Saturday, November 10, 2012

Protracted Struggles



Cute little gecko! They run all over the walls here and eat nasty insects.

Short post for today because I'm lazy and I have to write 6 essays. What am I, in college? I can see the light at the end of the tunnel with training almost being over, although I have 2 basically unstructured months ahead of me that might very well be the proverbial train...

So anyway, this week, I co-taught a 7th grade English class with my host brother at the high school here in El Rosario. It was a great class, really fun and communicative, but there was one funny aspect that I had not taken into account in my planning: students here are REALLY perfectionist. One of the activities that we had planned was to have the students make a smiley place and have them listen to move the face to practice prepositions of place (up, down, under, above, in, on, etc). I figured it would take them about 10 seconds to rip out a piece of paper and scribble a face on. Wrong. It took over 10 minutes for them to draw perfect circles with perfect features. Quite a few kids took out protractors and began laboriously tracing a perfect circles. This was even after I had repeatedly used the line "Nobody's perfect, except God" with them. Even though we work in public schools, there's not really separation between church and state here...I picked this line up from one of my Nicaraguan counterpart teachers. One girl took so long that I took away her drawing and gave her my ugly example smiley face. Take that little girl, don't you try to be all perfect at me!
Lesson learned: don't expect to be able to rush the artistic process.

On another side note, it's gotten cold here! In Carazo, we've reached the windy season. It's really nice weather, like 60s/70s and windy...Not really what I expected, but I'm LOVING it. Especially knowing that I will be sweating all the time in about two weeks when I go to my site.

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