Revisiting

Day 46.

So I´m in Orosi and mildly lonely. I saw Natalia sitting in a hammock out front of Montana Linda. Natalia was my spanish teacher during orientation, shy but very bright (she spoke to me about CAFTA that first week). She smiled to me from her hammock atop the small but steep hill, smiling for a long ten seconds before I recognized who she was. Her smile was really what I needed, a small reassurance that I make an impact. Up I went, kissed her on her right cheek as is custom here and ought to be everywhere, and began to excidedly tell her how I´d ran into another N. American in Puerto Viejo who had been to Montana Linda for Spanish classes and had been a student of hers for the week. Having no memory of him, she shrugged her shoulders, which indirectly made me feel better than maybe it should have. We talked about my town, my spanish, and I asked her about her daughter, reassuring her that I will vote for her when she runs for President in 40 years, if I so happen to be an expat by then. What a quiet but bad ass smile she has. Its a smile that forces you to ask. I love Orosi but it´s full of ghosts today, like going back to Bath would be for me, I can no longer view it simply as it is. Memories walk the streets with me, like I´m living in a double exposed photo. I have expectations and emotions attached to people and to OTIAC from Orientation and so on. I feel too quiet here, and even if all the volunteers were here I´d feel the same but suddenly right this instant I´m having rushes and flashes, snapshots shooting across my mind of the open OTIAC windows and the fog laced mountains and Emily and all of us just trying to hold each other up and that crutch we mutually supported and shared that was utopian and is now gone. Its gone for me and I wonder if it was by my own choosing. This experience these 10 weeks, all of it, emphasized by my current location and unwillingness to sleep again in the bottom bunk where I slept the first week seems anything but fluid or linear. I remember vivid images but where has the specific day to day gone? Have I gone too Macro, looking for moral lessons in all? Maybe now, in Orosi, I´ll have my reorientation, meaning that I must simply keep a keener portion of my eye focused on details.

This time, the plywood in this room seems shiny and I´ve only really noticed spaces in the house. I wondered for a minute about the sky blue ceiling and why they pointed it out to me the first time and if I´d failed to understand just how remarkable it may be to them to have a celing in place of vaulted ruffled tin. I feel numb in my return to Orosi, severely more numb than I would like, but I´ve also been tired all day and was out till 3am with Mikey and Cindy and Karol. There is a level of certainty that was not here before, which has rendered me more businesslike in my visit.

...that was my journal entry last night, laying on my side and writing on a bunk bed made of wooden planks.

I´ve written so little about teaching in the Telesecundarias that rereading some of my entries, it actually seems more like I´m here on an anthropology fellowship than a volunteer teaching program officially aligned with the Costa Rican Ministry of Education.

Thus. Revisiting.

My class rules, introduced on my first day:
1. In class, we only speak English.
2. ¡Errores so tranquiles! (mistakes are OK!)

I´ve since severely broken one of those rules, but I absolutely embrace and encourage mistakes as THE most effective form of learning.

7th Grade.
Huge class! Upwards of 40 kids. It´s been a tough class to work with because of the dual nature of the relationship I´ve developed with them. Out of class I´m their friend, and almost always and anywhere a walking audience for their travelling talent shows. The difficulty has been reconciling this necessary part of my knowing them with the need to be a stronger disciplinarian in class. I have 10 or so students that pay absolute attention at all times during that class and I want to always teleport them to a place far off in the woods where we can sit around a small campfire and they can take perfect notes while I teach with the heightened focus they deserve. Class moves slowly out of necessity, and I never stand still. I once brought pictures from magazines to teach possession, and handed them out for keeps and for in class use to my quietest students. I skip and roll around the room, crouching down in front of desks and tables, allowing the shy ones to whisper in my ear, ´this is a watch´, or ´that is a shoe´, then springing up and amplifying the answer, shouting and when I´m feeling funky, singing! We occasionally use the telesecundaria videos that are mandated for use by the governemnt, but the sound is muffled and the general experience is much like I imagine it would be were I to hold class for 40 children in a stretch of grass, 10 feet from the main runway at an international airport. I write a lot on the white board, pick kids up and use them as living props, and we always always play games such as memory (using root forms of verbs and progressives as matches), telephone (which I hold to be the single most effective TEFL game of all time, encouraging teamwork and cooperation, self initiated learning, student to student instruction, patience and persistance, and would you know it a few minutes of tranquility!). I do not yell in class. It is a reactionary and powerless form of discipline. OK, I yelled once, but I might as well have been yelling in English to Costa Rican children. Instead I stand in silence. Quickly, the students who want to learn are up and out of their seats, yelling at their peers to ¡callense! I love leaving problem solving up to the kids. 7th grade I would say has the highest relative level of English of all my grades.

8th grade.
The hallmark of this class is boys who make absolutely no effort to even try to understand what I say in English, and thus do anything they can to create diversions, and girls who sit in groups and paint their nails. There are a few who sit their looking somewhere between interested and completely lost, and then there is Ana, who sits directly in the back of the horizontally rectangular room, wears a dark blue sweater over her light blue uniform with her hair in a perfectly attended ponytail, leans forward ever so slightly and hangs on every single word I say, absorbing everything. I get into zones sometimes where for a minute or two, I only teach to her. She´s the model of attentiveness, and I want to give her a pedastal to sit on and force everyone to watch her methods. Not to be outdone, theres also a group of really energetic and intelligent girls that sit next to her and thrive on competition, always trying trying guessing and sometimes knowing the answers to my sometimes difficult grammar questions. Through the use of excessive competition and Total Physical Response (body language, acting) I´ve been able to capture and engage this diverse group. We recently covered comparatives, a week in which I had different embarassed students join me in front of the class of 35 to compare and contrast who has the biggest legs, fattest neck, and longest tongue. Leo´s tongue is abnormally long, and in what is perhaps the upset of the year, proved to have a tongue ridiculously longer than my own. It was a bit of a set back, emotionally, to be honest. I just didn´t see it coming. I mean, I can stick my tongue in my nostril! Who in North, South, or Central America would have thought that could be beat?

9th Grade.

Started out so so good, and are currently testing my patience with their inexplicable level of apathy. I say inexplicable, because they have English tests in October which they must pass, or else they repeat 9th grade. The tests are not easy to say the least, and test reading comprehension, knowledge of past, present, and future tenses, synonyms, antonyms, and thats only the start of it. There´s a broom that sits near the door, and I want to occasionally smack about half of them with it. You have a native English speaker in your classroom! Use me! I will buy you an extra year of your life if you only let me! That being said, I´m simpathetic to their circumstances...actually, no I´m not. Not when Ivan gets and up walks to the back of the room to lie on his back mid class, eyes open staring at the ceiling. My cure for that fun little game is to let him doze off a little, then put my finger to my lips while the good students in the class watch, tip toe to the back of the class, and curl up next to him on the same desk for a cute little siesta.

Subject wise, we were supposed to be covering actions that began in the past and have continued to the present, using ´have been...´ I found this to be more than a little difficult, as most of the kids, except Jean, Andrea, Susanna, Jason, occasionally Pamela (accent on e), and when she wants to, Daniela, who seem to understand everything and are truly bright kids, can´t even verbalize a sentence in past, present, or future. I was able to get a few of them talking one day, by drawing a picture consisting of Costa Rica, the US, and an airplane in the middle. I told them that if they ever visit, some good looking guy or girl is going to want to talk to them, and the first thing he or she is going to ask is ´so for how long have you been here?´ That sparked a little interest, especially in my two girls Arrelis and Yarrelis, who now can repeat the sentence, ´I have been here for 10 days´, upon being prompted, 3 weeks later.

I have 10th and 11th graders as well, but they´ll have to await description for another day.