School Starts Again

After a two-week vacation to Costa Rica, visiting all of the places where Davie lived when he was younger, we returned to San Nicolas this past weekend and started a new school year two days later.

The school is one of the first buildings you see as you enter the town of San Nicolas. Painted white and blue, it is very hard to miss. There are five classrooms in a row, accented by broken windows and re-bar. In front of these stands the principles'/teachers' office, a cramped space with many desks, file cabinets, and odds-n-ends. Surrounding these buildings, there are four latrines (most of them unusable), a concrete basketball court, and a run-down garden waiting to be tilled.

The school year here in Nicaragua runs from the middle of February until the end of November, and since we didn't get here until October, this will be our first full year of classes. We've conducted a survey with a representative handful of students to determine what they did over vacation, and from the data we've gathered, two primary activities emerged: 1) Sleeping, and 2) Watching TV. From these results, we have concluded that it is about time to dig out the old pens and notebooks de nuevo.

As a bit of background, San Nicolas is the municipal center, or sort of umbrella, for the 40 or so tiny communities that surround it. Most of these communities have their own primary schools, but San Nicolas has the only secondary school in the municipality. Since many of these communities are miles away on terrible dirt roads, and since very few people own cars, lots of students have to walk for hours every day if they want to get a secondary school education. For the students who live even farther away and can't possibly walk that far every day, the school in San Nicolas holds classes every Saturday.

As it is the beginning of the year, we've been working on class scheduling with the other teachers. How they structure the schedule here is a bit different from how high schools in the US usually work. Instead of the students going to different classrooms for different subjects, here the teachers switch classrooms. Each grade (7^th through 11^th) has its own classroom, and every 45 minutes a different teacher comes into each classroom to teach a different subject. This seems to work fairly well; the only down side is that the teachers don't have their own space to decorate the classrooms with educational materials relevant to the subject they teach.

Discipline is a pretty big problem at the Instituto Publico Carolina Camas Arauz (which is the secondary school's official name). Once you've spent a good half hour observing the students chasing each other madly around the school building while classes are in session, the list of school rules posted in each classroom starts to seem a little ridiculous. (My favorite rules from that list: Boys are not allowed to have long hair or long fingernails. No students are allowed to have boyfriends or girlfriends).

It is pretty much impossible to keep students in their seats, or even in the classroom for that matter, during class. The younger grades are especially crazy; we've learned that trying to play educational games just breeds shouting and chair-standing. But the second that any of the students spots Idalia, the principal, they all inevitably run to their chairs, shut their mouths, and pretend to be writing something. So far, Idalia is the only leverage we've discovered to command good behavior.

The style of education that our students are used to is rote memorization. The school can't afford textbooks, so the teachers write their lessons on the board and students copy them into their notebooks. Unfortunately, this makes for very little creativity or critical thinking. We are beginning to realize that our students are not really accustomed to thinking for themselves. One of our goals this school year, therefore, is to teach them that there are often many right answers, and to encourage them to have the intellectual self-confidence to volunteer their own unique answers.

The school already employs a full-time English teacher, so this year Davie and I will divvy up the during-the-day English classes, so that one of us will support that teacher in every class, helping with pronunciation and classroom management. We are also planning an after-school English class that we will offer for high school students on Mondays and Wednesdays, and an English class for teachers after school on Friday. Some of the little kids in San Nicolas have also expressed interest in learning English, so we're planning on doing a more informal class for them on Saturdays as well.