For the second and third years students, this week has been a review of the English alphabet, vowels, consonants, capital and lower case letters, and cardinal numbers up to 1000. Overall, the students performed fairly well and remembered a significant amount of material from preceding years.
It was also an exciting week because there are a lot of activities available for reviewing / learning the alphabet and numbers. Sharon has several great sets of flash cards, pictures, etc. I also had my students create a two-sided bingo board in their notebooks. They made a big square with 25 little squares in side of it on the front and back of their paper. Inside the squares on one side of the page were capital letters placed in random order (one square had two letters), and on the other side of the paper were the matching lower case letters. The teacher draws letters out of a hat (in my case I used the flashcards) and the first student to get five in a row calls out bingo.
Aside from the teaching and planning, I had two really interesting experiences this week. The first had to do with the incident I wrote about last week involving the whole-class demerits (this happened with my first class, segundo curso B). Ester, who had been gone the two weeks before do to a last minute “directors” meeting in La Ceiba, had finally returned to school. During her time away many disciplinary measures were put on hold (as she is the primary discipline giver at the Colegio). One child in need of discipline was Francis, the girl who had told me the week before that everyone in my class hated me now.
In the middle of my class, Sharon came and asked Tom if he could take over teaching so I could go to the office to talk with Francis and Esther. I was a little nervous about this because I knew it meant discussing her words tome the week before, and I knew she had spoken impulsively to me. When I walked in the room, Ester and Francis wer sitting at a table across from each other – tears flowing down both of their cheeks. Ester said to me, “Kelly, Francis has something to say to you.” In short, Francis wanted to ask my pardon and forgiveness for her behavior towards me. She said she had spoken impulsively and she has a problem with holding her tongue. She also said she wanted to work on this problem and did respect me. After Sharon helped a little with the translation, she asked me to tell Francis how she had hurt my feelings and the affect her words had on me. This was also hard because everyone was in tears around me. So we went through the situation, she apologized again, and I said of course I forgave her. At this, she got up to go to the restroom.
Ester said Francis wrote her a letter last year to tell her that she was the first person to ever say anything nice about her before in her life. Ester was the first one to tell her she was beautiful or that she was intelligent, and she wanted to be friends for life. Francis’ father died when she was little and her mother moved to the States to find work, leaving her across the river with her Grandmother (a common phenomenon in these parts). In order to go to the Colegio, she lives with her mom’s cousin and family in El Naranjo, a village on this side of the river. I think she finds little love and encouragement at this house, and seeks it in other ways.
After my talk with Ester, I went to find Francis in the restroom. I gave her a hug and thanked her for her apology and told her that it is always harder to hold your tongue than to speak. It is also harder to listen than to talk. I thanked her for working so hard in my class, told her how smart I thought she was (as she has the highest grade in her class), and encouraged her to lead others out of love and service instead of bullying. She has been much better in my class since then, though she still has a very outgoing personality!
The second interesting experience of the week happened early Wednesday morning. As soon as I walked into the office, a education administrator was talking with Earl, Sharon, and Ester. He told them they had to cancel school for that day, and the following two days (Thursday and Friday) and that Ester had to lead a seminar for all the teachers in the river valley about the directors meeting she had been to the week before. They said they had already paid to bus all the students and teachers and they couldn’t simply call off school at the last minute. The man, Miguel, was less than satisfied with that answer and siad that it must be done and all the other teachers are already together in Yaruca. Ester said they had to have more advance notice than that, and the man insisted she must have known a few days ago. Anyway, as the students were already at school, we couldn’t cancel classes for that day.
At opening ceremony Ester informed the students that school was cancelled for the next two days and tests rescheduled, etc. She was very frustrated, and it seems like a normal thing for the Honduran education system. Well, the next day when we arrived in Rio Viejo to go to the teachers’ seminars together, it turned out the all the other teachers in the river valley decided they weren’t going to come because our teachers hadn’t shown up the day before. It all turned into a crazy mess, and the teachers from our school ended up being the only ones to attend the seminars Ester had prepared. It sounds like there is dissention amongst the schools in the river valley, and it also seems like our school is part of problem. Although it all seems confusing to me now, all I can make of it is that the other schools are jealous of all the resources, etc. that we have.
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