Green Forest School

A little about the school since that is actually why I am here!

The school has 4 buildings - 11 classrooms, an office building and a technology room. It also has a soccer field and is pretty open air with no air conditioning. They are doing construction, so it makes things difficult - do you shut the doors and windows and bake, or leave them open and hear drills all day? They are putting an addition on and should be done in the next week or two, but it is VERY distracting. The kids prefer to have the door shut - I think that they are used to sweating!

My schedule has been a disaster to work out. Each classroom has a schedule that changes every day and so does each teacher. Some teachers don't even come every day and when they are not teaching, they are not required to be there. Paul Gray (director of all the English speaking classes) doesn't want me to totally take over any one subject (because then that teacher would have nothing to do) or the english instruction in any one grade level (because the parents may not like it). So that makes things difficult. As of right now, I will be teaching 1st grade ESL, 2nd grade spelling/phonics and 3rd grade science and reading.

I am teaching next week even though I haven't had a day that resembles anything like a full day in the classroom or a chance to really talk to the teachers I will be working with. I don't think that the science teacher even knows that I am doing it yet. It will be difficult to plan with them because every one's schedules are different and I'm not sure when we will have free time together. However, the kids parents buy the text books, which cost like 80 - 150 dollars here and everything is straight from the texts curriculum. I wouldn't normally agree with this, but if I'd paid that much for a book imported from the US, I'd expect my kid to have covered every page by the end of the year!

The classroom structure is very traditional (teacher led, copy things from the board, read pages 23-25 and do the corresponding work book pages etc.). The kids are not very well behaved by American school standards - they don't raise their hands and just randomly get up and walk around. I guess it is a cultural thing and is not considered bad behavior here. There are a million interruptions a class period and no real discipline plan other than then threat of meeting with parents.

However, at the same time the kids are very polite and many are very determined. Yesterday a third grade girl told me that she was just bringing her books home to study when I asked her if she had a lot of home work because she was emptying her cubby in to her bag. You have to constantly remind them to use english in class because it is so easy for them to revert to spanish. If they speak without thinking first, it is in spanish, and when they talk to their peers and play, it is as well.

You can really see the effect of spanish phonics and pronunciation on their english speaking and spelling. The letters and their alphabet make totally different sounds (even though they appear to be the same letters) and there are different consonant blends, phonemes and no silent "e"s. I feel like I am getting a better understanding of spanish by listening to and reading how they put their words in order etc. I can't imagine learning to read, spell and write in two languages at once.

One interesting example: Beautiful would be beyond more second graders in the US and when one little girl tackled it, she spelled it biutiful. In spanish "i" says a long "e" - that type of creative spelling makes perfect since in that case!