One week down!

On the first day of school the students showed up with
mountains of school supplies and were excited to see their friends and their new teachers. Many of them immediately asked, “Hey meester, are you a new teacher? Where are you from? What did you do this summer?” Others flopped down in their chairs displaying their disappointment in being forced to return to school. The first day’s classes were short. 25 minutes each. That’s how it should be in The States. Kids come in from summer not ready to be in school and only have to stay from 8am to 1pm. It makes more sense than throwing them into the deep end right away. I’m currently attempting to read all the ‘About Me’ papers I had them fill out and memorize all their names. Getting to know 105 new students’ names in a few days is no easy task; especially when there are 8 Juan Pablo’s, 7 Ana Maria's and 10 Jorge's.

The evening following the first day I played my first night of soccer. I showed up at 7 when I was told we would be starting. I should have known better as I waited 30 minutes for people to start showing up. The teams ended up being gringo teachers against local Mexican community members. I played on the Mexicans team and after 3 hours of running my out of shape body ragged my team won 6-5. It was a nice way to wind down from my first day of teaching my own class.

The second day was another short day. We barely had time to talk about the procedures of science class and mention the science notebook. “The science notebook,” I told them, “is the primary tool we will use to conduct science this year. The goal of this class is not to memorize a bunch of facts, but to learn how to think about science and think critically and creatively.” On the second day of school students are still in the ‘honeymoon’ phase of behavior. No ones trying to push the teacher’s buttons too hard yet.

Wednesday was the first day we dug into science. I had the first two of my five 95-minute blocks. I led the students down to the science lab next to the elementary cafeteria (noisy!). We started out with observing different photos. The students recorded qualitative and quantitative observations while differentiating between inferences. I showed them an optical illusion elephant that appears to have 4, 5 or 8 legs depending on how you look at it. A few of the quick ones shouted out “Meester, you tricked us!”

Somewhere along the line all the students at ASFG learned how to address all gringo teacher as ‘meester’ and ‘miess.’ “Meester, what are we doing next? Meester, I infer that they are in France. Meester, can I go to the bathroom?” I decided not to dilly-dally around too much and got them observing slides with microscopes right away. Some of the sketches they produced are priceless. The written observations were equally entertaining: hairy, holey, reptilish, staring, ugly, etc. (describing slides of fly heads, frog skin, and the like). Thursday was the same lesson three more times, each lesson getting consecutively better than the last… now if I could just teach 6^th grade science again next year I’d be a pro.

One week down and who knows how many to go!