School Stuff

Good news! The parent/student strike is over! All the kids are attending class again, and we can stop reviewing old material and start teaching new stuff. As a result of the parent strike, there have been a few changes at the school. Classes are starting promptly at 7am (the official start of the school day), recesses last for scheduled 10 minutes (ok, maybe 15, but its a lot less than the previous 30), and the school lunches now include more fruits and veggies. The principal installed a bell, which sounds a lot like the tornado drill sound I grew up with, and she bought the school a coffee maker! I'm not a fan of the bell, mostly because I can hear it from my house, but it really does help insure that the school stays on its schedule.

Another change for this school year is that the 1st-3rd graders are going to be using English workbooks. I'm really excited to start using them. We will save sooooooo much time because the students won't have to copy stuff off of the board- they will all have their own copies of the materials all ready in their workbooks. We will also save time by not passing out photocopies, and the students will have a visual reminder of how much material they have learned. I think it will be really motivating and a great classroom tool. But, it was a controversial decision because the kids have to pay for their own workbooks. I think I've mentioned before that the English budget only covers the cost of photocopying the tests. Each workbook costs $7.00, and they only way to get them into to classroom is if each kid buys their own. That $7.00 represents a legitimate sacrifice on the part of quite a few parents- and some of the parents have opted to pay in installments. Hopefully we will have all our workbooks by the end of the next month. *I think it's worth mentioning here that students in Chimurria use workbooks for certain subjects in school, usually math and social studies*

La Maravilla, the smaller school that I work with, had its first PTA meeting last Thursday. The school has around 40 students k-6, and there were 16 parents at the meeting (14 mothers and 2 fathers). Considering that most of the students have siblings/cousins in school- nearly every student had a family member there to represent them. The critical points addressed at the meeting: who was willing to come to mow the school lawn, who was willing to chop wood for the school's stove, how much money each family had to give to the school (standard practice in public schools in Costa Rica), was there enough interest/money to have a soccer team this year.
The meeting went pretty smoothly, and it was encouraging to see how invested the parents were in the school.