Teaching

Cody: Our classes have begun! We started school on Monday and it was wonderful to finally get to meet our students. I have a wonderful group of kids in 5th grade. There are 14 students and they are all really excited to be at school. We'll see how long that lasts... They are all really smart kids and I was impressed at how much they already know. They understand everything I say to them and speak in English without me asking them to. However, I found that the recipe for disaster is when I put them in groups because they automatically start chatting with each other in Spanish. Overall they have been so fun and we have been starting all sorts of subjects. The school day is broken into nine 40 min periods. They have Spanish, Social studies, Music, PE, Library, and Values all taught in Spanish by Honduran teachers and the remaining subjects, Reading, Writing, English, Spelling, Math, and Science are taught by me.

I have found that they read and speak well in English but their reading comprehension is pretty low. We'll be working on that. I think Math wins the prize for favorite subject for the majority of the kids. They respond really well to copying things down from the board. It is amazing, I just write something down and the room goes silent as everyone focuses and writes. Group work is a challenge. An interesting thing they do here is that when walking to another classroom or to lunch all of the kids line up in two lines, a girls line and a boys line. We then walk in a semi-straight line together. The kids have two breaks, recess and lunch. The Caseta (or cafeteria) is open for both times and serves mostly fried food in the morning and a rice, meat or noodle dish for lunch. My kids eat during recess time in the morning and then play soccer during lunch. Apparently the fifth graders have beat the sixth graders two days in a row now. They are pretty excited about that. I wondered how they knew who was on what team because they all wear the exact same uniform for school, a white button up, short sleeve shirt and red/blue plaid pants or skirt. I then found out they play by having grades compete.

All of the teachers are exhausted by the end of the day and what makes it worse is that it is the hottest time of the day. So we are tired, sticky and we have to make the long walk home.