So I prepared myself as best as I knew how for this endeavor and arrived in Costa Rica late in the evening on February 4, 2010. I was picked up at the San Jose airport by my house mother, Emilia, and rode in a taxi for a half hour to Tres Rios. The ride seemed much longer then than it does now! I’ll be spending the next four months here in Tres Rios, and teaching in a bilingual school for 15 weeks.
I was told prior to my departure that I would be teaching in a fourth grade class. Emilia walked me to visit my school early on Friday, February 5th and I learned that I would be teaching both fifth and sixth grade, much different than I had anticipated and planned for! The cooperating teacher that I am working with is named, Alejandro, and he is one of the few members of the faculty who speak English. Together, we are responsible for teaching a fifth and a sixth grade class, we spend half the day with each, and we teach them Language, Spelling, Reading, Science and Math in English. The students go to the same subjects the other half of the day with their Spanish teacher.
The following Monday, I attended a faculty meeting at my school at 7a.m. I was late for the meeting because my house mother, Emilia, insisted that everything was fine, that we needed to eat breakfast, and she wanted to show me how to ride the bus to my school. Needless to say I was freaking out! This was the school’s first impression of me and I was going to be late! Ticos (Costa Ricans call themselves) run on Costa Rican time! I was about fifteen minutes late but the meeting hadn’t started yet. I arrived just in time to have to stand and introduce myself, in Spanish. Very embarrassing! The meeting lasted about four hours and was entirely in Spanish. I felt like I was invisible. No one makes eye contact with you as they’re talking when they know you have no idea what they’re saying. I tried, during the break, to tell Alejandro (my cooperating teacher) what I thought they had been discussing. I was completely wrong. I had thought that they were discussing motivation and self-esteem, when actually they had been talking about discipline and maintaining students’ attention. I was exhausted from straining to comprehend the presenters’ words, hand gestures, and facial expressions. All of the staff was very welcoming and happy to have me there, but it was very frustrating to not be able to get to know them the way they were getting to know each other, or to be able to contribute my ideas on the discussion topics.
The next two days I went to the school early to help Alejandro prepare our fifth grade homeroom. Our school’s first day was on Thursday, February 11th which is actually during the summer in Costa Rica. It was exciting to be able to help set up the classroom, arrange the seating chart and discuss what procedures we were going to put into action. I took a few pictures of my school and my classroom during this time.
View from my fifth grade classroom out into the mountain. Beautiful and refreshing!
View from outside my fifth grade classroom down to the left, where all the little girls play during break.
View from outside my fifth grade classroom down to the right, where all the little boys - and one brave little girl - play, they loooove futbol! This soccer field was donated to the school and is new this year.
My fifth grade homeroom ready for the first day of school...
Much more to come, as we've been in school two weeks now, thanks so much for reading!
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