Missing Voices: Struggling to Engage Girls in the Classroom

La princesa esta triste. Que tendrá la princesa?
Los suspiros se escapan de su boca de fresa.

The princess is sad. What troubles the princess?
Sighs escape from her strawberry mouth.

Ruben Dario, Sonatina

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Word of the Day (review)
pena- shyness, nervousness, embarrassment

This post uses a lot of broad generalizations, particularly about gender, that I'm not entirely comfortable making, but it's to the end of verbalizing a vexing problem that I'm really passionate about, so I'm going to make them. Sorry, grey areas, you're being slighted. 

One of the biggest challenges I've faced so far in my first weeks of school is effectively engaging female students in the classroom. To vastly overgeneralize, the girls in my classes are devastatingly shy, particularly in the schools that lie outside the "casco urbano" (urban center, where I live). They giggle, cover their faces with their hands or their books, refuse to even try speaking, or give up easily if they make a mistake. Or just shut down entirely. This behavior isn't exclusively confined to female students, but it is more certainly more pronounced.

Usually the two or three really outstanding students in each class happen to be male. This has lead to some uncomfortable moments for me in which counterpart teachers have made comments like "What's going on here? It seems like the boys are better than the girls!" to urge the girls into talking. There are exceptions of course. One of my most stellar students happens to be pregnant. But in the classrooms I've observed so far, the trend of women outperforming men in the classroom is not in evidence.

Perhaps a communicative English classroom, featuring lots of movement and speaking and activities is more appealing to the active learning style of boys, which is awesome because this doesn't happen enough and according to a lot of teaching research, generally, appealing to more active learning styles is better for everyone. I'm using gendered dichotomies in a way that I don't like here, but I think you get the drift...My fear however is that my methods are somehow disempowering female students.

As a former overachieving student, who was always passionate about learning, and probably a bit of a precocious teacher's pet a lot of the time, I have trouble relating to this phenomenon as much as I am concerned about it. Secondly, as an American, I have to watch my reactions and remind myself that I'm from a culture where messing up is a pretty acceptable and normal part of life. In a classroom in an upper middle class suburb in the States, being shy, nervously giggling, and wasting class time would probably be more embarrassing than just trying to say a word you didn't know. Americans fearlessly butcher Spanish and French and Italian and German and Chinese.

So what can I do to help girls grasp the importance of a second language and motivate them to enjoy it, as well as school and learning more generally? What messages are they receiving outside the classroom from their families, from their daily lives or activities, or even their churches that lead to such behavior and how can I, as an outsider and a foreigner, help to encourage them to achieve and participate? My strategy so far has been to bestow absurd levels of positivity and encouragement on the students. (YES, YOU CAN do it. I know that you can. I would not ask if you couldn't. Just Try! Excellent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! EXCELLENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Another, more subtle approach, is to give students women role models in the activities we do. In addition to having a female English teacher (moi, at a minimum) present in the classroom, which can sometimes be kind of rare in Rio San Juan, I try to make flashcards or use images with women in professional roles. For example, for a class on occupations, I made flashcards with a female doctor, police officer and engineer.

Somewhat relatedly to all this, I observed a Musa Dariana (Darian Muse?) contest during school this Saturday. Held to celebrate Nicaraguan poet and national hero Ruben Dario, it featured a female representative of each classroom competing to be the "Musa Dariana" of the school. Contestants had to dress up in traditional folklore costumes, answer questions about Ruben Dario's life (On what date did Dario die, and where? What newspapers did the poet write for? etc.) and then recite a passage from the poet's work, while wearing a different outfit, that supposedly corresponded to their poem. I had mixed feelings about the contest. I appreciated that it was more than a simple beauty contest- their outfits/get up only counted for 20% of their score, and it was awesome to see girls confident enough to take the stage and recite a poem in front of 200 people. However, it reified an outmoded concept, memorization, as the ultimate goal of learning, rather than praising critical thinking, writing your own poetry, being the next Ruben Dario... It is cool that the Nicaraguan educational system exposes kids to so much good poetry though. And that their national hero is a poet.

If any readers out there have suggestions for what to do motivate and encourage girls to feel comfortable and confident in a classroom (or any other public space) let me have em!

So, what do you do again?

I've been meaning to put up this video for a while...it's about 15 minutes long, but it's a really good description of what Peace Corps TEFL volunteers do in Nicaragua, made by a former volunteer.




I haven't given a workshop or taught a community class since training, but I am planning to do those things eventually.

Classroom Anecdotes from the First Two Weeks of School

Hours taught: 40ish
Classes shortened or canceled for meetings, celebrations or holidays: 6

Most amusing:
A 7th grader (the youngest students I teach), came up to me after our first English class and said "Thank you teacher. I liked class and also you are very beautiful." Would have been really excellent had he said this in English, but I will take what I can get. If my students thinking I'm attractive gets them to learn and like English, I guess there are worse things...

Runner up- I danced in front of 200 students with one of the male teachers during the Musa Dariana competition (previously described) at the school where I teach on Saturdays.

Surprising smash hit: A very good friend.
This is a very simple chant to practice verb "to be" disguised as a song.
(I am, am, am a very good friend....You are, are, are a very good friend...etc)
The kids loved this song, and they wanted to come up to the board to sing it again on their own after we had moved on to another activity. Then, I heard one of my students singing it to a friend from another class as she walked to the bus. I almost jumped for joy and wanted to do this.

Something I did for the first time: Jazz Chant
I implemented a jazz chant in class to practice the modal "can"! Popularized by educator Carolyn Graham, jazz chants use the rhythm of spoken English to help students learn "language chunks". (MMM chunks of language...not  as fun as chunks of say, chocolate, but still fun if you play your cards right.) It was a impromtu thing, so it was a little rough, but it was a good time.
Can she milk a cow?
Yes, she can. Yes, she can.
Can he drive a car?
No, he can't. No, he can't. (Finger wagging included here, obviously)

Something I'm thankful for: Working with a Nicaraguan counterparts.
Not only is it really fulfilling and fun, but they also get to share their insight for things that will resonate with the students. For example, when we were teaching our lesson on abilities, we were going to use the phrase "use a computer" as one of the vocab words. My counterpart realized during class that there isn't even a cyber cafe in this town and instead added in two phrases as a replacement: "milk a cow" and "cut grass" aka chapear potrero aka cut tall grass with a machete. The students had actual everyday exposure to these concepts and the lesson went far better as a result.

Tried and true (ish): This is a pen.
Did one of TEFL volunteers favorite dinamicas, "This is a pen," with varying degrees of success, based on level of pena in the class. In some classes, the kids laughed because it was funny (which is the point). In some classes, they laughed and covered their mouths and almost had breakdowns from nervousness. So, mixed results. But when it worked, it worked. This is a great dinamica to introduce objects, especially classroom objects, but you can do it with almost any vocabulary, or you can do it with older kids to work on intonation (whether your voice goes up or down at the end of a sentence) or sentence stress (what word within a sentence is emphasized). It goes like this:

A: This is a pen. (Person passes pen to another person)
B: A what?
A: A pen.
B: Oh, a pen.

"La Gringa que corre" visits "El Oasis de Paz"

 Phrases of the day:
"La gringa que corre", aka the American who runs, is quite literally how I am know to my community, or at least the taxi drivers, who routinely see me running along the road. Every taxi driver I've ridden with in the past week has asked me to clarify which gringa I am based on this information (There's another really awesome PCV gringa in town, my 'sitemate" Christina, who works in the Small Business program). This seems like a pretty good thing to be known for, rather than other possibilities....

El Oasis de Paz (Peaceful Oasis) is the nickname of the Island of Ometepe.

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After my first week of classes (stories to come later), I went to compete in the Fuego and Agua Ultramarathon event on the island of Ometepe this weekend. Because I am only slightly insane, I didn't actually attempt to run an (ultra)marathon, but rather stuck with the more manageable 25k, about a 15 mile race.

It was truly epic and personal record breaking on two counts:

-Most forms of public transportation used in a day: 7

In an 11 hour journey basically across Nicaragua: bus, taxi, school bus, boat, school bus, bicycle and car

During the 12 hour return journey: school bus, boat, bus, taxi, bus, bus and taxi

-Longest distance personally covered on foot in a day: 25k in 4 hours and 20 minutes, which is  including a hike up a volcano that is technically active, but not currently exploding out magma or anything crazy like that.




                                                PCV Runners show off their race swag...


                                                            Volcan Concepcion just after sunset

Island view from the ferry across

I look way too happy in this picture

Adorable! (Photo credits to Laura Bisbee on the last 3 of these pictures.)

I am fairly obsessed with islands, especially in Latin America (some readers may remember my obsession with Chiloe, an island off the Southern Chilean coast). Ometepe, formed by two volcanoes in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, was stunning. Even though I can see the volcanoes from San Miguelito at a distance on clear days, I was literally floored at how gorgeous the twin cones of the volcanoes that form the island looked when I arrived at San Jorge, where the ferries to the island depart from, green bases rising up from the bluest of water, to a foreboding grey peak on the taller volcano.

Ometepe is touristy, but it's just starting to take off as a destination, and it's still rough around the edges and sort of remote, which adds to the appeal in my opinion. I didn't actually go to the part of the island where most of the tourist hotels and beaches are (Volcan Maderas), but rather stayed on the more populated towns around Concepcion, the taller and "active" of the two volcanoes, where my PCV friend Laura lives and teaches.  Beautiful sandy unpaved roads abounded, cows wandered untethered through pastures and into the roads, people ambled on bicycles past tiny towns with colorful houses and even more colorful flowers, bourganvilla spilling over walls...All with the giant cone of Concepcion majestically looming overhead. Fabulous sunsets, and beaches and phenomenal view of the stars at night. And a calm, laid back island feel washing over it all.

After taking a crowded 5am public bus to Moyogalpa, the main city on Concepcion to go to the start of the race, Laura and I discovered that we looked a little bit out of place, particularly in terms of our running gear, but also in terms of visible musculature...People were decked out in some fachenta spandex and we were wearing some slightly scruffier duds. I wasn't even wearing socks, because they bother me when I run and I wanted to be my best. I sought solace in the fact that we have little control over our diet, don't have access to a gym, and have to deal with mild sexual harassment while running...not challenges that I assume are generally faced by the average North American runner or wealthy Managuan/Costa Rican, who were the majority of the people running, besides the other volunteers. Luckily, my mother's saying "You've got to look good to be good" doesn't hold true for running. We ran down those spandex clad fancy people. Well, some of them.

Play by play:
First hour and a half: The race started at 7, and it was cool with a fabulous island breeze. We ran past cow pastures, occasional settlements where people started to watch, along sandy but fairly flat paths. After the first aid station though, the soils got rockier, more volcanic and the incline steeper. Finally, we reached a point where it was not advancing our cause to run anymore and switched into hiking.
Hour after that: Climbed the volcano. Some wicked amazing endorphins grabbed me and pulled me up that mountain like a crazy person. It was cold, jungle-y and awesome. Also there were howler monkeys at one point. The summit of the trail was gorgeous- it was incredibly windy, but you could see up to the peak of the volcano, and down to everything around for miles. Also, there were high altitude gigantic aloe plants that were the coolest ever.

Next hour: Getting down off the volcano was not as easy as we had thought it would be. Steep terrain with slippery volcanic soil in full sun with dusty gusts made for slow going. The view was awesome though- we looked out over the bluest blue of the lake, across to grass growing on what looked like the cracked earth of an old lava flow and up a beautiful sweep of green with a few trees leading up to the top of the peak. Also, there were some random cows.

Final leg: Finally were able to run again, but were exhausted and hot, as the midday sun was starting to come out in full force. Laura got me through a lot, especially this one part where I almost decided to call it quits. She is the sweetest person ever in addition to being an formidable and multi-talented athlete. For instance, she introduced Nicaraguan teens to ultimate frisbee during ACCESS Camp.
Post race, we celebrated with pizza, a trip to her awesome host family's beach farm on the lake side of the island for dinner and a whole lot of "lying flat."

It was such a beautiful time: friendship, physical activity, and exploring. It's been very much against my vaga nature to be as settled down as I have in the last few months, and truth be told, with camps and meetings and things I haven't even been in San Miguelito all that much. So it was good to get some travel time, even if it was solo. But I read a book (El Pais Bajo mi Piel/The Country Under my Skin, a memoir by Nicaraguan poet Giaconda Belli) and National Geographic in Spanish (appropriately the 125th Anniversary edition about human desire to explore) and had some interesting conversations with strangers, so it wasn't that bad, even with the mega-amounts of time. But it does feel good to be "home" now, too. Off to teach about 400 kids some English this week!

Feliz Dia de la Amor y Amistad

Feliz Dia de la Amor y Amistad! As Valentine's Day is known here...
I've been thinking a lot about the friendship side of the equation today, how incredibly lucky I am to have friends and family/"family" scattered literally all over every corner of this country, all over the United States and in so many others. What a beautiful world! May your kindness and love come back to you tenfold.

Corn Powdered Girl Gives Saturday Teaching a Try

Word of the Day
pena- shyness, nervousness, embarrassment.
Emily (dancing around capriciously, generally being weird): No tengan pena!!!!!! (X100)
Students faces: We are not convinced by your antics, gringa. We're still going to have lots of pena.
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When my alarm sounded at 5:30 Saturday morning, I momentarily felt extremely disillusioned with my job. There's something especially sacred about Saturdays, and having to rouse myself at this hour went against all of my better instincts. But after drowsily sprucing myself up, fixing myself a cafe con leche, and hitching a 20- minute taxi ride, I arrived for my sabatino class in a nearby community called Never Oporta, comically referred to by people around here as "Never". Sabatino classes are held on Saturdays, mostly for teens who are working, who got pregnant or have dropped out and are trying a second round. It's also for adults coming back to school or who perhaps have never studied. Theoretically, it's only for people who are over sixteen. It's sort of like the Nicaraguan version of getting a GED.  Since "Never" is currently in the process of constructing a building for the high school, however, the majority of the students who come to the sabatino are young, at approximately the typical age for going to high school. Many of them probably work, on farms or helping around the house, and some live in agricultural communities that are very far away. Most people showed up nicely dressed in their uniforms, blue bottoms and white tops. It felt like a real day of weekday class, except that there's a lot more to cram in if you're only teaching once  a week.

While we were waiting for school to start, I toured classrooms (they use the primary school, which is why they need to wait until the weekend) and met the principal, a very nice man who was eager to introduce me to his school. "Pregunteme!" "Ask me!" he goaded, trying to load me up with information. This phrase and his particular intonation unfortunately reminded me of a bizarre and hilarious character on Mexican comic genius Eugenio Derbez's show "Derbez en Cuando," which led to me being awkward because I was trying really hard not to laugh. Womp womp. Anyway, I started off teaching a section of 8th graders with my counterpart teacher Xiomara, who's about my age and the possibly the sweetest person in the entire universe. The students were well behaved, somewhat in contrast to their urban peers. For example, when I went over to ask a boy not to use his cellphone, he just handed it over to me. Boy, they were shy though. We tried to do a game where they would introduce themselves... "My name is ________" and think of a word, in Spanish if they wanted, that began with the same letter as their name. I begged, pleaded, put myself entirely at their mercy, smiled freakishly, with limited results in the back corner. The kids were not even going for "My name is _________." They were just not going to talk. The 7th and 11th grade sections went much better, in this regard, because the kids were less nervous and even knew a little bit of English, in the 11th grade class.

A new language, when you're just trying it on, maybe even for the first few years, is like a straightjacket, until it finally begins to open doors and allow you to see things in a new light. I had a bizarre urge at many points in class to just stop and break down the act and just chat with them in Spanish, however selfish this would be from the long term perspective. It was almost physically painful to see vibrant young personalities reduced to so little.

One of my students really provoked this reaction. He's maybe 12 years old, tiny, and he sells vitamins on the buses as a traveling salesman, for lack of a better term. This kid is a legend. The first time I saw him, I wished I was had a video camera to record him, in case it ever fell upon me to teach public speaking again. Excellent posture, projection, appeals to the heart strings, excellent knowledge of whatever (questionable) product he was purveying, details memorized but not in a way that appeared canned. Seriously, legendary. In contrast, seeing him trying and hack his way through "May I leave the room?" made me want to unlock his cage, unclip his wings, set things right, as bad as this instinct was. In some ways, being confident and highly competent in your first language (L1) can be a temporary mental barrier to gaining confidence in your second language (L2). Not to say that it can't also be a huge advantage, especially with languages like Spanish and English that share so much vocabulary.

The other teachers for the Saturday class are all really cool. We shared a lot of corn snacks and corn drinks during the break and after classes were down for the day. People are so instantaneously generous here. For instance, if you buy a bag of corn snacks, with an amount inside that is about a one person serving, you automatically offer to share with everyone, and they might take you up on it. Or if someone gives you a piece of breadfruit, you split it with the person next to you, aunque sea un poquito. We do not really have this custom with single serving snacks, ie a bag of chips, a candy bar, etc. in the States, so I really need to work on not being such a gluttonous egotistical American.

I had one other experience that was really interesting. One of Xiomara's former students, who's a teacher in a rural community called "The Clouds" (this lead to about a half hour of jokes about how he had "fallen from the sky", "had his head up in the clouds..."etc) came to talk to me in English. He was really excited because given his location, he doesn't have many opportunities to practice or speak English. Given the dearth of opportunities, he was so nervous he was literally shaking. The fact that I had the power because of a few weird coincidences of my birth to literally make a grown man lose his train of thought because he was so nervous was a funny contrast to the sense of powerlessness that is an inevitable part of a PCV life. Powerlessness over the distance from family or friends, which only multiples at the appearance of the slightest adversity (for them or me),  powerlessness over the weather, over when the water will come so that I can do my laundry, over what I will eat for my meals, over whether there will be real ice cream that's not frosted or defrosted 6 times in stock anywhere in town, over whether the chickens and dogs will create their own symphony at 3 am...It was a weird contrast and a weirder moment. I hope he got something out of our brief conversation.

Conclusion on Saturday classes: Definitely not ideal for "having a life," but absolutely worth getting out of bed for.

Walking Around, Shape Shifting

It's been a bit of a slow week, just waiting for school to start, and dodging in and out of meetings that are not exactly riveting, especially in my second language. I'm trying to stay calm and go with the flow, but not having a firm schedule established that I know will not change is killing me a little bit, especially since I'm finding it hard to fit in all the time, particularly for planning, that I need to work effectively with my 4 counterparts.

To help combat this tension, a lot of what I've been doing this week has simply been walking around. My site mate, Christina, made a pact that we would walk around every day to be more visible in the community. This has yielded some unexpected adventures and conversations, with each other, and community members. We ended up going down an interesting rock scramble past a beautiful ravine on a trail that goes somewhere still unknown, and we've seen some truly spectacular sunsets over the lake.

 Today, at one of the teacher's suggestion, we went with some of the profes to matriculate students. When I heard that this week they would be matriculating students, I assumed that this meant the parents would come to the school and sign their kids up. This is not what happens. Instead, the profes go house by house, throughout each sector of the town, to sign people up. This was a great way to meander down some side streets I didn't even know existed, meet people and have a visual connection to where they lived. It's always fascinating to me too, a vicarious pleasure, to see what people's homes look like.

One thing I absolutely love about Nicaraguan homes is their flexibility and openness, to change, to the elements, to passersby. Unlike American homes which are practically closed off fortresses in comparison, with very fixed shapes, with defined rooms and heavy furniture, Nicaraguan homes take form according to the needs of the moment. Having another child, taking on a renter or have family moving in with you? Add some concrete on back and you've got an extra room.  Move a bed into another room, add a curtain and a bit of wood, and you've got an extra space. Have neighbors chatting with you out front for a long time? Move a few plastic chairs out and you've got an instant porch. People's inventiveness and creativity is amazing. Function drives form, completely.

Running Chronicles: Volume 2

The other day, we had a volunteer meeting/Super Bowl Party with all the volunteers who live in my same department, Rio San Juan. As an ice breaker, we had to go around and write "the thing that is helping us get through our service" and then other people had to guess who had written what. The first thing that came to my mind was "running." Particularly in the last few weeks, running has really emerged as my #1 way of dealing with the stress of adjusting to Nicaragua, and particularly, dealing with the stress that living in a society where machismo is a latent part of daily life (As opposed to say, the United States, where it's less in your face, most of the time, but we've still got a long road to walk in terms of gender equality.)

This may seem counter-intuitive, since I've mentioned that running attracts its fair share of unwanted attention, ranging from catcalls (piropos) to awkwardly getting checked out to just strange looks. At first these things really did bother me, until I realized I could harness this discomfort to fuel my running. Hence, the machismo to endorphins cycle was born.

While piropos are at their root, a form of male control over the female body, I came to the realization that when I am running, no- one has more control over my body than I do. I am physically strong and powerful in ways that most cultures' gender roles cannot accommodate  And so as you smirk and me and honk your horn, I laugh and keep going. My mantra, sometimes whispered to myself, sometimes screamed out in the humid air after the offending car/motorcycle has past: "I AM MY OWN PERSON. I AM MY OWN PERSON. YOU CANNOT CONTROL ME."

Creepiness? A machista comment? Yet another person asking if I have a boyfriend? Another money taker on the bus obsessing over my eyes? Simply the psychological equivalent of calories to drive my down the road, to endorphins to happiness, to strength, to well- being, to the calm that will allow me to get through the day.

Matagalpa Photos

Sunset overlooking a citrus grove in Selva Negra

Coffee beans, pre soaking, drying and roasting

Strangler vines in Selva Negra

The view across the little lake in Selva Negra

Coffee beans in the wild, NOMZ

Matagalpa City

Cloud cover near Cerro Apante

Color-coordinated PCVs at Cerro Apante

TEFL 60 (and a grey shirted environment 60 vol) at La Cascada Santa Emilia