March 27th literacy class observations

It was great to get back into the classroom to see the students and observe after having a couple weeks off–one for Semana Santa, and almost another full week for capacitaciones (trainings) for the teachers. I was able to make it too all four classes again and had a chance to see all the teachers teach at least part of a lesson. I first dropped into Mateo´s class… after having a little difficulty finding it because they switched rooms! This class is the 6th grade class which is made up of different ages of men and women with ages ranging from teenagers up through adults. Today Mateo introduced the class to fractions… they first reviewed whole numbers and practiced a bit with those numbers (which is great reinforcement) and then they moved onto fractions. Mateo did a great job of using the example of a cake (circular cakes are popular here) which he drew on the board. He then told the students that they had the task of dividing the pie into enough pieces for their family of 10 to all have an equal piece. I thought this was great because he made the problem relevant to their lives, and also gave them a number which is a little more difficult to divide evenly than say 8 pieces. Hopefully next week we will go further into how to use the fractions to help out in our daily lives.

Mateo then went on with his class to a grammar lesson. Today the class began learning about nouns… he had the class copy down the definitions of nouns and explained the difference between common and proper nouns. He also gave lots of examples of nouns that were important in the students lives, such as corn fields, machetes, pencils, chalkboards, etc.

Next I was off down the road to the adobe house with a dirt floor to observe Lucia´s class. Lucia teaches the 2nd and 3rd level classes. Today the class of 4 older women continued to practice reading and writing in their workbooks. The lesson in the workbook today focused on nutrition and health, and perhaps even more exciting than seeing the women slowly sound out the words in the workbook, was seeing their interest in the material they were reading. The students spent much of the time discussing and asking Lucia about the information in the lesson. They wanted to know all they could about how to give their children the best nutrition for the means they had, and how to care for them when they are sick. Although much of the conversation I could not understand because they were speaking in Tzu´tujil, I could understand the Spanish sections they read in the workbook and the actions Lucia made pointing to different parts of her body when the students ask questions. Even though this might have been somewhat off topic, I have learned through all my education classes I took in college, that some of the best learning takes place when a class goes off on a tangent and starts really discussing something that they are really interested to learn. So, this was all very exciting for me to see in this class.

I was able to pull myself away from this exciting discussion though and head up the street to the municipal building to observe Manuel´s class of some VERY high energy teenagers. As I entered the class it looked like a considerable smaller amount of students compared with the usually very packed and stuffy tiny room. And the students were all rather quiet working on something. Manuel soon informed me though, that this was only half of the class, the other half were those kids that were playing ball and hanging off the stairs outside. The students were taking a short test today, and so he split the class in half to give them room and to prevent wandering eyes! With the two groups together I counted 25 students! The test they were taking was a written Tzu´tujil test (Tzu´tujil seems to be much harder for the students to actually write and read than Spanish because for the students it is more a spoken language). But on the test Manuel included different forms of assessment which included translating from Spanish to Tzu´tujil, identifying drawings in Tzu´tujil, and then creating sentences in Tzu´tujil. This is great to measure how well students actually understand the material, and gives students with different strengths an opportunity to show they understand the material.

After seeing both groups work on the quiz, I headed towards my last stop at Odelia´s class. Today Odelia only had one student show up for class. Some of the women had a meeting they had to go to at their children´s school, and since her class is all older women who have families to take care of, they sometimes have things that come up that they have to tend to. But it was great to see Odelia work one on one with this student. She was so patient and encouraging with this woman. And they both would work on repeating the letter sounds over and over until she got them right. So, this was another exciting day of observing classes, and every time I go I feel like I learn more and more, and it is really fun to see the students on the streets when I am walking through town and have a chance to talk with them and build relationships.