeks ago was about how 3 volunteers went to a baby shower and had to play this game involving feeding each other baby food while blindfolded. The baby shower tradition has been imported recently from the US, a fact evident in its Spanish translation of “baby shower”, with vowels pronounced Spanish-ly. Another fellow volunteer, an atheist, announced one morning that her host mother and sister had put their hands on her shoulder and prayed for her first class for five minutes, because she looked nervous. Another volunteer laments that Nicaraguans are unfamiliar with the particular part of a pig that produces bacon. Etc.

Anyways, one of our talks from two weeks ago revolved around security, and was really eye-opening for me. First they went over protocol for blogs, personal web pages, etc, and I realized how many rules I had already broken. For starters, a disclaimer that my views are not in any way affiliated with the Peace Corps needs to be prominently displayed. Second, we are never to mention the exact town we live in (my second blog post is entitled “Diriamba”. And there is a picture of my home. Oops). Then we moved to cultural differences in interpreting the actions and words of others. Nicaragua is a very high-context and indirect society, meaning that words and actions carry different meanings that those within the society understand. This is a stark contrast to the US, which is probably the most low-context and direct society in the world, where we say exactly what we think, mean exactly what we say, and treat everyone as a social equal. But anyways, some of the cultural interpretations were shocking. Our first activity was, in gender-separated groups, to write a list of a) what our gender does to indicate we want to have sex; and b) how we know someone of the opposite gender wants to have sex. I’ll spare the details, because the most interesting were the ones that the Nicaraguan representative groups came up with. For example, asking someone if he/she is married or has kids means you’re interested. What? My heart sank, as I reflected on several conversations I had already had with various neighbors about their living situations. Oops. Prolonged eye contact means you’re interested. I remember one incident where I stared at a guy for a while, trying to determine if he was also a foreigner, until he noticed and got excited. Oops again, now I just ignore everyone. Getting into a car with someone means you’re interested. So I guess I’ll be walking a lot. Yup, still got a lot to learn.

We also had a fantastic session about classroom management, which made me feel so empowered about being able to run an efficient classroom that is different from all the others in the school. I have so many ideas, and it’s frustrating to think that there is so little we can do during this training period. The fact that I’ve acknowledged that fact in itself represents a big step, for I spent the first week stressed out that I wasn’t accomplishing enough. Then I talked to a volunteer from last year who worked with Claudia, and he told me there was nothing we could really do except co-teach by the teacher’s guidelines as best we could; we’d have to wait until we get to our sites to start any real changes. So I’m much more relaxed about co-teaching now, and consequently more pleased with the results. Plus the dog hasn’t eaten any of my supplies yet this week, another plus. We had another great talk about how to make our own classroom supplies, since we surely won’t have any, nor the funds to buy them. A lot of classroom supplies come from recycled materials, which I of course fully support. We will be using a lot of papelografos, which can last longer if we tape the corners so the paper doesn’t rip when we hang them up. We can also cover select portions with clear tape, kind of like laminating, to make them like white boards. Old cereal boxes make good backings for visuals, and used potato chip bags can be used to decorate and make things shiny. I’ve already bought myself all the essentials for being a teacher: glue, scissors, two kinds of tape, permanent markers, whiteboard markers, whiteboard eraser, colored pencils, and a pencil sharpener. I’m ready.

Things continue to go well with my family. I get along really well with my two sisters, Andrea and Yelba, and we have an evening ritual of taking the dog out for a walk. Though I suspect they only want to do this because there are always adolescent boys hanging out. But we need to be back by 7pm, because that’s when my telenovela “El Clon” starts. I think I wrote about it in a previous post…get in touch with me if you want more details, the plot continues to change dramatically. I also go, when I can, to watch their dance class 3 times a week. At first I just went to support them, since they were beginners, but then I realized that their classmates were essentially professional dancers. Diriamba is known for its traditional dance called “El Gueguense”, which has been declared a Cultural World Heritage, and these are the people who perform it at international venues where one must pay great sums of money to see them; but I get to watch rehearsal for free! And last week, to my delight, I discovered that one of Dona Yaya’s sisters owns a beach house, so we went to visit for the day. After passing through some gorgeous rolling hills, we arrived and walked out to the almost-deserted sandy beach. I spent a good while boogey-boarding in the gloriously warm water (why can’t the ocean in Maine be that warm?), then went back to the house and played in a small fresh-water pool in the backyard with Yelba and Ana (age 3). We ate a great lunch, though it did involve  watching Yelba dramatically eat 6 fish eyes, then lament that there weren’t any more. Then I took a nap in a hammock. A good day, to be sure. 

We’re excited for next week, which will be Practicum Week. From what I understand, this means we will be shipped off to a different part of the country to shadow a volunteer for a week to understand what our lives and responsibilities will be like. We also have to plan a few classes, which will count toward our required total of 8-10. I already will have 6 by the end of this week, so I’m good. I’m excited to see a different part of the country and get a better feel for what the life of a teacher is like. Also, as Alba just reminded us, we will be informed of our site assignments in 3 weeks and 1 day. Not that we’re counting.

I’ve been continuing to run with Caroline (almost) every morning, and though I still feel like dying on a daily basis, my watch tells us that we’re improving. We run to the neighboring village of Dolores, which is probably about 3 km from us, then walk for a few minutes, then jog back. Well, I jog; Caroline runs. The first week or two I despaired of keeping pace with Caroline, but then I successfully stayed with her one day at a pace of 14:50. She picks up the pace a little every time, something I would never do if I were by myself, and today we arrived in a blazing 13:39. Was I gasping for air? Yes. But it’s still a great feeling of accomplishment. We heard a rumor that there is a half-marathon in a few months somewhere in Nicaragua, and we are hoping to run in it. Though I am not even going to try to keep up.

A fun fact about Nicaraguan television: we get NBC! So thus I found myself last Sunday, after a day of bucket bathing and hand-washing my clothes, curled up in my bed watching the live broadcast of the Patriots game, in English. One point for globalization!

That’s all for now, I guess. Keep in touch! J