School Days: Difficulties and Differences

While my experience in Ecuador was an overwhelmingly positive one on the whole,  I did have difficulty in adjusting to some aspects of the way things are done, especially in the school setting where I was carrying out my practicum.

The second last Thursday of my practicum was really difficult.  Although I’d felt I had adjusted really quite well to the new culture and to my specific situation, I kind of lost it that Thursday. I feel I acted unprofessionally.

Late in the day, the teacher of my class returned to the classroom while students were running around outside and  chided me (though in a civil and respectful manner) for having let the students go outside.  I cracked.  The teacher had been out of the classroom for a long time, perhaps an hour, as he usually did more than once a day,  and I was having great difficulty getting the students to continue working on the pages their teacher had instructed them to complete. Many of the students had run outside before I had decided to try engaging them by having them all play a game outside.

What had happened first was that the teacher had left, and many of the students went berzerk, running around and fighting. I tried to get them to sit down and do their work, but I wasn’t successful.  I wanted to still enable/encourage the students to learn, so I sat down with one of the books I’d purchased in Otavalo for the class (since the class doesn’t really have any books other than workbooks available to the students) and read to the students who came and huddled around me. Soon, most of them got up and started running around and fighting, too,  so  I tried to get all the students engaged in learning together through organizing a game of What Time is it, Mr. Wolf? outside. This sort of worked for a while, but then most of the students dispersed and just ran around the schoolyard. It was at this point that the teacher returned.

I was very frustrated with being scolded for what I felt had been resourceful, if ineffective, actions. I  told the teacher, in a heated manner, that I didn´t know where he went all the time, leaving me along for long periods, and that I was supposed to be there to support him, not to replace him. That wasn´t my responsibility, I stressed. I also explained tearfully how I tried to get the students to do their work, but they just would not listen to me. I said I was leaving, and would see him on Monday (since our group was leaving on Friday for a group weekend trip). But after crying at home for a little while, while several of the students called out to me from the gate of my host family’s home, I went back to school. There, I apologized to Vinicio and to the class for my words and behaviour, saying I wasn’t proud of the way I had acted,  and asked for us to all try to make a fresh start. I suggested going over the class rules posted on the wall, which Vinicio helped me with, and he had the students apologize to me (which I didn’t entirely feel was necessary), and promise to try to behave better. I left school feeling good.

Later, when reflecting on this experience, I realized that my expectations for how schools should operate (and my experiences of how they do operate in Canada) had conflicted with the cultural practices and economic situation of Ecuador, and in particular, of Iluman.  In Iluman, children are not disciplined nearly as much as they are in Canada as a general rule. They are given the opportunity to learn from experience rather than being told all of the right ways to do things, and being indoctrinated with rules about what one may and mayn’t do.

From a theoretical perspective, I agree with this system (though I do have concerns about the kids’ safety). From the perspective of someone entrusted with the task of getting 24 feisty students to complete worksheets on the letter Q, perhaps not. It felt to me like I was stuck in the middle of a fundamental disconnect between the type of work students were expected to do,  and the structure and substance of classroom management that the students were familiar with, or at least those aspects that I was able to work with.

Another difficulty I first experienced earlier on in my practicum was with a student who clearly had a learning disability, but for whom extra support and resources weren’t available. I tried to help the student during my stay, but it seemed that some learned helplessness had already been developed. The student shone in certain areas of the curriculum, like art and some elements of math, but significant difficulties with reading and writing meant that these strengths didn’t seem to be reflected  in assessment or  evaluation of the student.

Differences in how school supplies are procured and distributed also threw me for a loop. Although public education in Ecuador doesn’t require fees to be paid, students must buy all their own pencils, erasers, scissors, plasticine, tissue paper, glue, and paints. I think they must also buy their own uniforms. As well, food is sometimes provided during recreo, or the half-hour recess break they get every day, but students must have paid for the food at some point in the year in order to receive it.

Time was also treated differently. School began at 8 a.m., but often the teacher would arrive after most of the students. School officially ended at 1 p.m., but often the students would still be working until 1:3o or so. One day, I arrived at school expecting it to be a regular day, but found out at 10:30 that school was now over for the day due to a staff meeting. I found the lack of foreknowledge about changes in schedules to be a little challenging, at least for a while.

The teacher often led the students in didactic rhymes or songs, which really engaged them, and which was in accordance with my OISE-based pedagogical philosophy, but much of the teaching was direct teaching and many of the activities the students had to do were drill-based worksheets. I think this was due in part to a lack of resources as well as to a strong cultural emphasis on rote learning in Ecuador’s educational system.

Following my mini-meltdown on that Thursday, I made a conscious effort to adjust my attitude and behaviour to better flow with the classroom philosophies and practices surrounding me. I was a fair bit more laid back during that last week, and I focused more on my relationships with the students than on anything else. I think this was the case throughout my internship, but even more so during the last week.  And it was certainly the most rewarding part of my internship.

Last Week of Practicum

The last week of my internship, which culmintated on Thursday, May 21, was the best week of them all. I had a lot of fun with the students, and felt more connected to them than I had before.

They had outdoor traditional dancing three days in a row from Tuesday to Thursday, and I joined in with them and had a lot of fun.  The dancing involved having the whole school (about 100-150 students, maybe) dance to Andean music around the schoolyard in circles of various sizes, with students playing instruments or wearing masks (boys) or carrying dolls on their back or baskets in their hands, dancing in small circles in the middle.

(Only later did I learn that the students were practicing for a dance performance that would occur later on as part of a Mother’s Day program. Mother’s Day seems to last a month in Ecuador, to my initial confusion.)

During my last week of practicum, I taught greetings in English to the students, as well as having them each do an activity where they wrote ¨My name is…¨ in Spanish, English, and Quichua, their traditional indigenous language.  Then they drew a self-portrait, and surrounded it by things they like or are interested in. The next day, my final day, I had them write ¨I live in Iluman, Ecuador¨ in the 3 languages and then draw what their Iluman and Ecuador look like.  I really wanted to make my lessons relevant to the students and to validate them as persons, and to affirm their language and  life experiences as well.

I consciously modelled the Spanish writing first, since it is their primary language of instruction, and then demonstrated the Quichua (with Vinicio’s help, since I don’t know Quichua), and finally, theEnglish.  I almost put the English second, but caught myself; I didn’t want to give English dominance over Quichua, a marginalized ingigenous language, but rather, to give it legitimacy, even if only in a tiny symbolic way.

I made a huge card for the class, with a heart-shaped window you could open to find a little cartoon face of each student inside. I brought in cookies for the students, and also gave each of them a little Canadian flag pin.

That  night,  I’d looked at up the stars as I stood out in the courtyard long after the family was asleep. I’d been excited two days prior when realized I could see the Big Dipper; although I loved looking up at the stars in the dark sky,  so exquisitely visible from my host family’s courtyard,  I had been a little disappointed that I hadn’t been able to recognize any constellations.  It was comforting to see the Big Dipper suspended there along with all the other inscrutable  scatterings of stars.  Now, when I see it at home in Ontario (though it definitely won’t be visible in Toronto), the Big Dipper will  remind me of how my experiences here are connected to those I had in Ecuador.

I was  emotional when I popped in on Friday morning to say a final goodbye to the class before leaving with our group for Quito at 8:30.  I also took the pages the students had created during the previous two days,  and bound them together into a book form. I  added covers with pictures I had taken of (and with) the students pasted all over them. The professor had all the students line up and hug me goodbye. One student even presented me with a card with his photo pasted on it and a personalized artisanal tapestry his mother had woven specifically for me, an act that left me immensely touched.

With a few more hugs, and an exchange of phone numbers and email addresses, I walked the two minutes to my host family’s house, and bade them a poignant goodbye.  My host mother, however, was out delivering her children to school , and while I had already said goodbyes to my host brother and sister, I didn’t have a chance to to the same with my host mother. But Ceci, one of my supervisors, had a rented truck waiting so I had to pile my luggage into the back of the truck and then hop in with it myself, and be driven away, waving energetically to my onetime family  as I bounced away from them  along cobble-stoned main street.

We picked up the rest of our group, and then headed along the Pan-American Highway to Otavalo. The wind blew my hair all over my face, and  as I held on tightly to the bars on the sides of the truck’s open back so I wouldn’t fall out,  I reflected on how attitudes toward safety and toward personal freedom are so different in Iluman from in Canada.  I knew that I would miss this sense of liberty when I returned to the highly regulated and, in many ways, constraining, society of my home country, just as I was already missing the freely given grace, candor, and friendship of the people I’d had the privilege of living among in Iluman.

Lunes 18 de Mayo del 2009 (or Cuy, Culture and Mingas)

ll, when I started writing this, it was Monday, May 18. Now it´s Friday, May 21.

I ate guinea pig on Monday.  At first Johanna served me chicken, but then she asked if I wanted cuy, which is guinea pig. I said I´d try the cuy.  I received a portion that was fortunately without the guinea pig´s head, but it did have a leg with tiny toes. I left that part on my plate. I was feeling a little uneasy while I was eating the cuy, but I suppose the flavour itself wasn´t bad.

At school on Monday, I somersaulted, and danced, with the students during Cultura Fisico (gym), and danced with them later in the day. I usually stay in the classroom when the students go for gym, but since my friend Eva helped lead gym last week, I´ve realized it´s a good opportunity to connect more with the kids if I participate in gym.

For the dancing, the whole school (about 150 kids, maybe?) goes outside and the students dance in circles to Andean fusion music.  Students with instruments (recorders, panflutes, cardboard cutout guitars) and girls with baskets or dolls dance in a smaller circle in the middle of the large one. I had a lot of fun dancing, and after the dancing was officially over, there was music still on, and some girls from other classes came and clustered around me and we formed a circle of our own and I tried to lead them in some simple moves.

It´s easy to get sunburnt here. I think I got some sun on my facefrom being outside dancing. Sun here is strong,  and it´s because of the altitude, I think, the light is more direct since there is less atmosphere for it to go through, being as high as it is here.

When I was at the internet cafe recently,  a large group of Indigenas in traditional dress came into the cafe and started speaking with the manager. Clearly they were voicing opinions about a matter they felt strongly about, and I gleaned it had something to do with computers for a school. But what this had to do with the internet cafe, and why its staff was arguing back forcefully, I couldn´t figure out. I hadn´t heard so many people speak on top of each other, and so urgently, before.

It kind of made me think of mingas. A minga is a gathering where Indigenas come together to discuss matters of community concern, and to help collectively resolve problems or offer help to people who need it. Some of my friends here have been to mindos, but I haven´t. I´m enamoured of the idea, though.

Weekend in Mindo

This weekend, my friends and I hopped a bus to Mindo for three days of adventure and indulgence.

Mindo is 3 or 4 hours away from Iluman. We left early on Friday morning, and after taking several buses, arrived in Mindo at about 2 or so  in the afternoon.

While we were on the 2-hour bus ride from Quito to Mindo, I started having a conversation with a guy I was sitting beside. He told me about how we were travelling through an area that has Ecuador´s rare spectacled bears. Neat! I found out Pavel works for the provincial government of Pichincha doing  development work. I want to learn more about this; it seems like he is doing really good stuff for the people of Ecuador´s Pichincha province.  He also has family in Toronto, though he doesn´t know which neighbourhood. He knew a little English, and me a little Spanish, and we had fun trying to communicate in each other´s languages. I love striking up conversations with strangers like that!

Once my friends and I arrived in Mindo, we settled into the hostel we had booked. It was beautiful, with hammocks on the balcony, and lots of wooden floors and walls.

To begin our adventures, we travelled to a place where we could ride 13 ziplines in the canopy of a cloud forest, which is a forest that is sometimes covered in clouds because of its high altitude. In most climates, forests can´t grow up so high, but because Ecuador is on the equator, its heat and humidity nourish trees and undergrowth.

For much of the afternoon, we zoomed across wide valleys while hooked into harnesses that suspended us by a few cables above the foliage far below. Sometimes, three of us would have the chance to perform a trick with one of the three guides as we zipped across the valley. ´Superman´involved wrapping one´s legs around a guid and lying vertically, face pointing down, and with arms extended. I tried it twice, and it was amazing! Like my dreams of flying. The ´mariposa´, or butterfly, was even more adrenaline-conjuring, the bulk of the zipline is crossed while completely upside down! I tried it once, and while was scared, nonetheless enjoyed the crossing!

The last zipline went right through a dense cloud, and we watched our friends one-by-one disappear completely into the fog. I did Superman for that zipline. Wow.

The weekend was also the weekend of Mindo´s annual festival.  on Friday night people were dancing to traditional and salsa music right in the street. I love dancing, but am very shy about it, so every time that a guy asked me to dance that night, I ran away and started dancing right beside my female friends.

On Saturday, we went to a butterfly conservatory. There were about 40 different species, including Blue Morphos! They were really beautiful.

Across the way from the butterfly garden was the entry point for river rafting. Well, tubing. All 7 of us clambered aboard a regata of 7 inner tubes lashed together and rode down the Mindo river through a whole bunch of rapids. I was jubilant.

In the afternoon, I took a siesta in a hammock on the balcony of our hostel and watched hummingbirds hovering and darting by the feeder a few metres from my head.

We had rich chocolate fondue at a cute little place in town, and then had supper at our favourite mexican restaurant.

On Sunday we got up early and went on a birdwatching expedition. I saw cuckoos, many different types of tanagers, hawks, different kinds of toucans, swallows, kites, and tiny grey parrots with colourful beaks.  After that, we took a cable car across  a green valley and hiked a steep, winding path through a hill-side forest to get to an impressive waterfall.

We had to really hustle to make the bus in time. I think this was one of the busiest weekends I´ve ever had! And one of the best.

Today I read The Tortoise and the Hare, and The Three Little Pigs to my class in Spanish (well, most of the students – the others were running around, since I opted to take the class outside for a fresh-air read-aloud). They huddled around me, listening intently. I had to keep asking them to move back so I wouldn´t whack anyone when I turned a page.

Most of the school day was taken up by math and Spanish. The students did addition using manipulatives – but only one student per group of four got to use the manipulatives (corn kernels and dried beans) at a time. During Spanish, the teacher left and instructed me to have the students copy down ¨qu¨ words that I dictated from a workbook. It annoys me when the teacher leaves me for so long – I would say up to 45 minutes or more at a time. Today wasn´t very bad though; many of the students actually listened to me, and there wasn´t any fighting or running out of the classroom. At least not much.

After school, I asked a few students if I could walk with them and see where they lived. While this would probhably be inappropriate in Canada, in Ecuador there isn´t the same kind of suspicion and anxiety about teacher conduct. Indeed, the teacher spanked a number of students today, albeit lightly and in passing, to get them to stop misbehaving while he was teaching. Anyhow, I walked up the steep hill where some of my students live, teaching one of their siblings, who was accompanying us, some English, as per his request, and responding enthusiastically to their gleefully uttered ¨hello¨s and ¨OK¨s.  I completely understand the thrill of being able to communicate with comeone in another language, no matter how minimally!

These kids have a long, steep climb to make after school every day! As we climbed, when I looked back I had a stunning view of Volcan Cotacachi. I met a woman and her daughter along the way, and after I talked with them a bit, they invited me to their home to see the bags and tapestries they make on their hand loom. I didn´t buy anything, having bought lots of bags and a tapestry already from other people, but was grateful for their acquaintance. On the way back down the mountain, it began to ran a lot and I knocked on the door of a student I had been climbing with to ask if the student could keep overnight and bring tomorrow my large bristol board diagram of the human body with parts labelled in Spanish and English, so it wouldn´t get wet on my way home and was invited in by her parents. Up until today I hadn´t really seen where my students live, or had much interaction with their parents, so this was really meaningful for me.  The homes of my students that I saw today were very humble, raw, concrete structures, and I felt a twinge for their inhabitants, along with my gratitude for their letting me into their lives.

Last night I had a somewhat similar experience, in terms of the poignancy of the situation. After hours of walking, wandering vainly,  and visiting, my Canadian friends and I paid a call to a woman who has a child in the daycare where one of my friends is placed. She had invited us to come visit her to look at scarves she makes. One of my friends remarked, as we entered her premises, that it felt like camping. There were tarps stretched over large sticks to create canopies over areas of packed earth, and the house itself was divided into two large rooms built out of concrete. I saw either two or three beds in the room with the scarves and loom that we were ushered into. The woman, Blanca, had eight children and was pregnant with her ninth. Some of her children were playing volleyball with a decomposing ball and a string between two trees that served as a net. One of the children pointed us in the direction of their cuy, or guinea pigs, which were one of the family´s sources of food.

After some time spent perusing and purchasing delicate cotton scarves in lovely colours, we took a few pictures with Blanca and her family.  As we left, Blanca asked if it would be possible for us to send her children shoes from Canada. Some were wearing flimsy sandals. Even Andreas, a member of our group who has a well-earned reputation as a tenacious bargainer, said he would have felt bad haggling with Blanca.

I wish I could give Blanca and her family similar opportunities to the ones I have. And I wish I hadn´t spent so much of last night grumbling about how tired and hungry I was, as we searched for the right house. Last night was absolutely more than I had expected it to be.

Above the Cascada de Peguche on Friday May 8, 2009

A view from when hiked up a road that led us above the Peguche waterfall

The river that later turns into the Cascada de Peguche

I couldn´t get the lake and myself in one shot…

More Ilumanating experiences

Lulu, Gringa the Pitbull´s 4-month-old puppy. I´ve stopped trying to play with her because she ruins my clothes and shoes, and she has bitten me a number of times.

Pollos!

View from further down my street from my house

The backs of some houses in Iluman

Evidence of the recent presidential (and local) election

Chancho!

A nearby street

Iluman´s Catholic church and part of the village´s main plaza

Ilumanati

Joanna my host mother, Martha, my host grandmother, and some of their nephewsView from my streetA river that becomes the Cascade de Peguche later on

I´m tired. The market at Otavalo yesterday was really overwhelming, and I am a true ingenue when it comes to bargaining. Today, Mother´s day, was more relaxing. I miss my mother, though.

Plateau

I´m still enjoying being here in Ecuador, but I think I´ve reached a plateau in terms of experiencing new things about Iluman´s culture and also in terms of learning Spanish. I may even be backsliding with the Spanish.

At any rate, I´ve been really tired the past few days. Maybe part of it is that I have a cold. Not a bad one, though.

I work at the school Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and it´s only a 2 minute walk from my house. The last few days it´s really tired me out, though. This week, the usual teacher is away and there´s a supply here. I´ve been teaching the kids numbers, colours, and the names of animals in English. I´ve used games like What Time is it Mr. Wolf, songs like Old McDonald, and rhymes like 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. I´ve gotten them to request certan pencil crayon colours in English, and I´ve begun getting them to say “please” and “thank you”.

A lot of the boys don´t like to sit still for long periods of time and sometimes run outside or run around inside the classroom. They also fight with each other a lot. This definitely isn´t something I´m familiar with. Also, the supply teacher left 45 minutes early (to be fair, he asked me whether it was okay) and then I was alone with the kids. I have trouble getting them (well, some of them) to do what I ask. But I love them all. And they seem to enjoy at least some of my lessons a lot.

This past weekend I went to Quito with two friends, one of whom went home to Canada on Monday. She was living with a family in Peguche, another village near Iluman. But last week, Peguche had water contamination and a bunch of people got really sick. Including my friend. She was very sick for a long time, and decided living in Ecuador wasn´t the right thing for her. So my other friend and I went with her to Quito this past weekend, where she wanted to spend her last weekend before returning home.

We were too tired and/sick to really do much in Quito, but we discovered a neat little cafe with amazing hot chocolate and browsed souvenirs at a series of shops. Eva and I left Quito on Sunday afternoon after saying goodbye to our friend who had a flight to Toronto the next morning. The bus ride back to Iluman was gruelling, but we made it back eventually. I didn´t feel very rested from the weekend, but I was glad I spent it the way I did.

Yesterday I went to see a friend of Claire, who is a member of our group who lives on the corner of my street, doing traditional hand weaving on his loom. It was pretty impressive. I will post pictures of it when I am able; I can´t seem to import photos on this computer.

On Sunday our group is supposed to visit the huge market in Otavalo. I´m really excited.

The week after, we might go exploring some lakes and visiting some pre-Inca ruins. I wish I had more time in this country. I will have to return some day if I can.

More photos

¡Welcome to Iluman!

view from the bus travelling through the Andes from Quito to Iluman

Ceci´s hostel in the evening. Behind it, the volcano Imbabura

Soy una amazona!

My host mother Joana, her mother Martha, niece Maria Belen, and Gringa the pitt bull in the family´s yard beside the house

Joana and Maria Belen stand framed by one entry to the courtyard separating the kitchen, bedrooms, and living room.

Martha removing kernels from corncobs for 'tostadas' - yummy toasted corn kernels

Some of the students in the class where I work

More students, outside their classroom