Roam: June 2014

First day of school, back in February.

While the school year in the US has ended, our kids are just halfway through their school year that started in February and ends in December. The school year has been a bit shortened by a teacher’s struck (huelga) that lasted the whole month of May. Apparently there was a major problem with a new nationwide payroll system that resulted in most teachers not getting a paycheck for a couple of months or more. Some teachers are part of a different teacher organization (we think), and they continued to get paid. So the unpaid teachers went on strike, while the paid teachers continued to teach. Henry’s teacher continued to teach, so he still had school, though many of his days were shortened. In the colegio (high school), since there are many teachers for the various classes, the school was shuttered for the whole month. So Sullivan and Madeleine had an unexpected vacation. We kept them a bit busy with some online homeschooling, as well as the extra math, reading and writing work they do periodically even when they are in school.

Madeleine is in 7th grade, the first year of colegio, which is five years in total. This year she has many different teachers, which is a switch from last year when she had the same teacher for almost all subjects. A few of her classes are arts-oriented: hogar (“home”, in which they have been learning decorative stitching), art (mainly pencil drawing so far), and music (she is learning to play a plastic flute). She has three English classes: literature, listening & speaking, and reading & writing. Although students here start studying English in first grade, very few in colegio can (or are willing) to converse much in English. Clearly more conversation practice is needed. Her civica class is social studies, with lots of focus so far on community safety; gestion (“management”) covers government and business (I think!). Also Spanish, science, social studies, math, PE. During the second half of the year she will have a computer class. Madeleine has worked with a group of five other students on an interdisciplinary project, including aspects from civica, art and music. They have yet to present their project due to the teachers’ strike, but it includes a lot of artwork, prepared almost exclusively by Madeleine (cars, trees, flowers, pizotes), as well as an original song, all incorporated into a short play dealing with safety issues in our town.

The artista at work.

Pizote (coatimundi, more common in Costa Rica than raccoons)

Sully frolics among the trees and flowers for M's school project

Las flores y el duende.

The PE teacher at the colegio organized an impromptu track team this year, for which Madeleine was selected. She traveled with the team twice to Tilaran (a 30-minute bus ride) for track meets. While she was a bit lukewarm about the track meets, they were a fun diversion from school.

In colegio, there are no books; teachers dictate material and students write the text in their notebooks to study from. Sometimes the students have to go to the libreria (stationery store) in town to buy copied materials for class. The problem with no textbooks is that sometimes the teachers get the concepts wrong. For example, the English literature teacher has taught terms of literature analysis (symbolism, flashback, foreshadowing, etc.) that are not quite correct, or actually quite wrong. Madeleine needs to try to learn the terms the way the teacher teaches them even though they are confusing and incorrect. In order to get her answers correct on the exams, she needs to think like the teacher, who does not seem to have the best grasp of literature, or even the English language. Another example was in science class in which Madeleine’s class was learning the concepts of accuracy and precision in scientific measurements. The teacher seemed to have the concepts switched. So in these cases, we try to help Madeleine understand the correct concepts and terms for future reference, while at the same time she needs to keep straight how the teacher has taught the material and how she needs to answer the test questions. A little extra challenge for her that would make the heads of mere mortals spin! I don’t mean to bash the teachers, and I am sure they would prefer to have textbooks to teach from.

Henry is doing well in 5th grade! He was elected president of his class, for which he was quite proud. He is a bit nervous about the school-wide elections however. They were meant to happen during May but were postponed due to the strike. Henry is supposed to make a speech in front of the whole escuela (in Spanish of course), and he will be running for president of the school, against the other class presidents from the 4th and 6th grade classes. Usually the 6th grade candidate wins the school election, but you never know… the student body may vote for the gringo candidate:)

Henry’s teacher, when teaching math and comes upon a tricky concept, she sometimes tells her students to take out their calculators to solve those pesky long division problems, rather than learn how to do them by hand. I assume she finds the concept too hard to explain to the whole class. Yikes! There was one day when the teacher was a about to pass over a concept in the math book when Henry spoke up and told her how to do it and then proceeded to explain it to his classmates. Another point for Henry Jones! How appropriate for the class president to step up and help teach math. Before every test, Henry's teacher dictates study questions for the students to write down and find the answers to. Henry and Madeleine’s teachers did this last year too, but Henry’s teacher this year reads the questions directly from the test she will be giving them in a few days! So really, all kids should be able to get awesome grades, but this is not the case. It still requires looking through the text books to find the answers and remembering them for the test, and this is apparently too much of a challenge for some kids. Henry of course does quite well on tests, yet he does not appreciate when we suggest that he might go deeper and study more than just the questions the teacher dictates to the class. I worry a bit that we are enabling some laziness, however Henry does get very interested in questions on his own and enjoys reading about those things that interest him.

Henry has made some good friends in his class, which has made school more fun for him. He occasionally has friends over to swim at our house and play ping pong and Minecraft. It is hard to get upset about too much screen time when Henry and Sully are huddled up with a friend, playing Minecraft together (on separate devices) and discussing it in Spanish. Henry discovered that some of his classmates like to play Clash of Clans, which he is into as well, so he set up a Nuevo Arenal clan for them to join. Now they can play together and send messages to each other.

Henry and some neighbor friends enjoy some sandia, at our house #2.

Hot Henry after school, in his PE uniform, cooling off in the hammock.

Sullivan is also doing very well in first grade. It has been a big change from Kinder, where the emphasis was on playing, as well as interacting with classmates and listening and participating in class discussions. This year he sits at his desk, listens and does work in his many notebooks. He has a little bit of homework, but mostly classwork. Early on he said that first grade was better and more interesting than Kinder. Before the year started he was nervous about having to take exams, but it turns out that there is a new curriculum for first grade this year, with no written exams. Instead the teacher reviews and scores all of their work in class, and they have periodic oral exams. There are also no textbook-workbooks as the other grades in escuela have. They do all of their work on handouts and in their notebooks. In Kinder there was no formal reading, writing or math, so this year kids are working hard on all of that. This is in addition to starting English class, something that Sully’s classmates were very excited about. The work overall is not challenging for Sully, though he is benefitting from the writing practice, something he does not enjoy doing much.

A big emphasis for this year in Sully's class is listening to a lot of stories, poems and songs, and eventually reading books. To assist, Sully’s abuelita (my mom) was able to buy a CD player for the class and more recently a collection of used (former library) first grade level books in Spanish. Nik brought these things back with him when returning from work trips. Sully’s teacher is of course very grateful. We would like to be able to collect more books in Spanish for the whole school and try to resurrect the school’s library.

This year Sully has had two fellow gringo classmates, one was a boy from Florida who seems to have disappeared from school during the month-long strike. The second, a girl from California, just started after the strike. Neither kid spoke/speaks Spanish, so we are encouraging Sully to embrace his role as interpreter. He may not be as nurturing as the girls in his class, but he does have the advantage of being truly bilingual. Go Sully!