Now we're waiting for the teachers to show up to school. They went en masse to Latacunga yesterday in Ignacio's new truck as soon as we got back to Malingua Pamba, and they aren't back yet. The school kids are playing soccer, having their early morning "cafecito", and some have settled into empty classrooms and cracked their books on their own. Bolivar the student is opening up the computer lab and library in their absence.
My blog is filled with school observations because of my background, by the way, but also because there are so many teachers in my family and some former colleagues who find these details interesting.
Just after 9 a.m.: Marcelo and some of the teachers finally returned, minus Bolivar the teacher who Marcelo said had had an accident in his vehicle, and several others. Until then we had only one young teacher on site, Manuela the English teacher, who is Lautaro's wife. She helped the kids get their "cafecito" and intended to cover for Rosa in the primary classroom, but Rosa had stayed in Latacunga, apparently doing something for the Ministry of Education (...again?) and had not left her only key to the classroom behind. No spares, no key in the director's pocket. No access to the kids' notebooks, the reading books we'd moved to that room to create the seeds of a classroom library, or any other essential resources of a three grade primary classroom.
Manuela's an enigma for me: she's had "a sick baby" since we've been here, and hasn't been teaching any of her classes, at least on the days we've been around. The timing was perfect for her during the first week because we were present each day, but not during this past week. Yet this morning she covered for the missing teachers and Sonia took care of the baby, which is part of Sonia's role through the week when she's not in class herself. I don't know why that hasn't been an option on the other days; the baby, maybe seven months old (?), didn't look terribly ill to me, but I'm no pediatrician. Is Manuela simply shy to display her competency as an English teacher? Is she afraid we'll be more critical than helpful? We tried to chat her up a bit at lunch, and she did say she'd enjoy sitting in on some of our classes, or get some lesson prep time with us, which we said we'd be delighted to do...wonder why it took her so long to ask? She hasn't actually spoken English with us, except at the end of lunch, just a few phrases, which were certainly delivered more fluently than that of any other teacher here. Mind you, her Spanish is delivered at machine gun speed, too.
Manuela begged us to keep the primaries in the computer lab while she took the older kids - at least she had some resources to use with them. We read Goldilocks and the Three Bears in Spanish, and one other book, then Marcelo suggested we stay there and put the kids on the computers. We asked for age appropriate educational games for them, and he suggested Tux Typing. However, he couldn't find it.
We eventually found it on some of the machines: of the six Ministry of Education computers, one didn't have it, one had all instructions in English, and one in Tamil. The sound was deafening as the kids began shooting falling comets with the letter of the keyboard on them, and some kids opened a non-educational PacMan-like game with loud train whistles. It sounded like an arcade in there, with roaring arcade music on top of the shooting and train whistle sounds. We couldn't hear ourselves think, let alone give any instructions. We scrambled to find volume control, with no success. The speakers are inside the tower and the sound is hard-wired; finally, with the help of an older student we learned how to turn off the music and shooting, but it required constant monitoring; in some machines, it just kept coming back on - and I don't think the kids did it on purpose, I think it just resets every time they start a fresh game.
I was disappointed to find that there is so little educational software on Ministry supplied computers. Deb managed to figure out how to change the languages to Spanish so that the kids could at least shoot down words in their own language, and we banned the train game completely, which took some fierce yelling in "teacher voices" to overcome the resistance of the students.
I looked online for web-based typing tutors in Spanish, without luck. Later I located some educational games for Spanish children that might have been useful, but you can't spend time locating them when there are fifteen little fireballs demanding direction from you, and you can't introduce new activities suddenly, off the cuff, in a controlled way either. With only six computers connected for fifteen kids, it wasn't easy to keep them all engaged. It's a bit of an onslaught, and Deb took the brunt of it by default, having the language skills - and painfully pinched a nerve in her hip while frantically bending over between the chairs, trying to figure out how to kill the volume on each machine.
So, the long and the short of it is, we baby-sat all morning, making one full week when we haven't been able to deliver the English lesson we've developed and written out on chart paper. Maybe next week. We did figure out how to show fairy tales from Youtube in Spanish through the InFocus projector. After recess, Deb read one more book, and Ignacio assured us it would be a shortened day, so we watched The Shoemaker and the Elves. The best version we could find turned out to be "The Shoemaker and the Gnomes", on Youtube. Sometimes it's hard to find exactly what might work for your group.
One thing we learned is that there aren't any external speakers for any computer in the room, and it was hard for the primary kids to hear the sound if there was the slightest discussion of the video by the kids, shuffling of chairs, or older kids trying to gain access to the lab. I found two sets of Logitech external speakers in the computer graveyard that might have been loud enough, but neither pair had a power adaptor or a mini-stereo cable to take the sound from the headphone plug of the computer. I was puzzled that the arcade games had been deafening but Youtube videos were so quiet, but I've noticed before that Youtubes do seem to have varying degrees of volume.
Knowing we'd be finished early, I ran out to try to find the three missing teachers from last Monday's photo shoot while Deb supervised the video. I looked everywhere. By my count, there were four teachers on site out of an eight teacher complement. Ignacio listed the reasons for me why the other teachers were absent: illness, accident, Ministry business...and sure enough, by 11:30 a.m. we were done, and the kids were called to line up for their school lunch, after which they, and we, were expected to be finished for the day.
Was this a typical day? Maybe that'd be stretching things, but it didn't seem to be an unusual day. With so many days like this, it's easy to see why there seems to be lots of potential here and lots of common sense, but not much actual "book larnin'" going on. If it's like this in 2013, the teachers themselves must have grown up with the same paucity of instruction. They remind me of some parents I've interviewed at home who didn't understand why their children were being exposed to new methods of instruction and classroom management, when the three R's and strict discipline had worked just fine for them, and they were such well-educated people. Sometimes it takes a lot to look beyond your own experience and begin to perceive a fresh present perspective and a vision of the future.
Today's photo album is just twenty photos of yesterday's tour. Ignacio was very keen to take us on Thursday rather than Friday or the weekend. We discovered that he'd purchased a 6 year old diesel truck from the Cooperativo last Friday, and this was his first paying job with it. It was a bit of a white knuckle journey for him, especially when he misjudged the height of a rock (his new truck didn't have the clearance of his older brother's) and heard it banging off the undercarriage. We stopped and looked for fluid leaks from oil pan, transmission pan or any other damage, but as far as we could tell it had merely banged against the frame, and the damage wasn't tragic.
$16,000 for a six year old diesel truck is a big investment for a teacher who makes less than a quarter of that in a year - at his teaching job, at least - 1/20th what the average teacher in Toronto earns. If there's any question about the dedication and professionalism of rural Ecuadorian teachers for their chosen career (and I do have some), it has to be well salted with the awareness that status rather than pecuniary reward must be a big part of why they do it. Low pay, questionable depth of training, scarcity of resources including instructional aids and equipment - these are all factors to be considered. If we criticized out loud, I'm sure some of them would say, "Oh, for Pete's sake, what do you want from me, already?"
I noted that Sonia, who must be close to twenty, is a bit more keen on engineering or social work than teaching. She finished ten years of elementary but still has to go two days a week on weekends for six more years to finish her colegio while doing work within the family on the weekdays, before she can qualify for trade school or university. The colegio training, from the few fly-on-the-wall lessons I've observed, isn't as sophisticated as average high school classes in N. America. This is a significant delay to acquiring career training, and eventual earning power.
On our tour, the road across the valley was blocked by the same roadwork Eden had experienced in my last blog. We had to race a very long distance around high mountain roads with steep drop-offs to get to the towns Ignacio wanted to show us. We started late; luckily for Elvia we had to go past the highway where she could catch a bus into town, so she was able to hop a ride, but at that spot we also had to wait for another section of roadwork for forty-five minutes that Ignacio said they'd been working on for a year.
While we waited, I saw another green hummingbird with a split tail. I got my camera out, but it was too elusive for me. It looked like a swallow-tail from the "Twenty Hummingbirds to see before you die" web page from two blogs back, but seemed more green than the bluish one I'd seen there. We flew through Zumbahua, Quilotoa, Chugchilán, Sigchos and Isinlivi as if we were on fire, and got home two hours early. Crammed three abreast in the cab of Ignacio's new truck, it's not a tour I'd recommend. Cost us $80 plus $20 for diesel plus lunch and cookies for four, and we didn't really see much of the towns, didn't even manage a stop at some well-known hostels like Jean's Llullu Llama Lodge, or the Black Sheep Inn. The reason we got home two hours early, apparently, was because Ignacio kept getting phone calls from the teachers asking them when he'd be back to take them to Latacunga in his truck, since Bolivar's SUV wasn't available as a result of his accident. All in all, I felt ripped off, but I enjoyed what I did see as much as I could, and swallowed my words.
One very interesting thing that I noticed was that as soon as we'd crossed the border out of Sigchos canton, every home on the hillsides had its own lovely blue plastic water barrel, somewhere between 250 and 500 gallons - a nice, stable cylindrical barrel, not a tapered one. There was piping in places; I saw one guy moving a flexible hose with a sprinkler head for his crop irrigation. I wondered if it could be a curse rather than a blessing to be served by EWB, since few people in this canton seem satisfied with their irrigation solution, yet perhaps because the gov't considers that EWB has provided for it, they don't have to. In any case, I'm hoping EWB has studied the system in the neighbouring canton as part of the due diligence for their own project here. (I also noticed one interesting home with an inverted roof, so that the peak was below the top of the walls; I wonder if that was a clever solution to collecting rainwater from your roof.)
The day of our very rushed tour was clear and sunny, and the views spectacular. The hills are different here, majestic but in a gentle rounded way, not as sharp as the Rockies, and greener. We arrived at Quilotoa, and Sonia's grandmother Josefina had given her three six-litre jugs to fill with water from the lake in the crater of the volcano. Although other visitors claim it is "poisonous", Josefina believes that the salty, suphurous water is good for her animals, and she told us she has bathed in it herself. Sonia had to run all the way to the bottom of the crater with the empty jugs - took her fifteen minutes to jog down. That's about four kilometres. Then she filled the three jugs and began to climb all the way back up. Ignacio and I decided we'd try to meet her halfway and help her carry them...Deb declined to go down, but I began, and after a few hundred yards we decided Sonia was still an awfully long way down, so we went a little further...and then further...finally met her about halfway up, resting in a scenic spot. I grabbed one jug, Ignacio grabbed two, and we turned to go, but after about a hundred yards I had to surrender my jug back to Sonia. Gasping, dizzy, heart pounding, resting every few feet, I struggled my way back to the top, wondering every few seconds whether this was when "the big one" would hit, and they'd have to airlift me out, probably already dead. Deb asked me later whether I would have rented one of the horses we saw being walked down to the lake. At that moment, you bet I would have!
I don't know how much of that was that I'm simply that out of shape (but I play tennis for hours all summer at home) and how much is that fact that I just haven't developed the haemoglobin to manage the oxygen uptake I need for strenuous exercise. Or how much is just plain being sixty, for that matter. I began to worry about how I'd cope with the altitude at Machu Picchu if this was such a killer experience, but Ignacio stated that the altitude at Quilotoa is almost 13,000 feet (4,000 metres), whereas Machu Picchu is actually only 8,000 feet; Quito was 9,000 feet, so we should be much better off when we get to Ollantaytambo.
It was an experience...another "aventura" - Deb told Ignacio that she didn't go down because she was smarter, and that men are simply more "aventurosos"...and that's probably why we die younger. I now want to remember the volcano's name as "Killer-toa".
I think the frequency of blog posts will drop off over the next two weeks. We expect to spend our time teaching and doing little chores for Pam Gilbert until we head back to Quito for our flight to Cuzco, Peru.
Next: life in the clouds
No comments:
Post a Comment