Monday August 21, 2006

Today I Feel Like a Real Peace Corps Volunteer
I don’t always, sometimes I feel like a lazy poser, in no way useful to the people of Paraguay and faking it all. But not today!! Today I did good stuff!!

In the morning I went running, then met with Noemi and Betty at the Supervision and we planned our week, which includes meetings with the Columbian woman Thursday and Friday (ugh), and also a meeting on Wednesday with the 2nd and 3rd grade teachers of the area. Since the Columbiana has taken over the Preschool/1st grade group, I’m turning my attention to this next group of teachers, and what I’m trying to do is create a Learning Circle. This is a big deal in education jargon, and I think it’ll work really well here. The idea is that instead of bringing teachers together to be told how they should be teach, you recognize that the teachers ALREADY have ideas and skills and experiences and they can share with and teach EACH OTHER in order to improve their teaching. The idea is that the group will choose a common problem, such as how do we teach the multiplication tables, and then everyone shares their ideas and goes back to the classroom and experiments, and then we meet up and see how it went. It’s way more respectful of the ideas and abilities the teachers already have, through the former volunteer and their training and just through years of experience, and it makes me more of a resource than a lecturer, and I’m hoping it’ll also be more sustainable this way (ie. they can continue long after I’m gone, still learning from each other). So I’m excited that this is actually happening on Wednesday …

And then after lunch (yummy tomato soup fortified w/ extra veggies and soy) I went to the Escuela Maria Auxiliadora to plan with the Director the charlas or little talks I’m doing next week in every classroom about Dental Health. I borrowed a big pair of plastic teeth from the PC office so we can demonstrate how to properly brush your teeth, we’ll talk about why teeth are important (even baby teeth), and distinguish between foods that are good and bad for your teeth, and we’ll start the weekly fluoride process w/ fluoride pills I got from the Health Ministry in Asuncion. We’re also going to invite parents to come to the classes w/ their kids so they’ll learn how to support them and hopefully make the kids brush their teeth at home. That part’s a long shot, but if we can even get a couple parents it’d be a start.

And then I went to the other small school, Escuela Virgen del Carmen, to talk w/ Angelica, the teacher w/ whom I team taught a few weeks ago but haven’t really talked to since. I was kind of fishing around to see if she was still working on phonics or if she wanted more help making materials, and out of nowhere she said, “Want to see what we’ve been doing?” and brought out boxes and boxes of flashcards. For every week’s words (ex. Words with bra, bre, bro, bru) she has made large cardboard cards of the words, and started a system where the kids pair up (one better reader w/ one poorer reader) and quiz each other, and the kids can pull out the boxes of words and practice when they want to. While I was there they were even practicing during recess!! This is so great because 1. Angelica is continuing an idea that I had showed her during my model lesson, but more importantly 2. she took that idea and made it her own, had the confidence to create a structure that works for her and her students, to experiment and, in the end, to improve her teaching practice. What more could an early elementary education volunteer ask for??