Teaching to the Test

In high school, I took seven AP tests. I'm not saying this to brag or even to promote the American system of education. Rather, I think it ruined me.

I spent the better part of my education preparing to take tests. In tenth grade it was European History: copying outlines off the blackboard, highlighting all of the important people and events in the textbook, not taking a moment to discuss, debate, or create. Later it was Calculus and Spanish and Physics. In Physics we hardly did any labs. Instead we took notes and crunched numbers and practiced multiple choice. You get the picture. So when I realized that in my classroom all we were doing was preparing for one test, I felt pretty bad.

We made the final English test on Tuesday morning, and after that point we were able to teach to the test. Class time was devoted to reviewing the vocabulary words appearing on the test that no one could remember (desk seems to be a particularly difficult one), phrases learned the first week and promptly forgotten (I am lost), and the oral questions I am going to ask today in my loud, over-articulated way.

Where's the fun in that? When are these kids ever going to need to say, "I make the chair in the cemetery with the mother?" They're most likely going to use English when they run into a tourist on the street or in the market. And when someone asks, "Where did you make this?" they're not going to respond, "In the cemetery with the mother."

So I let them have a little fun. Towards the end of class, Zoila asks me how to say "feo" in English. I made a deal with her: you tell me who you think is "feo" and I'll tell you how to say it English. She giggle shyly, unwilling to let me into the summer school gossip circle. But it doesn't matter how silent she stays; her over-eager friend answers for her. "Diego!" she shouts, referring to an older boy who came for the first two weeks of class and never returned.

"Ugly," I say. "Feo means ugly." I make her stay in for recess, the cost of curiosity. She translates a variety of sentences featuring the word ugly, starting from the simple "Diego is ugly," to the more complicated and less sensical, "I like to run with ugly dogs."

These sentences didn't discourage her; she asked for more. "How do you say guapo? How do you say bonito?" Her friend leaks the fact that Zoila thinks Nelson is handsome. We go over several sentences, concluding with, "I like handsome boys." I think it's a good example because it demonstrates the way that adjectives are placed before the noun in English, rather than after like in Spanish.

She's furiously scribbling it all down, wanting to remember, not because it's going to be on some test, but because she has a secret she wants to share. I can imagine her out on the rusty blue swings, telling some boy her feelings in another language.

The Cast of Characters

As my time here is coming to a close, I'm starting to think more about each kid's personality than whether they're going to do well in the class.

First I would like to introduce Nelson. He stands out because he is a sixteen year old among eleven year olds. We've been working on question words this week, and whenever I get to him during our oral review, I am shocked to hear "I have sixteen." Since he's older, he is at a much more advanced stage of puberty. The other day I caught him rolling up his sleeves and examining his muscles in class. The boy next to him, one so little that his feet hardly touch the ground, poked them, perhaps out of jealousy. I just ignored him, embracing a little bit of chaos.

This little boy is also worth introducing. His name is Vidal, and he doesn't take his backpack off during class. Him and his even tinier best friend Diego can't sit still during class and constantly bicker with each other. When they start picking at each other's hair, we ask, "Is Diego your dog? Then why are you petting him?"

We also love to tease Kevin. He is very smart and very loud about it. When he finishes a task early or whispers the answers to another student, he begins to chant "Es facíl. Más. Más," in a fairly apathetic voice. But if he gets it wrong, he's in big trouble because we begin mocking him. That gets a smile and several minutes of attentive silence.

Our other smartest kid, Jenny, is the exact opposite. While it's clear that she's naturally gifted, she also has the best study skills ever and is only too eager to do what she is told. She stays after school for extra help even though she understands way better than anyone else in the class. Last week she finished the test and the post-test activity before time was up, so I told her to draw. She looked at me blankly and asked what to draw. I told her to just use her imagination. After a few minutes she calls me back over to show me several little illustrations perfectly labeled in English. She reminds me a bit of me when I was little, so I want to tell her to dream more and to gain some confidence.

I hate to say it, but none of the other girls are terribly memorable. They are all giggly, hate speaking in class, and love clinging to my elbow. I wonder if this silence and uncertainty is a product of their indigenous culture, or if this is true of girls this age all across the world.

The only thing that really sticks out about them is the way they run screaming across the playground when Kevin chases them. It's a behavior that I believe is recognized across all cultures.

Happy Places

I seem to only write here when I have nothing good to say, so right now I've come to say that today was a good day.

My teaching partner got sick this morning, so I was all jittery about having to teach alone. But somehow it went perfectly. I covered everything in my lesson plan, got the kids talking a lot, and felt in control of the whole classroom situation. The kids even surprised me by guessing patterns that I had yet to explain to them.

My good teaching day makes me remember all the good of the past couple of days.

First there was the beach. Besides for the beautiful green water and the warm sun, the best part about the whole trip was the food. Not that the food at the hostel is bad, it's just that the daily portions of meat, starch, and vegetable can start to seem fairly boring and unsatisfying after a couple of weeks. On the beach, everything seemed like a treat. First there were the batidos. It's a fruit milkshake, but it's not actually as gross as that sounds. Then there was the fresh seafood. The best kind to get was ceviche, which is kind of like really chunky salsa with shrimp or some other ocean creature in it.

My personal favorites were banana splits and corn. You could buy either of these things for about two dollars on the boardwalk just a couple minutes away from our shoreline hostel. The vendors put the corn on the grill in front of you, and, once it's cooked, they roll it in seasoning and cheese. Probably one of the best things I've ever tasted. A banana split is pretty self explanatory. (I'm describing all of these things in such great detail because remembering them is almost like eating them again).

Last night we weren't ready to return to the routine of Otavalo life, so we headed out into the town after dinner. Night life is more or less non-existent here. The only ones out on the street after nine are the dogs, and it's a struggle to find an open restaurant or cafe.

First we headed to The Pie Shop which sells exactly that--pie. Strawberry, Raspberry, Apple. I would recommend the chocolate with ice cream. When it closed (probably around ten), we moved to the bar where the program director likes to play music. Again, we were the only patrons. We painted with watercolors and sipped wine and listened to music. Basically, we were the kids for once.

Theory vs. Reality

Over the weekend we headed out to the coast to relax on the beach and enjoy some non-Otavalo night life. While searching for the perfect beach-front bar, we spotted one that had swings in place of stools. Awesome! Right? That's what we thought, so we sat down and chilled. But as it turns out, you couldn't swing much at all without hitting your knees on the bar, and the swings were so widely spaced that you couldn't chat with your neighbor. Good in theory, not so great in reality.

That's how I feel about lesson planning. We sit around all morning grading papers, creating/photocopying homework, tearing paper into flash cards, and brainstorming ways to make it fun for the kids, but it never ends up happening that way.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

When they're hunched over their tests all silent (so that the only sound in the room is the wind rattling the tin schoolhouse roof) I start to think that maybe they've got it. That they're scratching pens are writing English words, English verbs that match the subject, English vocab that matches the Spanish. That everything I've spent the last two days trying to put into their heads is now spilling back out onto the page, into the silence.

But after about fifteen minutes they start to squirm. They stare off into space, flip the test over and over, run their little hands through their straight black hair. And the worst part is that this isn't boredom born of completion; it is the boredom born of facing so many blank spaces that you just don't know how to fill. English is rather "all or nothing" that way. No amount of thinking about it is suddenly going to bring you closer to the answer.

And some of the squirming is bad news. Bad news bears. Even after making an example of Klever's cheating attempt last week, the students remained just as bold. One girl's rustling turned out to be her fingers sifting through notes hidden in the backpack seated next to her. She received a zero. And another girl's impatient erasing turned out to be the only noticeable sign of her silent method of passing answers to her neighbor. Two points off!

Teaching is exhausting. But having to watch the students like a hawk to ensure that they don't cheat is exhausting in a whole new way. I guess the right word is disappointing.

My disappointment can never last for more than ten minutes at a time because the kids can be so cute. One girl finished both her test and the post-test activity before time was up, so I told her she could draw. She kept looking up at me as her pencil moved across the page, and I just thought she was nervous about being allowed to do something so non-academic. But when she finished she held her paper up to show me how she had drawn and labeled me and my three co-workers.

She wasn't the only cute one. All of them planned a surprise going away party for a leaving co-worker. They got us to open an extra classroom so that they could serve cake and soda and perform a dance for her. She got presents and cake in her face. It was so cute, but I just wish they would show their affection for us in some other way, like, for example, by studying, or by not cheating.

Party!!!

Even after we found our friends, we still failed to return to our normal routine.

We couldn't plan lessons because the press showed up shortly after breakfast. Since the whole province, from the red cross to the police to the indigenous people who live on the mountain and know it like the back of their hand, had come out to search for these three Americans, they all wanted to see them and to know who they had worked to save.

But seeing someone via cathode tube really isn't getting to know them. In order to allow for a face to face, more personal meeting, we decided to have a party at the hostel for all the people who helped us look for our missing friends.

We sat around the breakfast table cooking mad amounts of banana bread and chocolate cake and taco fixings for our incoming guests. All forty-some of them showed up around eight, beginning the biggest culture clash I have ever witnessed.

Someone pulled out their ipod and turned on old 90s R&B songs. Even without hitting the 150 beers we had bought for the occasion, we all started dancing and singing along beneath the wary gaze of the red cross, the police, and some indigenous mountain men. The guests all sat around the perimeter of the room while we took up center stage, both in physical location and in absolute volume.

It never really got less awkward, even after the beers came out.

First off, someone had great idea of serving the food buffet style. Buffet style, as it turns out, is an American thing. We couldn't convince anyone to get out of his chair to self-serve, so we all quickly became waiters and waitresses. Next, most people refused the alcohol. Red cross members can't drink in their uniforms, so we offered sweatshirts to cover them up.

Basically, the scene looked something like this by the end of the night: red-faced Americans singing and dancing with joy because their friends had been saved from certain death while the Ecuadorians looked on with what I hope was a more subdued brand of joy. Scratch that. I know it was a more subdued brand of joy.

Los Perdidos

We have this game that we play at home when we get bored. It usually starts at the point in the night when we've gone out to dinner, crossed town to get dessert, but still don't want to go home. We don't want to go home so we drive. The goal is to get lost in the city, but in our tiny mid-west excuse for a metropolis it's not possible. No matter what combination of left, right, center we choose, we always end up somewhere we recognize. Sometimes we discuss the fact that we can't get lost because we're not trying to get anywhere.

Ecuador is a different story.

On Sunday morning we got up at 4 a.m. to hike up Imbabura, a volcano an hour away from Otavalo. It was intense five hour climb to the summit, and I didn't even make it all the way up because several meters from the top I realized that I'm terrified of heights. Me and two other girls headed back down on our own, winding our way through the rain and the mud to the bottom, relying on our memory to get us there.

But three other volunteers who did make it all the way up to the top weren't nearly as successful in their solo attempt at descent. They took a wrong turn and headed down the wrong side of the mountain.

Of course, we didn't know this. Come Monday morning, we just knew that they were missing. The usual hostel routine--morning run, some joyful meals, lesson planning--went out the window as we put all of our resources towards finding our friends. We called parents and embassies and all of our high up connections. We ate our meals in silence. Instead of copying worksheets and test papers at the corner paper store, we photocopied fliers with pictures of our missing friends.

A group of girls took a taxi to the base of the mountain and showed the pictures around some of the smaller villages, hoping that our friends had managed to spend the night somewhere, a much nicer scenario to imagine than a scene of them sleeping in the woods.

The girls found them around seven o'clock on Monday night. Some random hikers had helped them out of the forest, and then the girls spotted them out on the road. They drove up to the hostel, honking all the way. We shared hugs and stories.

As it turns out, we had been far more worried than the hikers. They had spent their lost hours singing relevant songs (such as Destiny's Child's Survivor), debating when they would be found, and wondering what they would do when they got back. They had an adventure; we whiled away the hours waiting.