Sunday, another beautiful morning in Belize! Katie Profita and I went to church with two British marines that are also staying at the inn with us. The church was a lot more crowded than I thought it would be but then again, most of the population here is Catholic and they speak English. A majority of the people there were tourists though. One of the things I love most about the Catholic faith is that it is pretty much the same everywhere you go. Same motions, same prayers, same routine … and even the readings are the same. It’s so cool to know that everyone back home was hearing the same readings as I was on Sunday. Some things were a little different though. Instead of saying “and also with you” they said “and go with your spirit” … or something like that. The priest was a little hard to understand during the homily, he had a thick accent and he was a little ADD with his topics but the service all in all was very nice and I look forward to going there every Sunday. Katie and I made friends with a little girl that was sitting in front of us. She wrote her name on a piece of paper and wrote “I love you” with a heart and gave it to each of us.
We walked back just in time to join the rest of the group as all of us were going to Sara’s Kitchen. We were invited by Sara herself and she made us a buffet of scrambled eggs, hash browns, pancakes, yogurt, fresh fruit and bagels with cream cheese. It was AMAZING and only for $10.00 Belize dollars ($5.00 American). Many places on the island are closed on Sundays, a day of rest for all. We all part-took in the restfulness and moseyed on down the beach. This time many of us lay under the shade of the palm trees since we were very crispy from the day before. With the heat of the day, the shade of the trees and the cool breeze I quickly fell asleep for a wonderful Sunday siesta. After a while a group of us walked down the beach to see if there was any fun kind of water sport we could do. We finally found a place that would take you out tubing! We were very excited however when the first group when to go out, they discovered that there was a hole in the tube. The other tube that the company owned was already in the shop being repaired so we had to have our money returned to us and we couldn’t go out. We were all very much bummed but we decided to go back to the group and just play around in the water ourselves.
I came back and showered after a while and my friend Lauren and I went to Hurricanes and got dinner. I had the best shrimp nachos, they were amazing! Sunday night was not very exciting at all. Since we all had to teach the next day we stayed indoors blogging about our weekend and trying to prepare what little we could for what we anticipated we might have to do the next day. Early to bed early to rise!
Monday morning did come early but getting up early here is not quite the same as getting up early at home in Wilmington. I think that my body is still on Eastern Time that’s why. I woke up at 7:00 which would really be 9:00 in Wilmington. The sun rises very early here so it had already been light for quite some time. I ate a cinnamon roll that I had bought from the bakery over the weekend and a banana for breakfast. The students at San Pedro Roman Catholic had to leave a little earlier today because we had to go meet our teachers for the first time. We got there at 7:45 and had to wait outside the school gates until 8:00 then we were let in. We waited in the courtyard until our individual teachers arrived. Mine was the first to arrive.
Mr. Burnel Jones is the teacher of my Infant II class. He is a very personable, laid back guy and very easy to get along with. I was slightly nervous being placed with a male teacher but now I am very glad that I get this experience. About half the teachers at the school are male which is very out of the ordinary and not something you would typically see in America. My classroom has two doors, one that leads out into the center courtyard and one that leads out into the front of the school. It is an extremely small classroom. I have anywhere from 24 – 34 kids, depending on the day. Attendance is taken every day but there are not really any consequences for not showing up. Sometimes when teachers do not show up and they do not have a substitute they split the class up among the other classrooms which is why I could have up to 34 students in my class at a time. As soon as the kids saw me in their classroom they all start running up and hugging me and trying to give me things and writing me notes, I received 10 notes the first day. They are super affectionate and I received more ten times more hugs in my first day there than I ever did at Codington! It is defiantly a difference in culture, there is not really any “personal space” and the “no hands” policy doesn’t exist either.
The classroom has desks and they are arranged in roughly in rows and they children don’t have assigned seats, the really kind of just sit wherever they want. They have a chalk board, not a white board and no technology anywhere in the classroom. The walls are pretty well decorated with days of the week, numbers, the alphabet, Belizean symbols and other school related things. They start the day off with morning prayers, the national Belize anthem and their pledge to their flag. This takes about 10 minutes, the anthem is very long but they sing it every day! Then my students have Language and Grammar in the morning. Next is 20 minute break that the whole school gets in which the kids all run around unsupervised but they are locked inside the school walls. When they come back inside they have Mathematics and then a “special” or “excel”, depending on the day, that is taught in the classroom. Then they have an hour and a half for lunch. Lunch is very long because many of the students go home to eat. This is yet another unsupervised break in which the kids run around; in the school yard, on the streets, on the beach … there are kids EVERYWHERE! When my kids come back they only have an hour and half left of school. They have more “specials” and “excels” during this time such as Spanish, Social Studies, Heath and Family Life Experience, Penmanship or Expressive Arts. Infant I and Infant II get out at 2:30 while all of the Standard classes get out at 3:30.
The biggest similarity that I see is the curriculum. Infant II is the equivalent to Second grade and they are learning many of the same exact things that I taught my second graders at Codington. In math they are learning subtraction of money and they will begin subtraction with re-grouping this week. In social studies they are learning about how to be good citizens and community workers. In science they are learning about friction. Their language arts are the same as ours; they have spelling words that they do something different with everyday. I think I will feel very comfortable teaching the curriculum as I have had a lot of experience with it so far.
The biggest difference I see is classroom/behavior management. Like my lovely second graders at Codington, these little kids love to talk. There is always a constant buzz of talking in the classroom. I think the hardest thing here though is that there is no discipline or consequences for talking or any kind of misbehavior except for having to stay after school and sweep the classroom. In many school systems and classrooms in America there are charts or sticks or money that is monitored and kept up with depending on how you behave. In my Codington classroom we had the lovely “paw chart” in which students would start on a red paw (bad conduct) and work their way up to a purple paw (best conduct) throughout the day. Here there is NOTHING! Mr. Burnel gives reminders for them to be quite and do their work. They are never all sitting down at once. I thought I hated the automatic pencil sharpener in my Codington classroom but now I wish I had one here. Not every student has their own pencil sharpener so they are constantly getting up to use a friend’s. They don’t keep their books at school, they bring them back and forth from home and they don’t all bring their books to class every day. Distractions are numerous and I feel like I never have all of their attention. I am either going to have to come up with a system of punishment or reward but I will have to do something because just watching the classroom the first day stressed me out!!
As this was only my first day I am sure all of us were a little out of our element and that things will become smoother and more organized the more that I am in the classroom and the more we interact with each other and learn from each other.
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