Dearest Rachel –
I knew from the outset that whatever I was expecting from a classroom here in Honduras, it wasn’t going to be like what one was like in the States (or, for that matter, since I’ve seen more of their classrooms in the years post-graduation, Japan). The trouble is, I couldn’t visualize what it would look like once I was there. I was still picturing rows of desks and chairs, and students facing their teacher as he or she delivers the lesson for the day. And while that actually still is the case in the public school we visited after my first class of the day, the one at Just One isn’t really anything like those.
The other thing I knew coming into this was that things would go wrong. Not catastrophically or anything, or even in some kind of Murphy-level cascade, but enough to make a full-on, scripted, step-by-step plan only marginally better than worthless. As a result, I really didn’t take a lot of steps to have anything ready for the lessons; besides, given that I was going to try to give the students hands-on experience at a task, I figured that it would be best to start with as little as they did, in order to walk through the task with them, and have them follow my lead.
However, those anticipated-in-theory hiccups proved more difficult to overcome than I expected, for the very fact that they came from a quarter I would never have foreseen, let alone prepared for.
For instance, while I’d made a point of translating the words on the introductory worksheet so that the kids could read and understand what I was trying to do with the table, I hadn’t realized that the computers themselves had to be modified for use in Spanish. Fortunately, I wasn’t the one reconfiguring the keyboard to type out accent marks and tildes on the appropriate letters. Unfortunately, this meant that when the students typed out something as indicated on the English keyboard (an equal sign “=” to start a formula, or a plus sign “+” to add cells together, for instance), what got displayed on the screen was not what was indicated on the keys. It took some time to figure out where and how to type out the actual character we wanted; I was not expecting this to cause so much trouble.
At the same time, when I was setting everything up before class, I had set my computer on a music stand, thinking it looked sturdy enough… it wasn’t. It wasn’t immediate, but after ten minutes or so of sitting there while we set up the students’ computers, the upper part begin to tilt under the weight, and my computer went crashing to the floor. Fortunately, it wasn’t damaged or anything; and I was glad to have this happening before class, so it wouldn’t interfere with the actual lesson. However, it did mean that, during the actual lesson, I was holding onto the computer – and the stand – a little more tightly than I’d have liked. I’m sure I looked nervous enough as it is, without appearing to hold onto the stand for dear life.
Still, by following the lesson plan fairly straightforwardly, things were going pretty smoothly – until we ran into the keyboard issue. It took way more time than expected to straighten that out, and I was so far off-script that I couldn’t make my way back. Still, I did get a few points in about how any sort of calculation – be it adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing – could be done easily on a worksheet, with everything there on a single page to refer to. They seemed to pick up on it, even if it did feel like I’d just scratched the surface.
The afternoon class had its own issues, with the Wi-Fi going out halfway through. As much as Google Sheets has an advantage over Excel by being shareable (and free; an important thing in an impoverished society), the fact that its very existence depends on the cloud means that without internet access, it’s useless. This isn’t even a situation that I could have planned for and mitigated against; there is no creating an off-line Sheet, nor could the students build their own once access was taken away. We did manage to get a different connection, and things proceeded fairly normally from there, but as you can tell, it was a real comedy of errors along the way.
Of course, this is the nature of the beast; things go sidewise, and you just have to roll with the punches in an environment like this. I’m sure my sister Jenn could tell me about how this is standard operating procedure when you’re a full-time teacher. It’s just that, not being one myself, I wasn’t prepared for it, and to a certain extent, I’m not sure I could’ve prepared for it. All I can hope for is that the kids absorbed something that they can use going forward. Honestly, I’m just relieved that my turn behind the podium is over and done with.
Still, there’s another couple of days yet to go, so I’d appreciate it if you could continue to keep an eye on me, and wish me luck; I’m still going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 