I had thought that sleeping in the jungle would be restful. I was wrong. It’s noisy. We slept on the floor of the school room in Manguita and between the insect noises, the roosters crowing (funny, I didn’t notice them during the day but heard them all night), the pigs and horses rooting around outside and villagers coming and going to the party in Monte Cristo I didn’t sleep much. A cup of nescafe powdered coffee helped!
On this day we started with sitting in on the class in Cotoca. Cotoca has 13 families and we are running both a primary and secondary school level program here (19 students in total). The primary school level program is all about critical thinking, reading comprehension and computer skills.The secondary school level computer program teaches State level math and language skills along with social and environmental values. They are creating socio-economic projects in groups to be presented at year-end. As almost always, there was 100% attendance and all the kids were clean and nicely clothed. They even have Alma shirts that the parents paid to have made!
The students discussed a field trip that they had taken and, like in Monte Cristo yesterday, we found the teacher was not asking enough questions, not engaging them in critical thinking opportunities to the degree that we would like. The field trip was a wonderful learning opportunity but I think that the kids could have gotten a lot more out of it.
Something I noticed here and have noticed before: the young kids, the ones who couldn’t write and therefore drew and coloured pictures to describe the field trip and then stood up to speak about the trip gave much more detail and could answer many more questions (and could think more critically and creatively) than the older students who all seemed to write the same thing as if from a template. Seems the system, over time, dilutes a child’s ability to think creatively and critically. This is a point I noticed in research produced by the MiT media lab. In particular an essay I read titled “Everything I need to know…I learned in kindergarten”.
I sat down with one of the secondary school groups and we discussed their project. Eventually, the conversation turned to something they are passionate about – soccer. Turns out that they will be hosting a tournament next year here in Cotoca for 15 communities in this district. We discussed creating a project around the tournament and they got super excited. Katie is going to work with them on the project and I am hoping that maybe we can get a little funding from Scotiabank for soccer balls and shirts.
After the meeting with parents and lunch, we moved on to Manguita. I love Manguita, I had a great experience here last year and this year it again impressed me. We have a super teacher here running a primary school level mathematics and a computer program. Here the kids were not only dressed in Alma shirts (we had no idea the parents had paid to have these made) but they were wearing ties. A couple of the girls blew me away with their multiplication and division abilities. We were introduced to a number of children who had gone from understanding absolutely no math to being able to do a variety of State grade level math tasks. There are kids here (as everywhere) with undiagnosed learning disabilities but even they were not being left behind. The teacher’s name is Hernan and he is doing an incredible job. The kids presented us with a gift of beautifully bound binders with some of their work inside.
The parents meeting here was as impressive as the kids and the classroom had been. I think all parents, even all the fathers were there and they asked good questions. We are having a big impact here and it feels good.
Late in the day, we were told of an old man in great pain – his family and an area nurse think that he has a ruptured hernia and needs to be taken to the hospital so we decided to drive back to Trinidad. We layed him out in the back of the pick-up surrounded by our bags/his bags and his wife and daughter and began the long, bumpy road back to Trinidad. The only thing I can imagine worse than doing that drive is doing that drive lying in the back of a pickup truck with a ruptured hernia. For obvious reasons, we had to drive slow but we made it, covered in mud and dirt, to the hospital at midnight.
