Thursday March 25, 2010
So the last couple of days before spring break are already difficult to get through because you are so close but still have to teach, but the last two days have been especially tough. I am sick, and not cold sick, like stomach sick.
It started yesterday morning when I began to have a nasty stomachache. This turned into some unfortunate trips to the bathroom that without medicine I make about once every 1-2 hours. I am going to go to the pharmacy tomorrow if it keeps going and get some anti-parasite medicine just in case that’s what it is. I had some pork the night before I began to get sick, and last time I had pork (which was in a tamale) I also got a stomachache. However, that was only for one night. This has been going on 36 hours. Lets just hope this clears up before spring break, oh wait, that starts tomorrow.
So my buddy Steve is flying in tomorrow along with Rachel’s friends. Rachel, Laura Beth and I will then be meeting them in Santa Rosa late tomorrow afternoon. From there we will head to Copan on Saturday and Sunday and then on to Tela on Monday. We will be here from Monday night through Wednesday and head to San Pedro where on Friday we send the visitors back to the U.S. I am looking forward to it.
Because of my vacation I shall be MIA for the next week. If I get a chance to post I will, but I am not bringing my computer. I’ll have pictures and hopefully some good entries for you when I get back.
See you in a week!
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
Monday March 22, 2010
I forgot to tell you about something that happened on Friday in my nivalacion class.
So Fridays are casual here in Honduras (as in many work places in the United States) and I was wearing jeans, a white polo shirt and my awesome new Abundant Life Christian School warm-up jacket. I was giving a new vocabulary list to my kids, “clothes,” and was demonstrating what a jacket was in English by showing them my jacket. While doing this I walked towards the back of the room and unzipped the front of my jacket as I continued to repeat “J-A-C-K-E-T.” While I did this two girls who were sitting in the row I was walking in freaked out. They suddenly went off saying something really quickly in Spanish and one of them jumped out of her seat and moved towards me. She proceeded to reach at the collar of my white polo shirt, which was now visible since I had unzipped my jacket, grab, and then throw, for American standards, a rather large spider at the window of the classroom. Now when I say for American standards anybody in their right mind, in a typical home in the United States, would freak out at not only the size, but also the scariness of this spider. It was about average for a spider down here in Honduras.
I am not usually a guy who gets all freaked out by spiders. In fact, when I was in Dallas I followed a tarantula around the driving range at Dallas National for a good 10 minutes. But to have this size of a spider crawling on the collar of my polo shirt and not know it was there, that freaked me out a little bit. I came to the conclusion that it must have made its way into my jacket during the night. I hang it up on a nail in my bedroom and it must have made its way into the jacket while I slept unknowingly. When I put it on Friday morning it must have just been hanging out until its unfortunately appearance in my nivalacion class (fortunate for my sake—no spider bites).
Anyway, another Honduras story told. I hope you enjoyed it and watch out for spiders.
I forgot to tell you about something that happened on Friday in my nivalacion class.
So Fridays are casual here in Honduras (as in many work places in the United States) and I was wearing jeans, a white polo shirt and my awesome new Abundant Life Christian School warm-up jacket. I was giving a new vocabulary list to my kids, “clothes,” and was demonstrating what a jacket was in English by showing them my jacket. While doing this I walked towards the back of the room and unzipped the front of my jacket as I continued to repeat “J-A-C-K-E-T.” While I did this two girls who were sitting in the row I was walking in freaked out. They suddenly went off saying something really quickly in Spanish and one of them jumped out of her seat and moved towards me. She proceeded to reach at the collar of my white polo shirt, which was now visible since I had unzipped my jacket, grab, and then throw, for American standards, a rather large spider at the window of the classroom. Now when I say for American standards anybody in their right mind, in a typical home in the United States, would freak out at not only the size, but also the scariness of this spider. It was about average for a spider down here in Honduras.
I am not usually a guy who gets all freaked out by spiders. In fact, when I was in Dallas I followed a tarantula around the driving range at Dallas National for a good 10 minutes. But to have this size of a spider crawling on the collar of my polo shirt and not know it was there, that freaked me out a little bit. I came to the conclusion that it must have made its way into my jacket during the night. I hang it up on a nail in my bedroom and it must have made its way into the jacket while I slept unknowingly. When I put it on Friday morning it must have just been hanging out until its unfortunately appearance in my nivalacion class (fortunate for my sake—no spider bites).
Anyway, another Honduras story told. I hope you enjoyed it and watch out for spiders.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Sunday March 21, 2010
Sorry for the delay. Midweek is always the busiest and come the weekend I am not on my computer that often. But here we go.
So the rest of the week went pretty well. The third marking period is winding down (this coming week in the last week) which means I am officially half way through my time teaching down here. That is hard to believe because I feel like I just left Detroit airport and was embarking on this experience. But here I am two and a half months in and half way through my time teaching. Time flies when you are having fun.
Yesterday (Saturday) was a pretty fantastic day. My spring break travel buddy Rachel and I went into town in search of a couple of things for our vacation to Copan and Tela next week. She was looking for a dress and I was looking for a cowboy beach hat and a pair of aviator sunglasses. We both proved successful and I am the official owner of some knock off Ray Ban aviators and a rather stellar looking cowboy hat (sorry, you will have to wait until break to see pictures). Now, first and foremost, I need to address the fact that I bought a cowboy hat. I have never been a big country fan and I strongly dislike country music. However, last week my buddy Mike mentioned that he had bought a cowboy hat and has been shaping it over the last several weeks. This got me thinking about how sweet it would be if both of us wore cowboy hats in Copan and Tela. We decided that that was what we were going to do, which led me to making the 200 lempira ($10) purchase yesterday. I’ve also wanted a pair of aviator sunglasses and it is now official, I will have a really bad 80’s look going on over break next week. Epic.
After we finished our shopping we were waiting for our mototaxi at Guancascos when we ran into Jennifer, one of the European girls we know. She was there with Renske and Laura (the two girls from last weekend who are from Europe) and they were getting ready to go to the hot springs. About 20 minutes away from Gracias (where I am at) there are natural hot springs that are an attraction to locals and tourists. Two of the girls’ program supervisors were in town and had a truck that they were going to take to the springs. They invited us and even though neither Rachel nor I had our swimsuits we went, because neither of us had been to the private hot springs, which is where they were going (these are evidently nicer and less busy then the public ones). The springs were fantastic. Unfortunately neither of us had our cameras so we didn’t get any pictures. But basically there are three main pools that vary in temperature because of their distance from the hot spring. There are then several smaller pools which are fed directly by the hot spring and which are rather hot—I went in one that we guessed was somewhere between 105 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It was just amazing to me that this hot water was natural. And as expected, the pools were very well kept and clean and were not that busy. We hung out there for almost 3 hours. We eventually made our way back to Gracias and back home. I considered the day seized and relaxed the rest of the night.
Anyway, I am off to the river to work on my base tan before next week so I’ll try and get another post done by midweek. I hope all is well for everyone back home. Take care.
Sorry for the delay. Midweek is always the busiest and come the weekend I am not on my computer that often. But here we go.
So the rest of the week went pretty well. The third marking period is winding down (this coming week in the last week) which means I am officially half way through my time teaching down here. That is hard to believe because I feel like I just left Detroit airport and was embarking on this experience. But here I am two and a half months in and half way through my time teaching. Time flies when you are having fun.
Yesterday (Saturday) was a pretty fantastic day. My spring break travel buddy Rachel and I went into town in search of a couple of things for our vacation to Copan and Tela next week. She was looking for a dress and I was looking for a cowboy beach hat and a pair of aviator sunglasses. We both proved successful and I am the official owner of some knock off Ray Ban aviators and a rather stellar looking cowboy hat (sorry, you will have to wait until break to see pictures). Now, first and foremost, I need to address the fact that I bought a cowboy hat. I have never been a big country fan and I strongly dislike country music. However, last week my buddy Mike mentioned that he had bought a cowboy hat and has been shaping it over the last several weeks. This got me thinking about how sweet it would be if both of us wore cowboy hats in Copan and Tela. We decided that that was what we were going to do, which led me to making the 200 lempira ($10) purchase yesterday. I’ve also wanted a pair of aviator sunglasses and it is now official, I will have a really bad 80’s look going on over break next week. Epic.
After we finished our shopping we were waiting for our mototaxi at Guancascos when we ran into Jennifer, one of the European girls we know. She was there with Renske and Laura (the two girls from last weekend who are from Europe) and they were getting ready to go to the hot springs. About 20 minutes away from Gracias (where I am at) there are natural hot springs that are an attraction to locals and tourists. Two of the girls’ program supervisors were in town and had a truck that they were going to take to the springs. They invited us and even though neither Rachel nor I had our swimsuits we went, because neither of us had been to the private hot springs, which is where they were going (these are evidently nicer and less busy then the public ones). The springs were fantastic. Unfortunately neither of us had our cameras so we didn’t get any pictures. But basically there are three main pools that vary in temperature because of their distance from the hot spring. There are then several smaller pools which are fed directly by the hot spring and which are rather hot—I went in one that we guessed was somewhere between 105 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It was just amazing to me that this hot water was natural. And as expected, the pools were very well kept and clean and were not that busy. We hung out there for almost 3 hours. We eventually made our way back to Gracias and back home. I considered the day seized and relaxed the rest of the night.
Anyway, I am off to the river to work on my base tan before next week so I’ll try and get another post done by midweek. I hope all is well for everyone back home. Take care.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The power went out last night so I did not get a chance to post an entry I wrote yesterday. It is below this one. I also posted a few pictures of my nivalacion class (the class I am teaching ESL to). You can check those out by clicking to the right.
Last week Thursday the boys and girls soccer team went to La Union to play their boys and girls soccer team. Unfortunately the boys lost 0-2 and the girls lost 2-6. In fact, Reske and Laura, the two European girls I talked about a few days ago who teach at the La Union school, would not stop bragging about their school’s two victories. Me being the competitive person I am could not stand it, and wanted a rematch. Well, I found out that that rematch would be today—La Union came to Gracias for a rematch.
The boy’s game was played down in Gracias at the stadium, so unfortunately no one at the school was able to watch it. However, the boys ended up avenging last weeks lost with a 2-0 victory. The girls played at the school on the cement basketball/soccer field. They play 4 v.4 plus a goalie so its small sided. The game started a little before noon (it was scorching hot today too. I was drenched in sweat sitting and watching the game) and all the students from 5th grade through 9th grade were allowed to go watch. It was a lot of fun. I’ll upload some video from before the game (the students were going crazy with horns and drums) and maybe some video from the actual game. Unfortunately, the girls lost 1-4. Either way it was a nice break from class and a fun experience to see all the students get into supporting each other. In fact, I had told Mr. Bran to text me after the boy’s game and let me know how it went. I left my phone on my desk and when I saw it go off and picked it up my nivalacion class went silent. I looked at the message and wrote the score on the board—the students went crazy. When the boy’s team returned from town the school went crazy and I had to rip my kids away from the window where they were watching the boys come in. It was a good time.
Anyway, like I mentioned above, it is really hot again today. It’s been like this for probably the last week or so—probably between 85 and 90. There is nothing like leaving Michigan in the winter and going to summer weather in Honduras, and then returning to Michigan for summer weather. If only Honduras had a Lake Michigan…
The power went out last night so I did not get a chance to post an entry I wrote yesterday. It is below this one. I also posted a few pictures of my nivalacion class (the class I am teaching ESL to). You can check those out by clicking to the right.
Last week Thursday the boys and girls soccer team went to La Union to play their boys and girls soccer team. Unfortunately the boys lost 0-2 and the girls lost 2-6. In fact, Reske and Laura, the two European girls I talked about a few days ago who teach at the La Union school, would not stop bragging about their school’s two victories. Me being the competitive person I am could not stand it, and wanted a rematch. Well, I found out that that rematch would be today—La Union came to Gracias for a rematch.
The boy’s game was played down in Gracias at the stadium, so unfortunately no one at the school was able to watch it. However, the boys ended up avenging last weeks lost with a 2-0 victory. The girls played at the school on the cement basketball/soccer field. They play 4 v.4 plus a goalie so its small sided. The game started a little before noon (it was scorching hot today too. I was drenched in sweat sitting and watching the game) and all the students from 5th grade through 9th grade were allowed to go watch. It was a lot of fun. I’ll upload some video from before the game (the students were going crazy with horns and drums) and maybe some video from the actual game. Unfortunately, the girls lost 1-4. Either way it was a nice break from class and a fun experience to see all the students get into supporting each other. In fact, I had told Mr. Bran to text me after the boy’s game and let me know how it went. I left my phone on my desk and when I saw it go off and picked it up my nivalacion class went silent. I looked at the message and wrote the score on the board—the students went crazy. When the boy’s team returned from town the school went crazy and I had to rip my kids away from the window where they were watching the boys come in. It was a good time.
Anyway, like I mentioned above, it is really hot again today. It’s been like this for probably the last week or so—probably between 85 and 90. There is nothing like leaving Michigan in the winter and going to summer weather in Honduras, and then returning to Michigan for summer weather. If only Honduras had a Lake Michigan…
Monday, March 15, 2010
Monday, March 15
Oh beware of the ides of March. Julius Caesar wasn’t…
Anyway, I wanted to give a quick description on what my three friends are doing (mentioned in yesterday’s blog entry). Mike, Andrew and Patrick are three of my good friends from college. I got to know Mike beginning freshmen year and got to know Patrick and Andrew junior and senior year. The three of them got involved with a UM graduate student and they spent three months this past summer down here doing research. But along with this they began to work on starting a microfinance company down here in Honduras. I know they are working with a fourth individual as well but I don’t know all the details about how they are doing this or how they set it up. Although I do know their overall purpose is to help coffee growers in La Union.
La Union is a smaller community about an hour and a half from where I am in Gracias. As mentioned there is also an Abundant Life Christian School there. My friends are working with the local coop of coffee growers in La Union and are hoping to bring about more economic success for this community. What they are doing is two fold: they are first providing assistance to these growers, such as loans, so that they can purchase fertilizer and anything else needed to help grow the coffee. Along with providing loans they are also working to create a face and a market for these growers—they buy the coffee from the growers and ship it back to the United States. In the United States they have established a partnership with a coffee shop in Saugatuck where the beans are roasted, bagged and sold. So the second part of their work here in Honduras is selling and marketing this coffee back in the United States. They sell their coffee for $10 a pound. Seven dollars of that goes back to the growers in the form of loans and is also used to purchase more coffee (again, this is from my understanding. I am describing what I understood from my conversation with them this weekend). The other $3 goes towards supporting Mike, Patrick and Andrew and their efforts (food, housing, travel expenses etc.). I got really excited for them as they were telling me about what they were doing. I had had conversations with them in the past, but now that they were down here doing it and I am familiar with Honduras, I have a lot better understanding and appreciation for what they are doing.
So, in writing all of this I am doing two things. First, informing you about what three of my good friends are doing down here in Honduras. Second, for those of you who read this and are coffee drinkers, I want you to not only think about at least purchasing this coffee and trying it, but also think and see if know that in buying it you are not only helping my friends, but more importantly helping people down here in the small and poor community of La Union, Honduras. But to also spread the word to anyone you may know who would be interested in helping my friends out. They are still looking for investors as well as people to help them market their product. If you think you know someone or have any possibilities shoot me an email (tad.vandenbrink@gmail.com) and I will relay that information off to my friends. Thanks!
I will post the guys website information and cover letter as soon as I get it from them.
Oh beware of the ides of March. Julius Caesar wasn’t…
Anyway, I wanted to give a quick description on what my three friends are doing (mentioned in yesterday’s blog entry). Mike, Andrew and Patrick are three of my good friends from college. I got to know Mike beginning freshmen year and got to know Patrick and Andrew junior and senior year. The three of them got involved with a UM graduate student and they spent three months this past summer down here doing research. But along with this they began to work on starting a microfinance company down here in Honduras. I know they are working with a fourth individual as well but I don’t know all the details about how they are doing this or how they set it up. Although I do know their overall purpose is to help coffee growers in La Union.
La Union is a smaller community about an hour and a half from where I am in Gracias. As mentioned there is also an Abundant Life Christian School there. My friends are working with the local coop of coffee growers in La Union and are hoping to bring about more economic success for this community. What they are doing is two fold: they are first providing assistance to these growers, such as loans, so that they can purchase fertilizer and anything else needed to help grow the coffee. Along with providing loans they are also working to create a face and a market for these growers—they buy the coffee from the growers and ship it back to the United States. In the United States they have established a partnership with a coffee shop in Saugatuck where the beans are roasted, bagged and sold. So the second part of their work here in Honduras is selling and marketing this coffee back in the United States. They sell their coffee for $10 a pound. Seven dollars of that goes back to the growers in the form of loans and is also used to purchase more coffee (again, this is from my understanding. I am describing what I understood from my conversation with them this weekend). The other $3 goes towards supporting Mike, Patrick and Andrew and their efforts (food, housing, travel expenses etc.). I got really excited for them as they were telling me about what they were doing. I had had conversations with them in the past, but now that they were down here doing it and I am familiar with Honduras, I have a lot better understanding and appreciation for what they are doing.
So, in writing all of this I am doing two things. First, informing you about what three of my good friends are doing down here in Honduras. Second, for those of you who read this and are coffee drinkers, I want you to not only think about at least purchasing this coffee and trying it, but also think and see if know that in buying it you are not only helping my friends, but more importantly helping people down here in the small and poor community of La Union, Honduras. But to also spread the word to anyone you may know who would be interested in helping my friends out. They are still looking for investors as well as people to help them market their product. If you think you know someone or have any possibilities shoot me an email (tad.vandenbrink@gmail.com) and I will relay that information off to my friends. Thanks!
I will post the guys website information and cover letter as soon as I get it from them.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Sunday March 14, 201
This morning I was sitting across the table from one of my best friends in college, with another sitting behind me in the living room, sitting next to a girl who lives 20 minutes from me back home in Michigan and another girl from Iowa, and talking with two 18 year old girls from Europe. All of this in rural Honduras. Now if that isn’t awesome I don’t know what is.
As you may or may not know I have a couple of really good college friends (Mike DeWit and Patrick Hughes) starting a microfinance company down here in Honduras (another one of my buddies, Andrew Boyd, is doing it with them, but he is still state-side). They are doing this in and around La Union, which is about an hour and a half bus ride from Gracias. I will write another blog entry about what they are doing later. They gave me a call Thursday night saying they were taking a break from work and doing some traveling and that they could hang out in Gracias this weekend. They had gotten to Honduras about 3 weeks ago and I hadn’t gotten a chance to connect with them yet so I was extremely excited.
On Friday afternoon I met them in town and grabbed some dinner and I showed them around. We then came up to Villa Verde (where I live outside of Gracias and where the school is at) and we all crashed up here both Friday and Saturday night. So those were my two good friends that were sitting with me this morning. The two Europeans were actually two girls who are working at the Abundant Life Christian School in La Union and who know Mike and Patrick but also know all the teachers here in Gracias because of the school connection. They came in last night and we all hung out. Renske and Laura are part of a program that sets them up as volunteers in Honduras for a year before they go to college in Europe. We have two girls from the same program at my school who help out the kindergarten and pre-school teachers. Then add Laura Beth to that mix of people and it was quite the group. It was just crazy to think about, mostly the fact that there I was in Honduras, eating pancakes with two of my best friends from college. Wild.
Anyway, I do realize it’s been over a week since my last post—which I don’t know how many people actually read (I was hoping for some more comments, but oh well). But it was a pretty busy week down here and I have been pretty exhausted with schoolwork and the warmer weather (it was 95 here Friday afternoon). But things are still going well. I am counting the days until spring break (11) and looking forward to our plans of going to Copan, San Pedro and Tela.
As mentioned above, this weekend was very good and I have spent most of today (Sunday) grading papers. The life of a teacher, even in Honduras.
Well, I need to get back to grading but I will try and be better about posting this week! Take care.
This morning I was sitting across the table from one of my best friends in college, with another sitting behind me in the living room, sitting next to a girl who lives 20 minutes from me back home in Michigan and another girl from Iowa, and talking with two 18 year old girls from Europe. All of this in rural Honduras. Now if that isn’t awesome I don’t know what is.
As you may or may not know I have a couple of really good college friends (Mike DeWit and Patrick Hughes) starting a microfinance company down here in Honduras (another one of my buddies, Andrew Boyd, is doing it with them, but he is still state-side). They are doing this in and around La Union, which is about an hour and a half bus ride from Gracias. I will write another blog entry about what they are doing later. They gave me a call Thursday night saying they were taking a break from work and doing some traveling and that they could hang out in Gracias this weekend. They had gotten to Honduras about 3 weeks ago and I hadn’t gotten a chance to connect with them yet so I was extremely excited.
On Friday afternoon I met them in town and grabbed some dinner and I showed them around. We then came up to Villa Verde (where I live outside of Gracias and where the school is at) and we all crashed up here both Friday and Saturday night. So those were my two good friends that were sitting with me this morning. The two Europeans were actually two girls who are working at the Abundant Life Christian School in La Union and who know Mike and Patrick but also know all the teachers here in Gracias because of the school connection. They came in last night and we all hung out. Renske and Laura are part of a program that sets them up as volunteers in Honduras for a year before they go to college in Europe. We have two girls from the same program at my school who help out the kindergarten and pre-school teachers. Then add Laura Beth to that mix of people and it was quite the group. It was just crazy to think about, mostly the fact that there I was in Honduras, eating pancakes with two of my best friends from college. Wild.
Anyway, I do realize it’s been over a week since my last post—which I don’t know how many people actually read (I was hoping for some more comments, but oh well). But it was a pretty busy week down here and I have been pretty exhausted with schoolwork and the warmer weather (it was 95 here Friday afternoon). But things are still going well. I am counting the days until spring break (11) and looking forward to our plans of going to Copan, San Pedro and Tela.
As mentioned above, this weekend was very good and I have spent most of today (Sunday) grading papers. The life of a teacher, even in Honduras.
Well, I need to get back to grading but I will try and be better about posting this week! Take care.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Thursday March 4, 2010
If you had told me in May when I graduated, or even this past October, that my first teaching job would be at a bilingual school in Gracias, Honduras teaching not only kids history and geography, but English as well, I would have laughed at you. But here I am, sitting outside on a perfect 75-degree day in March staring up at the mountains waiting to go teach my nivalacion kids basic phonics and vocabulary and later World history to my 7th graders and U.S. History to my 8th graders. It is funny how life works.
Although I feel like I’ve grown personally through all of this it is also the professional growth I am excited about, which was also a major reason why I decided to come to Honduras and teach. This is my first teaching job, and it is a very unique one at that. I want to take some time to share some thoughts that I have had since I’ve been down here about this and a few other topics.
Being down here has further excited me about my chosen profession. After graduating last May I was hoping to find a full-time teaching job—it was something I wanted to do, not only for the pay, but to be in the classroom with the kids and begin to grow as a teacher. When this did not work out (I couldn’t land a teaching job) I began to look for other opportunities and was eager to find one that would allow me to be back in the classroom. Although I had begun to look into teaching overseas, I never thought I would have gotten a position so quickly, but here I am in Honduras.
Now, as many of you know, working with kids can be one of the most challenging professions, but also one of the most rewarding. Being down here in Honduras sheds light on this in a whole different way. In the United States you have the public school system, where every kid has the opportunity to get an education, with a larger and larger percentage of high school graduates going on to some sort of college or training. Down here that is not the case. Before I came down here I read that Honduras has one of the lowest literacy rates in Central America. Coming down here and seeing this for myself, and then seeing the unique opportunities that the kids at my school have to not only get a good education, but learn English as well, is an experience all in itself. Although I am not going to be back in Honduras next year, the kids I work with here on a daily basis will always be with me, and I am going to make my best attempt to stay in contact with as many of them as I can. Eventually I would like to support a student at the school. Almost 35 percent of the students here in Gracias are on scholarship—it costs right around $100 a month for a student to be enrolled at the school. It is something I want to do once I get settled down (whenever that will be…) and a worth while investment in helping a child gain an excellent education, go to college, and make a difference in his or her home country.
Along with thinking about the differences in expectations of education and what it means to be educated I have thought about what my role as a teacher is down here in Honduras. But that led me to think about teachers in general; what is the role of a teacher in the classroom? It seems like a simple question to answer, but is it actually as straightforward as most people think? This is something I’ve thought about a lot down here in Honduras. Here I am, thousands of miles away in a developing country, teaching native Hondurans in English. As a teacher who is looking forward to a long career in education this is something that must always be in my mind—what is my role in the classroom with my students’ and how do I make sure I know I am doing my job? But how do you know how successful you are if you don’t even know what your job is in the first place?
In my education classes we always talked about there being a fine line between being the teacher and the students’ friend. You need to be especially careful early on in your teaching career because of the smaller age gap. If you become too friendly you lose the students’ respect, and if you are too strict you can also lose the students’ respect. There is middle ground that must be found to have a healthy classroom environment. But how is that middle ground reached? This is all centered on classroom management, and for me this is just as important as content knowledge for a teacher in the classroom.
I want to use a book I finally read down here in Honduras as an example. A couple of Christmas’ ago my sister gave me Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man. McCourt was a public school teacher in the New York Public Schools for several years. He uses this book as almost an autobiography of his career in education and it is a phenomenal read. In it you see McCourt develop his classroom management around his ability to engage his students—engage his students in stories of his life growing up in Ireland or fighting in Europe during World War II or working the docks. Many (such as administrators and disgruntled parents) might view this as unproductive and not what a teacher should be doing during class time. But I see this as something so valuable in the classroom that is must be done. Many say the teacher’s role in the classroom is to teach the content, assign homework, and give tests. I disagree. One of the reasons why I went into education was to be able to work with kids and help them develop into young adults who think critically about their surroundings. Part of this is through engaging them in the classroom, even if it isn’t in the content. McCourt thrived on this and it allowed him to develop a relationship with his students that carried over into the influence he had on them as a teacher and their overall growth as a person. This then carried over into his ability to focus on the content and through creative ways work with the students. Although I believe teachers are responsible for teaching content and making sure school, state, and national standards are being met, I also believe that teachers must find ways to keep the students engaged and trigger their curiosity in different and unique ways, and this isn’t always through the content. It all comes together in the end and if done right can create a classroom environment where learning can thrive. The question is finding that middle ground, which is something I am looking forward to working on through my career.
So this has become a pretty long post so I think I’ll end here. Feel free to comment on it and I might follow it up with some more thoughts if you show interest.
If you had told me in May when I graduated, or even this past October, that my first teaching job would be at a bilingual school in Gracias, Honduras teaching not only kids history and geography, but English as well, I would have laughed at you. But here I am, sitting outside on a perfect 75-degree day in March staring up at the mountains waiting to go teach my nivalacion kids basic phonics and vocabulary and later World history to my 7th graders and U.S. History to my 8th graders. It is funny how life works.
Although I feel like I’ve grown personally through all of this it is also the professional growth I am excited about, which was also a major reason why I decided to come to Honduras and teach. This is my first teaching job, and it is a very unique one at that. I want to take some time to share some thoughts that I have had since I’ve been down here about this and a few other topics.
Being down here has further excited me about my chosen profession. After graduating last May I was hoping to find a full-time teaching job—it was something I wanted to do, not only for the pay, but to be in the classroom with the kids and begin to grow as a teacher. When this did not work out (I couldn’t land a teaching job) I began to look for other opportunities and was eager to find one that would allow me to be back in the classroom. Although I had begun to look into teaching overseas, I never thought I would have gotten a position so quickly, but here I am in Honduras.
Now, as many of you know, working with kids can be one of the most challenging professions, but also one of the most rewarding. Being down here in Honduras sheds light on this in a whole different way. In the United States you have the public school system, where every kid has the opportunity to get an education, with a larger and larger percentage of high school graduates going on to some sort of college or training. Down here that is not the case. Before I came down here I read that Honduras has one of the lowest literacy rates in Central America. Coming down here and seeing this for myself, and then seeing the unique opportunities that the kids at my school have to not only get a good education, but learn English as well, is an experience all in itself. Although I am not going to be back in Honduras next year, the kids I work with here on a daily basis will always be with me, and I am going to make my best attempt to stay in contact with as many of them as I can. Eventually I would like to support a student at the school. Almost 35 percent of the students here in Gracias are on scholarship—it costs right around $100 a month for a student to be enrolled at the school. It is something I want to do once I get settled down (whenever that will be…) and a worth while investment in helping a child gain an excellent education, go to college, and make a difference in his or her home country.
Along with thinking about the differences in expectations of education and what it means to be educated I have thought about what my role as a teacher is down here in Honduras. But that led me to think about teachers in general; what is the role of a teacher in the classroom? It seems like a simple question to answer, but is it actually as straightforward as most people think? This is something I’ve thought about a lot down here in Honduras. Here I am, thousands of miles away in a developing country, teaching native Hondurans in English. As a teacher who is looking forward to a long career in education this is something that must always be in my mind—what is my role in the classroom with my students’ and how do I make sure I know I am doing my job? But how do you know how successful you are if you don’t even know what your job is in the first place?
In my education classes we always talked about there being a fine line between being the teacher and the students’ friend. You need to be especially careful early on in your teaching career because of the smaller age gap. If you become too friendly you lose the students’ respect, and if you are too strict you can also lose the students’ respect. There is middle ground that must be found to have a healthy classroom environment. But how is that middle ground reached? This is all centered on classroom management, and for me this is just as important as content knowledge for a teacher in the classroom.
I want to use a book I finally read down here in Honduras as an example. A couple of Christmas’ ago my sister gave me Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man. McCourt was a public school teacher in the New York Public Schools for several years. He uses this book as almost an autobiography of his career in education and it is a phenomenal read. In it you see McCourt develop his classroom management around his ability to engage his students—engage his students in stories of his life growing up in Ireland or fighting in Europe during World War II or working the docks. Many (such as administrators and disgruntled parents) might view this as unproductive and not what a teacher should be doing during class time. But I see this as something so valuable in the classroom that is must be done. Many say the teacher’s role in the classroom is to teach the content, assign homework, and give tests. I disagree. One of the reasons why I went into education was to be able to work with kids and help them develop into young adults who think critically about their surroundings. Part of this is through engaging them in the classroom, even if it isn’t in the content. McCourt thrived on this and it allowed him to develop a relationship with his students that carried over into the influence he had on them as a teacher and their overall growth as a person. This then carried over into his ability to focus on the content and through creative ways work with the students. Although I believe teachers are responsible for teaching content and making sure school, state, and national standards are being met, I also believe that teachers must find ways to keep the students engaged and trigger their curiosity in different and unique ways, and this isn’t always through the content. It all comes together in the end and if done right can create a classroom environment where learning can thrive. The question is finding that middle ground, which is something I am looking forward to working on through my career.
So this has become a pretty long post so I think I’ll end here. Feel free to comment on it and I might follow it up with some more thoughts if you show interest.
Monday, March 1, 2010
March 1, 2010
It is already March and I have been in Honduras for almost 2 months. I feel like I just left the airport in Detroit and was embarking on this experience, and here I am one-third of the way through it. It’s hard to believe it’s already been two months, but as they say, time flies when you are having fun.
Sorry I never got a second entry posted last week. I had something written up and decided it was something I wanted to work on a little bit more before I posted it. I am hoping it will be my entry for the end of this week.
So it is Monday and per usual it feels like a Monday. Although I am not dragging as much as I was at this point last week, I am still feeling a little off. I had a tough class period with my 8th graders. I tried having them do a debate in class today over state’s rights and the issue of nullification. I was specifically using the Tariff of Abomination as the example (for the record, I used the example of toilet paper that my 7th grade history teacher used when she taught me this) of if the state’s had the right to nullify a federal law. I had originally planned to do this Thursday and Friday of last week, but because I got behind a little I had to do Friday and today. The students had a good grasp on the issue Friday but as most cases with the weekends the students had 2 days to forget it. I gave the students 15 minutes of prep time in class today but they just didn’t get it. Pair that with this being their first attempt at a debate and I’d say the lesson blew up in my face and I had to scramble to solidify the point of the lesson and what I was trying to have them do. But oh well, that is the life of a teacher. You can’t always walk away from a lesson saying you nailed it, because rarely that happens. You take what is given to you and do what you can. That was me today in class with my 8th graders. Overall, it was a great learning experience for a new teacher like myself.
It was a pretty good weekend as well. For what felt like the 4th straight weekend it rained and was cold on Saturday, so we ended up not going to town (which also means my desperately needed haircut will have to wait another week). So instead I tried to get a little work done but that ended in me taking a nap. Later in the afternoon two of the teachers from the Abundant Life Christian School in La Union came up (they were in Gracias for the weekend along with two others who worked at another school about 40 minutes from Gracias) the mountain and we hung out at the girls place for a couple of hours. As dinnertime approached a group of us decided to go back down to Gracias with them and grab dinner as well. It was a lot of fun talking with all of them. They were all European and all recent high school graduates who are doing a one-year program teaching here in Honduras (we have two of them at my school as well but they had gone to Tegus for the weekend). Three out of the four girls were from the United Kingdom and the other was from the Netherlands. I couldn’t imagine doing what I am doing right now right after I graduated from high school—thoroughly impressive.
Sunday’s weather cooperated a little better but since I had fallen a sleep and then hung out with the girls I had a lot of work to do. I did get a chance to make it down to the river later in the afternoon but unfortunately the sun had already made its way behind the mountains. I guess that tan will have to wait another week. Speaking of tan, Rachel and I worked on the spring break plans this weekend. I am not sure if I mentioned it before but Rachel has two friends coming down for break and I have one—in fact my buddy Steve was able to get an almost identical flight schedule as the two girls. All of us including Laura Beth and my buddy Mike, who is finally in La Union working on setting up a microfinance company, will be hanging out over spring break. We booked our hostel in Copan, which is where there are some Mayan ruins that we are going to check out. We are then working on picking out a hotel down in Tela, which in on the coast, which is where we are going to spend the rest of the week after Copan. That is only 4 weeks away and I am getting really excited for it.
Anyway, this is a pretty long entry so I’ll let you guys go. Sorry I haven’t posted any recent pictures, I need to start taking more of them. I’ll try and post some pictures of me in class with my students in the next couple of weeks. Adios for now.
It is already March and I have been in Honduras for almost 2 months. I feel like I just left the airport in Detroit and was embarking on this experience, and here I am one-third of the way through it. It’s hard to believe it’s already been two months, but as they say, time flies when you are having fun.
Sorry I never got a second entry posted last week. I had something written up and decided it was something I wanted to work on a little bit more before I posted it. I am hoping it will be my entry for the end of this week.
So it is Monday and per usual it feels like a Monday. Although I am not dragging as much as I was at this point last week, I am still feeling a little off. I had a tough class period with my 8th graders. I tried having them do a debate in class today over state’s rights and the issue of nullification. I was specifically using the Tariff of Abomination as the example (for the record, I used the example of toilet paper that my 7th grade history teacher used when she taught me this) of if the state’s had the right to nullify a federal law. I had originally planned to do this Thursday and Friday of last week, but because I got behind a little I had to do Friday and today. The students had a good grasp on the issue Friday but as most cases with the weekends the students had 2 days to forget it. I gave the students 15 minutes of prep time in class today but they just didn’t get it. Pair that with this being their first attempt at a debate and I’d say the lesson blew up in my face and I had to scramble to solidify the point of the lesson and what I was trying to have them do. But oh well, that is the life of a teacher. You can’t always walk away from a lesson saying you nailed it, because rarely that happens. You take what is given to you and do what you can. That was me today in class with my 8th graders. Overall, it was a great learning experience for a new teacher like myself.
It was a pretty good weekend as well. For what felt like the 4th straight weekend it rained and was cold on Saturday, so we ended up not going to town (which also means my desperately needed haircut will have to wait another week). So instead I tried to get a little work done but that ended in me taking a nap. Later in the afternoon two of the teachers from the Abundant Life Christian School in La Union came up (they were in Gracias for the weekend along with two others who worked at another school about 40 minutes from Gracias) the mountain and we hung out at the girls place for a couple of hours. As dinnertime approached a group of us decided to go back down to Gracias with them and grab dinner as well. It was a lot of fun talking with all of them. They were all European and all recent high school graduates who are doing a one-year program teaching here in Honduras (we have two of them at my school as well but they had gone to Tegus for the weekend). Three out of the four girls were from the United Kingdom and the other was from the Netherlands. I couldn’t imagine doing what I am doing right now right after I graduated from high school—thoroughly impressive.
Sunday’s weather cooperated a little better but since I had fallen a sleep and then hung out with the girls I had a lot of work to do. I did get a chance to make it down to the river later in the afternoon but unfortunately the sun had already made its way behind the mountains. I guess that tan will have to wait another week. Speaking of tan, Rachel and I worked on the spring break plans this weekend. I am not sure if I mentioned it before but Rachel has two friends coming down for break and I have one—in fact my buddy Steve was able to get an almost identical flight schedule as the two girls. All of us including Laura Beth and my buddy Mike, who is finally in La Union working on setting up a microfinance company, will be hanging out over spring break. We booked our hostel in Copan, which is where there are some Mayan ruins that we are going to check out. We are then working on picking out a hotel down in Tela, which in on the coast, which is where we are going to spend the rest of the week after Copan. That is only 4 weeks away and I am getting really excited for it.
Anyway, this is a pretty long entry so I’ll let you guys go. Sorry I haven’t posted any recent pictures, I need to start taking more of them. I’ll try and post some pictures of me in class with my students in the next couple of weeks. Adios for now.
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