Super Busy

I can't believe a month has gone by and I haven't written anything... A month of school and I haven't told anyone anything about my schools, my teachers, my students, the education system here in Costa Rica, nothing. In my site I don't have the time or the Internet to blog often but luckily I'm in San Jose for another week of training and have plenty of both! This week of training is referred to as In-Service Training (IST) in the Peace Corps world and it signifies the three-month mark of your service. For the first three months in your new site, you're supposed to take it easy and get used to your new surroundings, get to know the people, make friends, etc. Unfortunately for us TEFL volunteers the school year started in early February and that time of relaxing kind of went out the window.

I have three schools that I work in every week and a couple others that I visit from time to time if my schedule allows. I work in both the elementary school and high school in my town and another high school in the big town close to me. Each of the schools in my town has roughly 100 students and one English teacher while the other high school has 800 students and 7 English teachers. The bigger high school is a technical high school, which means that the kids that go to that school learn special skills, almost like majors in college. And they have to go there for an extra year to finish the program. Also, I should point out that Costa Rica doesn't have middle schools like we do in the States, so normal high schools go from 7th to 11th and technical schools to 12th. I think they are like colleges because for the first three years they take academic classes and in addition they take English and French and classes from the majors to decide which one they like. They even have to apply to get into a specific program, just like we did in college for our majors. It's pretty cool though. The majors they have are accounting, wood working, computers, secretarial management, tourism, and architectural drawing. Other technical high schools have other programs, but those are the ones in mine.

The schedule in the technical high school and the elementary school is pretty straightforward, but it's wacky in the high school in San Isidro. The technical high school goes from 7:00 - 4:10 everyday. The elementary school goes from 7:00 - 2ish everyday (I don't really know because I'm never there past lunch because the English teacher works the mornings there and the afternoons in another place). But the other high school's schedule is just crazy. There's five grades, five teachers (English, Math, History, Science and Spanish), a principal, a cook and then no one else. There's no janitor, no gym teacher, no counselor, no computer teacher, no art teacher, nothing. So what happens is each teacher is assigned a grade and they have to teach classes called guia (guide - like a counseling class I guess, they talked about feelings the one time I saw it), desarrollo personal (personal development - pretty much whatever the teacher feels like teaching that could help develop the students; it could be art or computer classes, whatever) and proyecto social (social project - a volunteerism class basically, although it's not voluntary). I think it would be a lot more efficient for them to hire one teacher to go around to all the grades and teach all these extra things so the teachers would have more time to plan for their respective subjects, but I doubt the ministry would want to do that. Anyway, to try to make a long story short, the high school in San Isidro starts everyday at 7:00 and then each grade has its own schedule. From what I've seen, the earliest they get out is at lunch and the latest is 3:30. However, a grade might have all Science classes in the morning and nothing in the afternoon and if the Science teacher is sick or something then all the kids just go home because there's no one else to teach them that day. As it turns out, the English teacher I work with there only teaches English in the mornings and then her afternoons are full of all those extra classes. Which is problematic for me because the elementary school teacher also only teaches in the morning. That's why I started visiting those other two schools I mentioned before because it makes more sense for me to work in the high school in the morning and visit another school in the afternoon than to work in the elementary school in the morning and then sit in an art class in the afternoon.

There are a ton of things about my job in the schools that I haven't described at all... but I'm already tired of talking about school haha, so let's move on to the more fun things that I'm doing. I started a boys' soccer team in my high school and we've been training three days a week after school. I was astonished that there wasn't already a team because soccer is so huge here and almost every single kid plays it from a young age. I really enjoy hanging out with the guys and playing soccer, but the difficulty is motivating them to practice without having games planned in the near future. We started with about 25 kids the first couple practices and recently we've been getting ten or twelve. So what I've been doing is going around to other high schools and talking about the possibility of playing friendly matches together, but this poses all sorts of other problems. Namely finding a time to play, transportation and that other schools also don't have teams. Kind of important.

I never realized it until I spoke with the lady in the regional office of DINADECO (an organization that helps Associations of Development with their projects), but the Association of Development in San Isidro is trying to build a gym, which is exactly what I want to do, too! I haven't had a chance to meet with them yet, but I'm really looking forward to the possibility of working with them. Apparently the governmental process for doing these projects is really slow, like years of paperwork and waiting for an answer. And supposedly they had been working on a gym once before and got all the paperwork turned in and everything, but it got denied after three years. Part of our training during IST is on the different organizations that can help us with funding and on how to write grants in Spanish, so hopefully we can start the process over again and get it approved this time!

After IST, I plan on starting my community classes in San Isidro. Part of the reason I waited was because I wanted more time to get to know my community before I became too busy to do anything else but teach English. The other part was simply that I wanted to learn from others' successes and mistakes. All of our classes are completely free because we don't want to exclude anybody from them, so my idea was to have my students volunteer their time working on one of my projects instead of paying me. It will help the community and hopefully limit my class sizes to only those who really want to learn. Other volunteers have classes of like 40 or 50 and that's something I definitely want to avoid.

I think those are all the major things that I've been doing. Lots of English, lots of soccer. I'll try to expand more on my job next time. And if there's any questions that you want answered feel free to leave a comment or email me. Pura vida!