All right, you all out there know that I am not normally a Debbie Downer. I am trying to capture the experience here as it truly is, and convey some part of it to you. This is, of course, yet another impossible task I have given myself. Whatever.
I returned to school to find give a small test (with no grade) to my students in seventh grade. After six weeks on this unit of pure struggle, of writing on the board and insisting that they take notes, of repeating myself over and over and over...nothing. Even the best students in the class couldn't do the test. Every last one would have failed.
So the English absorption level of my students is at about 20%. At best. At worst, they know absolutely nothing from the unit. Apparently my expectations need to slip another ten notches lower.
But wait! There's more!
A student of mine, who I know is smart and understands English more than he lets on, has been causing problems in my class for a few weeks now (since the seventh and eighth graders collectively lost their hormonal minds over crushes). I asked him six times today to take his seat. He openly refused to even put his name on my test. He distracted other students.
And then, the seventh time I told him to sit down...he reached out and hit one of the other students, one who has special needs and developmental problems. It made a huge noise and it was obvious that he had hit him hard.
"All right, that's it. Get out! A fuera!" I told him. "Go to the office and tell them what you've done. I do not accept that kind of behavior in my class." The other students clapped.
They suspended him.
The whole class turned on me in an instant. They called me evil. They told me that it was my fault that he got suspended. They swore at me and stole from me. They didn't do their work.
Let's take a moment to remember that I actually paid to be here. I receive a small stipend from the United Nations Development Program (the check I cashed today actually had the UN logo on it!), but it is equivalent to about $8 a day. Minimum wage in Chile is 34,000 pesos a day (about $7.50 an hour, same as Colorado). Damn, my stipend sucks. I pay the difference in blood, sweat, and tears.
The money isn't the issue, really. I wanted to help people, and teach, and make a difference. Change things. Be part of something bigger than myself. But what I am realizing is that one cannot help people who don't want the help...and no one wants to admit that they need help, and one cannot teach people to recieve help graciously. No one wants to admit that they could do better.
The change has to come from within. Because my students and hosts and the town and Chile are not ready to change from within, everything that I do is moot. I cannot change the tide alone, and I apparently cannot convince even my best students that studying is important. And I wonder if it is only here in this school or this community, or if my life's mission to help people in whatever way I can in many places around the world is pointless. Impossible.
In some cases like that of José who got suspended today, maybe things would have been better if I had never come here. In any case it seems on the whole that there would have been no difference if I had not, and I could have saved a bunch of people the inconvenience of having to fulfill a contract or host a foreigner or learn a simple phrase in English. My students can't even answer "How are you?" after nearly three months. I don't know what more I can do.
So, what do you do when there is nothing more to do? When you have nothing more to give? When what you thought was the point of your life has been erroded by three months of floundering and you wonder what the point of trying is?
You tell the existential crisis bearing down on you to go fuck itself, and you spend the UN's money on some new boots and a coffee. Because sometimes you have to stop thinking for awhile and take care of yourself before you lose it completely. Tomorrow is a new day, and you have to face the crisis first thing in the morning. A little break never hurt anyone.
24 May 2011
Halfway Through the Marathon
I'm going to kiss the dishwasher in my parents' kitchen when I get home. And the laundry machines. And the stove, and the pots and pans, and the bathtub, and my laptop. I'm going to go to the Boulder Farmer's Market and cry like a baby. I'm going to look at how our house doesn't have a lean to it and how all of our streets are paved and how ridiculously clear the picture is on our HDTV and wonder how I ever got along with something different. I am going to step inside a state-of-the-art hospital and feel uncomfortable that everything is so clean.
In talking with a dear friend yesterday, I was reminded that all of this struggle and pain and frustration and disorganization and confusion all adding up to a big fat sense of futility is temporary. For me. It sounds like I'm homesick because I am, but it also alludes to a greater issue.
I feel guilty that this is temporary for me. Because it isn't for the people who live here.
All the things that were supposed to be one way and actually are totally different. All the systemic confusion and lack of responsibility on so many levels locally and nationally. All the corruption that seems to happen with deals like the recent HidroAysén fiasco here in Chile (if you don't know what I am referring to, check out this article http://matadornetwork.com/change/11-disgusting-facts-about-a-massive-dam-project-just-approved-in-chile/). All the struggle to change and develop and become a world player. All the unequal distribution of resources and opportunity.
I can and will leave at some point and go back to my cushy life in the States. Honestly, I have the resources to leave tomorrow morning if I wanted to. I could be sitting on my couch on the back porch in late spring with a pool to swim in within three days, instead of struggling yet again with my eighth graders on Friday, wondering why I am here if they don't want to learn and not one of the teachers in the school can control them. They know I am frustrated. The 8th graders keep telling me that I have no patience and the seventh graders ask me why I am not ashamed of my Spanish.
I am beginning to hit some kind of a limit within me, which appears to be manifesting as anxious butterflies and a sincere desire to just leave the classroom and walk out of the school forever. My "boss" teacher didn't show up to school today, meaning that I had to throw everyone off by insisting that they fulfill the terms of their contract with the program and not force me to take a full class. People act like my presence is more of an inconvenience than anything else, whether it is in the school or at home or in Chile in general. I try so godamn hard every day to make everyone else's life easier and to give my time and work and sweat and money to help Chile, and some of it feels unappreciated on days like today.
I want to hope that this is just yet another "wall" like the ones that long-distance runners experience and that I just have to push through it...because make no mistake, my time in Chile is a marathon that is not getting any easier. Maybe this is just the feeling of the uphill section beginning after the first thirteen miles.
But I don't want to leave. Not yet. Because I want to prove to myself that I can stick it out, that I am tough enough and flexible enough to stay even when I could easily cop out. Besides, only 34 days of teaching remain. Less than a third of the time I have left here in South America. The rest will be split between English Camps and traveling.
At the very least, this time in my life gave me the perspective to truly appreciate the life I have lived up to this point...my education especially. And I now speak passable Chilean Spanish. And I have a lot of really beautiful photos. Maybe those three things are the whole point. Or maybe there isn't one.
At this point it doesn't seem to matter too much. I'm halfway through the marathon. Only thirteen more miles (uphill) to go.
In talking with a dear friend yesterday, I was reminded that all of this struggle and pain and frustration and disorganization and confusion all adding up to a big fat sense of futility is temporary. For me. It sounds like I'm homesick because I am, but it also alludes to a greater issue.
I feel guilty that this is temporary for me. Because it isn't for the people who live here.
All the things that were supposed to be one way and actually are totally different. All the systemic confusion and lack of responsibility on so many levels locally and nationally. All the corruption that seems to happen with deals like the recent HidroAysén fiasco here in Chile (if you don't know what I am referring to, check out this article http://matadornetwork.com/change/11-disgusting-facts-about-a-massive-dam-project-just-approved-in-chile/). All the struggle to change and develop and become a world player. All the unequal distribution of resources and opportunity.
I can and will leave at some point and go back to my cushy life in the States. Honestly, I have the resources to leave tomorrow morning if I wanted to. I could be sitting on my couch on the back porch in late spring with a pool to swim in within three days, instead of struggling yet again with my eighth graders on Friday, wondering why I am here if they don't want to learn and not one of the teachers in the school can control them. They know I am frustrated. The 8th graders keep telling me that I have no patience and the seventh graders ask me why I am not ashamed of my Spanish.
I am beginning to hit some kind of a limit within me, which appears to be manifesting as anxious butterflies and a sincere desire to just leave the classroom and walk out of the school forever. My "boss" teacher didn't show up to school today, meaning that I had to throw everyone off by insisting that they fulfill the terms of their contract with the program and not force me to take a full class. People act like my presence is more of an inconvenience than anything else, whether it is in the school or at home or in Chile in general. I try so godamn hard every day to make everyone else's life easier and to give my time and work and sweat and money to help Chile, and some of it feels unappreciated on days like today.
I want to hope that this is just yet another "wall" like the ones that long-distance runners experience and that I just have to push through it...because make no mistake, my time in Chile is a marathon that is not getting any easier. Maybe this is just the feeling of the uphill section beginning after the first thirteen miles.
But I don't want to leave. Not yet. Because I want to prove to myself that I can stick it out, that I am tough enough and flexible enough to stay even when I could easily cop out. Besides, only 34 days of teaching remain. Less than a third of the time I have left here in South America. The rest will be split between English Camps and traveling.
At the very least, this time in my life gave me the perspective to truly appreciate the life I have lived up to this point...my education especially. And I now speak passable Chilean Spanish. And I have a lot of really beautiful photos. Maybe those three things are the whole point. Or maybe there isn't one.
At this point it doesn't seem to matter too much. I'm halfway through the marathon. Only thirteen more miles (uphill) to go.
19 May 2011
Winter Arrives...Let the Comparisons to Southpark Begin
Knock, knock...housekeeping! As the more perceptive among you have surely realized, a few things have changed here on CaminoChile. There are new reaction buttons to give your opinion of a piece in one click. I highly suggest the overuse of the "WTF" button (because who doesn't like a few explitives here and there? Or everywhere?)
On your right you will find a new section weaving common threads out of the chaotic rantings that you often find here, for everything from "Coincidences" to "Armed Robbery." There is even one for "Chaos" if you feel like putting all of it in one place at a time. Fair warning, the chaos might jump out of the computer screen and manifest itself in your life. Then we can be comrades in arms.
Johanel, one of my sixth graders, made a keen observation today. It snowed for the first time last night here in Natales, and even the air appeared to have crystallized. Winter clarity of light and sight is here, complete with the pastel colors of sky and ice that signal the change of season. He looked up from copying "The Road Less Travelled" by Robert Frost.
"It snowed," he stated in Spanish. "Does it snow a lot in Colorado, Tía?"
"Yes, it snows a lot where I live. Nieve mucho dondé yo vivo." My customary double answer in English and then Spanish.
"Seems so," Johanel continued, "In Southpark the ground is always snowy. So Southpark and Colorado must be like Puerto Natales. And we are like the kids in the show."
Couldn't have put it better myself. Sometimes I feel as though I am teaching at Southpark Elementary, not Escuela 5. How funny would a volunteer teacher comes to town episode be? Right, probably not that funny for most. But for me it would be!
Life here in Natales grinds on like the bumpers barely held on by duct tape to some of the cars that drive down our street grind on the dirt. We are currently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of this oasis in the vast wilderness of Patagonia, with shows and art and even fireworks next weekend.
It appears I chose to come here at just the correct time to have everything line up. If I had come even a few months later, I would never have known that the biggest fiesta in Natales' history had happened. I might not have met the wonderful friends I did. Some of my students might never have met me, since they dropped out or changed schools to escape bullying in the months since I arrived.
Everything continues to happen for a reason. I wrote it almost 90 days ago...feeling my heart swell with the knowledge that there was not simply one reason I moved to Chile, but a multitude. One by one, the reasons take their turns drifting into the dance of my life, cutting in on each other and passing me from one to the next in a grand choreography.
On your right you will find a new section weaving common threads out of the chaotic rantings that you often find here, for everything from "Coincidences" to "Armed Robbery." There is even one for "Chaos" if you feel like putting all of it in one place at a time. Fair warning, the chaos might jump out of the computer screen and manifest itself in your life. Then we can be comrades in arms.
Johanel, one of my sixth graders, made a keen observation today. It snowed for the first time last night here in Natales, and even the air appeared to have crystallized. Winter clarity of light and sight is here, complete with the pastel colors of sky and ice that signal the change of season. He looked up from copying "The Road Less Travelled" by Robert Frost.
"It snowed," he stated in Spanish. "Does it snow a lot in Colorado, Tía?"
"Yes, it snows a lot where I live. Nieve mucho dondé yo vivo." My customary double answer in English and then Spanish.
"Seems so," Johanel continued, "In Southpark the ground is always snowy. So Southpark and Colorado must be like Puerto Natales. And we are like the kids in the show."
Couldn't have put it better myself. Sometimes I feel as though I am teaching at Southpark Elementary, not Escuela 5. How funny would a volunteer teacher comes to town episode be? Right, probably not that funny for most. But for me it would be!
Life here in Natales grinds on like the bumpers barely held on by duct tape to some of the cars that drive down our street grind on the dirt. We are currently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of this oasis in the vast wilderness of Patagonia, with shows and art and even fireworks next weekend.
It appears I chose to come here at just the correct time to have everything line up. If I had come even a few months later, I would never have known that the biggest fiesta in Natales' history had happened. I might not have met the wonderful friends I did. Some of my students might never have met me, since they dropped out or changed schools to escape bullying in the months since I arrived.
Everything continues to happen for a reason. I wrote it almost 90 days ago...feeling my heart swell with the knowledge that there was not simply one reason I moved to Chile, but a multitude. One by one, the reasons take their turns drifting into the dance of my life, cutting in on each other and passing me from one to the next in a grand choreography.
18 May 2011
With Love from the Battle of the Blackboard
"The battle to achieve economic development will 'won or lost in the classroom,' declares Chile’s president, Sebastián Piñera. To try to secure victory he has begun what he called Chile’s 'most ambitious educational reform since the 1960s.'"
Remember a few weeks ago, when I compared my struggles in teaching to "fighting in the trenches all day?" (If you don't, check your notes from this blog entry http://caminochile.blogspot.com/2011/05/its-enoguh.htmlYou don't have your notes? You don't have your notebook? Where is it? You lost it. OK, take this piece of paper and copy it again. Let's go, Tia Coleen knows you can do it).
I am not the only one who feels the strain of the struggle for a better educational system in Chile. As it turns out, even the head of state called for changes and improvements to the barely controlled scholastic chaos last December. (Read the full article here: http://www.economist.com/node/17679703) The reforms are a great idea. Implementation is a concern. It took two months for my materials to get here from Santiago, after all.
The calls for change come on the heels of an educational revolution already trying to jump from infancy to adolesence in a single bound. Since 2000, reforms and initiatives (including Idiomas Abren Puertas-IAP, which is the one in which I am partipating) have made the attempt to shift Chile's educational system drastically toward being able to compete globally.
Only in 2003 was high school made mandatory for all Chileans, and free of charge until 21 years of age (In perspective-Massachusetts was the first US state to pass compulsory education laws in 1852, and Colorado school districts made it cumpulsory 114 years earlier than Chile in 1889).
According to the information given at the orientation for IAP in Santiago, seven out of ten university students in Chile are the first in their families to attain tertiary education. In 1990, there were approximately 245,000 university students. In 2008, there were 769,000. This year, they will likely pass a million. That is a 400% increase in twenty years.
The main problem is that increasing the sheer quantity of Chileans receiving an education is not enough. The quality of the education (particularly in public schools like mine) must increase in step with the growth in numbers, or all that growth in the student population serves no purpose. Already it feels as though school is just a time/space holder in the lives of many of my students...something that they are required to do for reasons that even their parents may not understand. A relatively safe place to keep children during the day, where they can learn a few basics until they begin to work whenever adulthood rears its head. I suspect that in many parts of the US it is this way as well.
I don't pretend to know how in the hell one can implement true and lasting reform in a scholastic system and increase the quality of the education that students recieve. Likely the answers lie in the galacial changes of a culture over generations, a transition to a society that values education and encourages it. Probably too minute to see in the course of the five months since Piñera's declaration.
But the numbers and programs are a start. Even massive glaciers have to start with a few determined flakes of snow clinging to a Godforsaken piece of rock. Hopefully my school is one of them.
Sources/More Information
http://www.ncsl.org/IssuesResearch/Education/CompulsoryEducationOverview/tabid/12943/Default.aspx
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0112617.html
Remember a few weeks ago, when I compared my struggles in teaching to "fighting in the trenches all day?" (If you don't, check your notes from this blog entry http://caminochile.blogspot.com/2011/05/its-enoguh.htmlYou don't have your notes? You don't have your notebook? Where is it? You lost it. OK, take this piece of paper and copy it again. Let's go, Tia Coleen knows you can do it).
I am not the only one who feels the strain of the struggle for a better educational system in Chile. As it turns out, even the head of state called for changes and improvements to the barely controlled scholastic chaos last December. (Read the full article here: http://www.economist.com/node/17679703) The reforms are a great idea. Implementation is a concern. It took two months for my materials to get here from Santiago, after all.
The calls for change come on the heels of an educational revolution already trying to jump from infancy to adolesence in a single bound. Since 2000, reforms and initiatives (including Idiomas Abren Puertas-IAP, which is the one in which I am partipating) have made the attempt to shift Chile's educational system drastically toward being able to compete globally.
Only in 2003 was high school made mandatory for all Chileans, and free of charge until 21 years of age (In perspective-Massachusetts was the first US state to pass compulsory education laws in 1852, and Colorado school districts made it cumpulsory 114 years earlier than Chile in 1889).
According to the information given at the orientation for IAP in Santiago, seven out of ten university students in Chile are the first in their families to attain tertiary education. In 1990, there were approximately 245,000 university students. In 2008, there were 769,000. This year, they will likely pass a million. That is a 400% increase in twenty years.
The main problem is that increasing the sheer quantity of Chileans receiving an education is not enough. The quality of the education (particularly in public schools like mine) must increase in step with the growth in numbers, or all that growth in the student population serves no purpose. Already it feels as though school is just a time/space holder in the lives of many of my students...something that they are required to do for reasons that even their parents may not understand. A relatively safe place to keep children during the day, where they can learn a few basics until they begin to work whenever adulthood rears its head. I suspect that in many parts of the US it is this way as well.
I don't pretend to know how in the hell one can implement true and lasting reform in a scholastic system and increase the quality of the education that students recieve. Likely the answers lie in the galacial changes of a culture over generations, a transition to a society that values education and encourages it. Probably too minute to see in the course of the five months since Piñera's declaration.
But the numbers and programs are a start. Even massive glaciers have to start with a few determined flakes of snow clinging to a Godforsaken piece of rock. Hopefully my school is one of them.
Sources/More Information
http://www.ncsl.org/IssuesResearch/Education/CompulsoryEducationOverview/tabid/12943/Default.aspx
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0112617.html
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