Middle Ground

(A handful of 3rd graders and Diana Maria, the assistant to their class.)

I've lost that pleasant blogging rhythm I had the last month of winter term. My apologies.

Here's where we are: solidly into the third of the school year's four parcials; this one ends as Spring Break commences, on March 26th. By quirks of scheduling we will be able to cram much more undiluted teaching into this parcial. The last one was sort of ridiculous in that exams for the first parcial didn't conclude till the first week of November. That left, what? About 5 weeks before we ended up leaving the country ...and the 2 weeks Christmas were a crock anyway. I stopped doing new material in English Zone because about 10 kids were absent every class for Christmas show practice.

Parcial 3, by contrast, has 8 full teaching weeks before we even begin reviewing. And not a day off for months. MONTHS. I guess this is to combat the vacation day-filled first parcial, the absurdly short second parcial, and the end-of-year upheaval that will make up the fourth parcial.

On a non-administrative note, our outlooks dip and soar here in Casa Gringa, as we've dubbed our three-bedroom house in Barrio San Miguel. Probably our most constant battle is that of staying present with our school duties. All three of us are looking forward to spending time with family over Spring Break, so obviously that is a draw on our thoughts (I am flying to the States for my best friend's wedding, Bruin's family is flying into Honduras, and Bowen remains undecided, perhaps joining me in flying to the mother country for a week). However, vacation excitement aside, I am enjoying the mess out of my classes right now. To balance the names I write on the board for bad behavior, I have of late begun displaying the names each day of students who use excellent examples of English. 2nd grade in particular has taken this development in stride; students come up to me every day now sporting such colorful gems as: "My pencil broke." "The uniform is green, blue, and white." and "I would like a carrot and two oranges." 3rd grade's most notable phrase is: "Can I sharpen my pencil?"

Lamentably, I discovered in tutoring today that one of my 3rd graders (who lives with Americans!) can't distinguish the 5 short vowel sounds to save his life. Sigh. Spelling is a rather bloody subject for him.

Encouragingly, I've had a breakthrough about spelling in general. Whilst home over break I consulted with one of my teachers-in-the-wings and she wondered aloud why spelling was weighted so heavily (33%) in my grade configurations and reminded me (not being a teacher by education, I need lots of reminding) that spelling is but a bridge to reading. On that note, I began consciously including including independent English reading into the school week. I'm not sure how much they're comprehending on average, but they love it. They love paging through all the donated books and making lists of words they know. Many more will be gained from context. (Thanks for the tip. You know who you are.) 

Enough for now. My American swain is bidding me draw near on Skype.

Pressing On

Well, we're washed of exam week. I had precisely 1 of 54 students fail, and she improved her main exam grade well enough during recuperation that she didn't fail for the parcial (or "quarter"). It will be nice to have a parcial not bisected by Christmas holidays this time. Exam week ends neatly as Spring Break commences, so maybe I'll do my grading on the plane back to the States.

Anyway. Something curious happened this week: the majority of both classes outright failed the weekly spelling test. This has never happened. At present I'm going to chalk it up to a swirl of mostly new blends - ch, th, sh, and wh - and the fact that we don't have the new phonics books put together yet. No cross-subject reinforcement, alas.

And funny in its absurdity: the English director for the school (my most immediate boss) was supposed to be on hiatus from September through early November. Strangely, for circumstances beyond everyone's control, she is still in the United States. The latest prediction is that she'll return in late February.

I need to sleep. Now.

Exam Week

Sorry so silent. A lot of re-adjusting to do, but overall I'm in good spirits of late. 

We are in exam week, which is fairly enjoyable, but the thought of the pending number crunching and recording and commentary-writing (tedious in Spanish) makes me very anxious, so pray for quiet in my head. I can do it if I just sit down and get it done, but I am not the best steward of time, as regards work projects.

Let It...Begin. Again.

Roomies mine and I flew back Saturday, meeting in Atlanta, where it was hovering right around 30 degrees Fahrenheit. My teeth clattered wildly together as I shivered in cold and shock, even in my three layers and a scarf. It was hard to come back. It is always hard for me to slip with aeronautic ease in 3 hours from one of the richest countries to one of the poorest. Where people wear their wounds oftener on the outside. The blanket of comparative Central American warmth enveloped me as I left the airport, and I felt no comfort.

I'm writing because I'm a writer, and it calms me.

We were briefed today on Missions Day, which is supposed to be bigger than Christmas, than any other day at this school. There will be no normal classes that day (the first Monday in February); instead, each group of students will pass from classroom to classroom, learning about the persecuted Christians (specifically, children) in countries like Pakistan and Burma. They will identify the flag, sample a native dish (Elsy and I are cooking up some Pakistani taffy for the 4th grade room), hear some cultural and historical facts rattled off, and drink in some real stories. I'm translating two into Spanish: a girl who was imprisoned briefly by her employer for wanting to go to church on the Sabbath and a young man who took Bible studies by secret correspondence and later joined a terrorist camp. I forget what happened then. Must have decided mass-murder planning was on the creepy side and there was something to the Jesus stuff.

Can I tell this earnestly? Do I believe it?

I really hate living here sometimes. It's hard. It's uncomfortable. Teaching freaks me out. People get in my way and break my heart and scare me. 

But I get eyeball-to-eyeball to God here, or as close as I can get. Away from my safe hometown where nobody will tell anybody else they need anything. I cry a lot here, because I miss the people I love. But I don't miss the noise, the chaos, the clamor. When I'm there I miss the quiet here.

I think I long for a place that doesn't exist 'round these earthly parts.

-----------------

PS: Immediately after completing this entry in a thoroughly glum mood, I picked up C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, which I have been meandering through for about a week, and read this, which made me laugh, as I had just been ranting on noise: "Music and silence--how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father entered Hell--though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express--no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise--Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile--Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a Noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it."

So dear readers, until we meet again, prize good music, gentle silence, and a regular good belly laugh, and think about hitting up a 3rd world country, for it might be very good for your soul. -Z

I cannot make this stuff up.

So, this next-to-last week of school turned out not at all as expected. Not in a bad way. In a where-did-that-come-from way.

It was Tuesday, I think, when we (my roommates - the Kinder/Prepa/1st English teachers - and I) got word of our passports. (Mine actually travels more in Honduras than I do, for which I am quite jealous.) It was not a good word.

How travel permissions work here is that one has 90 days in Honduras once entering the country; past that point, it is necessary to either head for home, or go at least two countries over (try Belize), spend a little time, get a nice passport stamp, and come back. 

Sometimes, I'm not precisely sure how, the government grants visa extensions, which are good for 30 days. Having arrived the 15th of August, we applied (that is, we gave our ministry our passports and a fistful of cash and they went to a lawyer) for an extension to get us from November 15th to December 15th and got it. We were to do this again to cover the 4 days separating that extension limit from our actual departure date of December 19th, the Saturday after the last day of school.  

But it was not granted; we were told no one is getting them.

This news sat heavily upon me, despite reassurances that we could pay a fine (estimated at $80) and leave a little late, no problem. I felt uncomfortable willfully ignoring the law. On Thursday morning we were informed by our pastor's wife that the current fee was more like $140, or L2750). 

I forget in whose brain it was that the wheels first began turning toward leaving. But, we theorized, if the fee to change a plane ticket is only $10 more than the fine, AND we could stay legal in the process of leaving early (a good track record will only help should we enter other foreign countries in the future)... why not? 

We checked: there were flights still. A ride to a hotel close to the airport smoothly materialized. Our passports (which, nerve-wracklingly, were still in Teguc - 2 hours away - on Friday) were speedily returned to us.

And so we're leaving. Despite the arrangement ease, it's been a hard process. Though there is little real teaching happening at the school next week because of holiday festivities, we leave the school in a short-staffed position, as was made abundantly clear to us (in both Spanish and English). Overall though, the staff has been kindly supportive of our desire to avoid the illegal status. They are ever a pleasure to work with. 

So here's the way we gonna play.

This guy has stood me up three times now.

The first time I brushed it off. "He didn't come because he was sick," I told myself. The next time, when he scooted out right before our appointment? "He forgot," I rationalized. Today, when he straight-up did not show again, I faced this fact:

David Emmanuel Oliva Osorio just doesn't want to be tutored in English. 

Having ascertained that, I can strike back by ignoring standard protocol.

At the Destino school, a child who requires tutoring is sent home on Friday afternoon with a blue slip which expresses to their mother/aunt/older sister/whomever that on Monday they will stay after school for about an hour and should be collected at their normal bus stop about 4:20 p.m.

For the obstinate sorts, like our friend David, that little paper tells them exactly which Mondays not to come to school.

So, we out-maneuver them. For special cases, we have what might should be called a Grab-and-Go Policy. Having NOT sent a slip home Friday, we wait for their unsuspecting selves to come to school on Monday, grab them before they get on the bus to leave, and make them go to tutoring.

Hold onto your hat, Oliva. And here's the ironic part. When Destino sent out sponsorship photos this year, each kid held a board listing their full name, grade, and something they liked. Get a load of David's:

Mods

Maybe a month or so back, I hauled 2 3rd grade girls into the office for unsmoothly executed cheating behavior during a spelling test. I blame the incident in part on the fact that I had no assistant (on Friday I only have one for about the last 25 minutes of class, and who wants a spelling test hanging over their head that long?), because having two pairs of roving teacher eyes tends to put down said asinine behavior. The principal, to my annoyance at the time, said perhaps I should move the test to Thursdays, when I am better supported.

I dug in my heels, for they pay an English advisor a fair chunk of money to design a decent curriculum, and by gosh, I was trying to follow it: new spelling list every Monday, two days of practice/reinforcement with the words, a practice test on Thursday, and a test of Friday. (Though Mallori and I at the get-go had to eliminate all the photocopied worksheets that had been included. The school often simply doesn't have that much paper/toner, and it was suggested we could do much of the work on the board. I like the kids to have something in their hands, especially the ones with NO attention span, but it worked out all right.)

So, I carried on with Friday spelling tests, sometimes borrowing an assistant from another class, like one of the 1st grade English teachers. Obviously this is not ideal. Also not ideal is that on Mondays, when the kids get their spelling tests back and have to write missed words several times each, I also have no steady assistant. Mallori's in for maybe 20-25 minutes and then Diana Maria at the end. Nothing sustained. I'm thinking - finally - of switching to Thursday spelling  tests, and then introducing the new list on Fridays. That would eliminate the problem of needing a second pair of eyes on Friday, but would not help the situation of needing back-up on the days (under this plan, Fridays) when only some kids are writing missed words. UNLESS I could convince Mallori to do my grading in the Thursday class, and have the kids write their words at the end. There's an idea. Immediate feedback. I wonder if it would confuse my brain entirely to have 2nd and 3rd on different schedules.

(Nicol, Susan, and Axel - 3 of 3rd grade's best spellers.)