A Enseñar

Day 4 of my Spanish course, which doubles as the school´s pilot program for Special Teacher Cultural Exchange. The school I´ve chosen has a very well established Medical Spanish program, where participants work in a clinic during the morning and receive specialized Spanish and cultural competency lessons in the afternoon, and they´re taking a stab at founding a similar program for educators. Currently, this largely looks like my 1:1 tutor schlepping me across town to buy whiteboard markers during classtime, in order that I and another girl can start teaching 40 kids English starting next Tuesday, but the access it affords us to the Guatemalan education system is pretty priceless.

Yesterday, we went to Quetzaltenango´s only public special education school, which, for Project folks, is very much like a tiny version of Ambato´s center. Students range from 4 to, well, 46, because there´s bugger-all else to do with your grown disabled child in Guatemala. The government provides a nifty little textbook, but only to the actual school-aged schoolchildren, and it doesn´t typically show up till the last third of the year anyway. Regardless of the lack of resources, the school is a sweet and dynamic place, with a pretty impressive vocational program: older students grow tomatoes and peppers in a greenhouse, make wooden knick-knacks to sell, and learn to cook and sew.

This afternoon, a group of us headed to a small town outside Xela to the guarderia founded by the school: it´s an afterschool care center for about 50 local kids, the children of single parents. I asked my host family about the guarderia a couple days ago. Her response: ¨¿Has visto la pelicula ¨Kindergarten Cop?¨

Possibly due to the absence of a Governator, things were not quite that chaotic. It was nevertheless a bit of an adventure, as the 10 of us were turned loose with no instructions on the center. Homework help was much in demand, and I ended out with an adorable, small eight year old attempting to confront long division with remainders. During today´s Spanish for Teachers Official Briefing (essentially my tutor peppering two of us with statistics and lamenting the sorry state of Guatemalan education for 45 minutes) we learned that many public schools have classes of 45 to 50 kids and a teacher who never made it past high school, so it was not hard to understand how Graciela ended out exactly where she was, throwing various numbers against a wall to see what sticks with no understanding of what division actually signified. I backed her up from 347 divided by 38 into the story of six cookies for two kids and we gradually moved upwards. I fully predict that she´ll hide under the table if she sees me again, because I made her late for recess by insisting on comprehension instead of number spaghetti.

And, speaking of spaghetti, it´s time now for dinner: every Thursday, students cook a big dinner at the Spanish school. Suzy´s cooking has been nothing short of fabulous, but I saw carrots in the kitchen this afternoon and I´m positively drooling at the thought of Gringo Food.