Week 1: Getting to Know You
Monday
Gaston told me to be at the school around 7:30, so I set my alarm for 6 this morning. This turned out to be unnecessary, because Everett and his friends sang me awake in the pre-dawn hours once again. With a stomach full of butterflies I showered and dressed, and had a small breakfast of bread, jam, and coffee. Coffee here is something interesting - everybody I´ve met drinks instant Nescafe, even in Quito, but at least there they had actual milk to mix it into. Here on the coast there´s only a yellowish milk-powder, which turns into lots of little gooey clumps when you try to mix it into the water. It reminds me a lot of Bill Cosby´s sketch about lumpy cream of wheat. But I got it down, and set out down that fateful road to the school.
Felicisimo Lopez School is . . . really not like any school I´ve ever seen in the US. It´s all behind a ten-foot cinderblock wall, which the students have painted murals on, and you enter through a gate of corrugated tin. The school itself is a collection of bunker-like pastel buildings, each divided into two or three classrooms. The buildings have neither lights nor windows - instead, the upper sections of the walls are open metal gratings, so the air circulates easily and the sun comes in for light. Since it´s pretty arid around here, all the rooms are dusty, and it´s very easy for bugs to get in.
This is going to be interesting.
The school gates open at 7:30, and the students and teachers wander in and sort of mill around in the dusty little yards until the bell (a horrible roaring buzzer-thing) rings at 8 or so. Then the students line up by grade in the courtyard in front of the main office (a two-story building much newer than the others), and have what´s basically a morning assembly - hearing announcements, sometimes singing the national anthem, and doing stretching exercises. When that´s done, they all go to their classrooms, the youngest grade first and the oldest last.
Since nobody told me anything about where I was supposed to go, I went to find Gaston, and he brought me into one of the classrooms and gave a small introduction. After that, I was left to my own devices, for the rest of the morning.
Yes, you heard that right. The school day runs from 8 AM to a little past noon, and I was with this one class that entire time, not counting the 30-minute recess at 10. I really hope this isn´t the standard schedule - never mind that I can´t keep 40 kids entertained for that long (especially kids whose language I don´t speak that well), it´s cruel to the kids to make them study the same thing for 4 hours, even with a recess in the middle.
I´d planned to start the lesson by teaching the phrase "My name is _ and my favorite animal is _ ", thinking it would be a way for me to learn names and I could get them interested by teaching the English words for animals. For an example, I said my name was Katherine, and my favorite animals were loros, parrots (I´d even worn earrings shaped like parrots for this lesson).
This was when learned something else - each person saying something one after the other isn´t a familiar concept in Ecuadorian schools. I wrote the sentence on the board so the kids would have a reference, but rather than say it with me to learn pronounciation, they copied it into their notebooks and came up to show me their penmanship. When I tried to get students to answer verbally, even in Spanish, they seemed lost. If the class had been smaller, I would have tried to go around and help each one, but that´s almost impossible with 40 kids. Eventually I just gave up and let them copy what I´d written, then fill out the answers in their notebooks.
After this fiasco, I thought it would be a good idea to go back to basics, and teach how some letters have different sounds in English. Once again, "say it with me" was an unfamiliar concept, and aside from a few half-hearted whispers, all they would do was copy what I wrote and then come show it to me. If this is standard protocol, I don´t think lessons will go very well, since you need to speak a language to learn it.
To make matters worse, it was the first day of school, so almost all the kids were rowdy and talkative, and I had to fight to make myself heard. I tried what the info packet suggested, and rapped on the board with my marker for attention, but that didn´t do much good. I´m really not sure how to cope with this - I can´t force the kids to respect me.
By this point I was exhausted, and it was only mid-morning. To kill time until I could leave, I wrote the words for numbers and days of the week, pronounced the words without expecting the kids to speak, and let them copy what I wrote. This is a bad way to teach and I know it, but really, there wasn´t much else I could do when I couldn´t even get them to stop talking and running around.
Finally class ended, and I fled back to Casa de Flor for lunch. When asked how things went, I replied along the lines of "Difficult, but it´s only the first day. I´ll learn." I really, really hope this will be true.
I spent the rest of the day in my room, studying Spanish and trying to think of new strategies. I did emerge for dinner, but beyond that, not much else happened.
Tuesday & Wednesday
Events were almost exactly the same as Monday´s, except that I was in a different classroom and I started right away with different sounds in the alphabet, not bothering with "My name is __ and my favorite whatever is __". The kids were just as rowdy as those in the first class, and from what I can tell, this isn´t just because it´s the first week of school. Ecuadorians tend to be very free with their children, so the little ones aren´t used to being corrected, and I´ve noticed that the other teachers tend to be loud and harsh by American standards. I don´t think I have the capacity for that - it´s hard for me to shout, I don´t know what discipline procedures are allowed, and in any case I don´t want the kids to be scared of me.
The only improvement was that the school took pity on me, and stationed a teacher outside the classroom to keep an eye on me and bail me out if things got too rough. I do appreciate this, but I also know I can´t keep turning to them every time the kids won´t obey - they have their own work to handle, and I need to have power on my own.
In other news, I made the jaunt back to Puerto Lopez in search of an Internet cafe. It turns out the connection here is horrifically slow - I was online for several hours, and didn´t manage to upload even one photo. This is not good.
Thursday onward
Thursday started with an embarrassment. I got ready as usual and headed off to school, only to find it completely deserted except for the janitor. He told me that there weren´t any classes today or tomorrow, because the teachers had gone off to Manta (a big city a few hours to the north) for a conference. Of course, no one had breathed a word of this to me.
Upset, I went back to Casa de Flor, where even she had known there weren´t going to be classes, yet hadn´t said a word when she saw me all dressed and heading out. I know it´s not the Ecuadorian style to be direct, but come on people, I´m a clueless gringa - you need to tell me things.
On the up side, I only had to work for three days this week instead of five, and I got to spend the rest of the time thinking up lesson plans, studying Spanish, and hanging out with Vanessa and Denise. Denise was still very determined to show me their collection of movies, so I had a unique experience: watching The Simpsons Movie in Spanish when I hadn´t even seen it in English. I now want to see it in English, though, because I liked it a lot. We also watched Alice in Wonderland, and I did my best to explain how that movie had disturbed me deeply as a child, since we lived near a big forest and it was easy for me to imagine being lost and scared like Alice. I also won laughs by crying out melodramatically, "Las ostritas son muertas!" ("The little oysters are dead!")
I finally made good on my offer to make Barbie clothes for Denise. She has a fairly good collection of cloth scraps, and I looked through them, thinking of what clothes they could be and asking her opinion. I ended up getting started on a plaid flannel shirt for Ken and a pair of denim shorts for Barbie, but had to put them on hold until I could go buy some Velcro.
I bought said Velcro on Sunday, at the same time that I went to meet with Marianne to discuss mailing stuff from the US to Ecuador, and to pick up some teaching materials that previous volunteers had used. These turned out to be a few storybooks and some excercise books matching endings and consonant sounds with pictures. Those aren´t much good to me now, since the kids don´t know the English words for the things in the pictures, but I might be able to use them later. I also discovered something else - Puerto Lopez gets frequent blackouts, which means no Internet during that time. I´ll have to take this into consideration.
Denise was very happy with the shirt and shorts, and I hope to be able to make pajamas, a tuxedo, an evening gown, some tank tops, and more with the cloth she has. Waspinator the chick came to visit us while I was sewing, and I learned that his real name is Junior (pronounced yu-nee-or), and he´s the only one of the chickens with a name. I´m taking their word for it that he´s a he - I´m not sure how you tell with a baby chicken. Denise tried to get him to play with her Barbies, and I joked that he could play an ostritch, or a velociraptor.
I forgot to mention that the chickens aren´t the only animals who live here. Dogs and cats aren´t allowed, since they might hurt the chickens (not that it stops several local cats from lounging in the back yard), but Denise has a pet turtle named Juanita. Juanita´s about the size of a big football, but flatter, and she lives in a plastic bin in the kitchen, eating fish bits, except when Denise lets her out to roam in the house and yard during the day. Denise has tried a few times to get Juanita and Junior/Waspinator to play together, but I think you can guess how successful that´s been.
Tomorrow I leap back into the fray. I need all the luck and good will I can get.
