First Day of School
Today we made it to Itzapa. Though I tried to have no expectations, the school (and Itzapa itself) were not what I expected. Most of the school is open-air - my classroom has 4 walls, but I think it´s the only one that does. I´m trying to upload some pictures, but this computer is wicked old and it´s taking FOREVER. It has an old version of Facebook and I can only upload 5 at a time, and that isn´t working all that well (they´ve been loading for the last 6 minutes). If it doesn´t work here today, I´ll try somewhere else tomorrow. Anyway, the kids are tiny, very cute and very sweet. In the morning I worked one-on-one with this kid named Jose for awhile since he doesn´t really understand anything about addition or subtraction. He did OK with someone with him constantly. But he doesn´t understand the difference between the plus and minus signs, I don´t think he understands the basic principles of addition and subtraction or even what his numbers are, etc. There will be a few teachers in 1st grade for the next few weeks, I think, so we´re going to try to have someone with him 1-on-1 to get him caught up. I had a little trouble explaining math in Spanish, but otherwise he was fine. The kiddo in the picture with me is Miriam. She´s very sweet - I got there and she came up to me and gave me a hug, which I wasn´t quite expecting. It´s kind of amazing how open these kids are, especially when you consider what their lives are like on a daily basis and what they have to deal with. For example, none of them got much sleep for the past two nights because of the wind and rain, and a lot of their roofs flew off their houses. Crazy. Also, the picture is blurry because another one of my first-graders took it.
The afternoon class caught onto things a lot faster than the morning class. THis was supposedly because they´ve all been in the same grade for longer, and in the morning class some kids only joined the first grade from kindergarten about 4 weeks ago. There were 2 boys in my afternoon class, David and Johny. Both are really smart and Johny´s a good artist. Another teacher told me Johny tends to be kind of a loner, but he and I got along rather well. We´re buddies.
The only guy in our group, Ben, is leaving on Friday and he had 2 girls in his class who were hysterically crying because he´s leaving soon and won´t be there for the next 2 days (see the next paragraph). He´s only been with that grade for 4 weeks, but he´s had quite an impact already. I think he got caught off guard by that, especially since he said he wasn´t really preparing himself for goodbyes today - Friday´s the day for goodbyes. (The 2 girls can´t be there on Friday for whatever reason.)
I don´t get to go back until Friday. I have some kind of intensive 2-day intern training thing tomorrow and Thursday. I have no idea what´s involved in it, but I´d kind of rather be at the school with the other volunteers.
Anyway, Day 1 was a success. I´m looking forward to working with these kids.