Turning into a true Belizean

Another has gone by! It was a fairly smooth and uneventful week. I’ve been teaching lessons on my own, team teaching with Mr. Burnel and grading lots of papers – I’m a grading machine! I feel as though I am making a difference here though. I teach the spelling lessons every morning. The kids have 10 spelling words each week and every day we do something different with those words to prepare them for a spelling test on Friday. This week all of their words ended in “-op” so I had them make little spelling booklets on Tuesday. Wednesday I scrambled 5 of the words and they had to unscramble them and we learned the definition of the words and talked about how we could use them in sentences. We did the same thing on Thursday for the other 5 words and each Thursday they take a “pre-test”. The students who make a 100 on the pre-test don’t have to take a test on Friday. Last week I only had 5 make a 100. This week I had 11 students make a 100 on their pre-test! I was so excited. Most of the other students only missed one or two words. So for homework I had them write the words that they missed 3 times each. On Friday I gave the test again and 7 more students made a 100! Mr. Burnel said that was the best that they have ever done on a spelling test. Most of the rest of them made 90 or 80 and only 4 students failed! My goal for next week is for not a single student to fail and have over 20 of them make a 100 J I am also making a “word wall” in their classroom with all the spelling words they have had so far so that they don’t forget the words they learned.

Friday was an exciting day after school. It was Mailyn’s birthday and she had sent out invitations earlier that week inviting all the kids to her party. Little did I know that her party was actually AT school RIGHT after class! It was a whole big thing! Her mom brought in a buffet of food. Other student’s parents came and brought the other student’s siblings to the party as well. Mr. Burnel and I played waiter and waitress to all the kids. They started off getting chips and queso. Then little sandwiches were passed out with drinks. Then all the kids got a cupcake. Then we went outside to hit the piñata. Then the kids came back inside and got favor bags. Then they were given an entire meal of rice and beans, mashed potatoes and chicken!! I was blown away! Even the assistant principal came to the party! I asked her if this was common for kids to have their birthday parties in school like this. She said it was becoming more popular because it was cheaper and all the kid’s friends were there at once. She said that this was a larger party and that most parents just bring a cake with some drinks for the kids. It was crazy though, it lasted over an hour and after all the kids left it was a mess to clean up. Luckily some adults stayed behind and Mr. Burnel recruited some older kids to come in and sweep the classroom. Quite an experience though! I was very full by the end of that party, to say the least!

That evening a small group of us helped out at the library to put on a movie for the kids. We helped the librarian set up an inflatable movie screen outside the library and set up a projector. We played Stuart Little 3: Call of the Wild. A good amount of kids showed up plus some families with smaller ones and I even think some tourists walking by even stopped to watch for a bit. For the first part of the movie however I went to go watch some of my students play soccer or “football” as they call it here. They are so cute in their little uniforms and watching them run up and down the concrete field attempting to kick the ball and block it from the goal is very entertaining. They get so excited about it though and you can’t help but be excited too!

Saturday was “service Saturday” for most of us! The other elementary school that 1/3 of us are at, Isla Bonita, was having a fundraiser for art supplies. They were also painting a mural on the outside wall that surrounded the front of the school. I got there around 10:30 and the mural was over halfway painted! Little kids were running around everywhere with paint brushes and paint on themselves! Our entire group showed up to paint as well as many people from the community. It was such a huge success. There is a girl name Natalie who is teaching the students at Isla Bonita creative arts. She is the new “art” teacher. She is doing an internship much like we are except she is here longer, two months I think. This project was part of a class called “Be the Change” and she had to make a change at the school she was at. The wall started off a bland pale yellow and it ended in various color shades that the students mixed themselves. “Brighten our Future” was written on it as well. It makes a huge difference and it makes the school very inviting and welcoming.

The rest of the day I was a beach bum. It was hot and I was in and out of the water between trying to even out my tan between my peeling burn. The few of us laying out caught word that more lionfish had been sighted and that some of the boys working at the snorkel shop on the dock were going out to spear them. We congregated on the dock to watch, I had left my snorkel bag behind for the day so I observed from above while some went in the water with the boys to spot the lionfish. They are not loved or wanted at all here. They eat all the other fish and destroy the reef and anyone who sees a lionfish is encouraged to kill them. The boys speared two. They were only a few inches long, but they said that it’s better to spear them when they are little, before they can do too much damage. It was quite an interesting thing to watch.

Saturday night I went to church at night and treated myself to ice cream and window shopping down front street. I met up with the rest of the group at RC where there was to be the “teacher vs. parents” game at 8:30. What was so special about this game was that many of the girls from our group were playing on the teacher’s team! They had been practicing for two hours every day after school the entire week training hard for this game. It was such an exciting and intense game. It was only female teachers vs. female parents tonight, the males teachers played the male parents on Friday night. The girls played so well, the parents were so aggressive!! Many of them bigger women but still in incredible shape, they were running up and down the concrete field, one lady even played without shoes on! The teachers ended up losing 2 -3 but they are doing a rematch next Friday before we go inland. Lauren’s teacher, who is on the team, told me that I have to play with them next Friday even if it’s only for 5 minutes! We will see how that goes, I’ve never been much of a soccer player!

Time flies on the weekends and the week of course goes by slow, I feel like that is the same in any country you go to. I can’t believe this is my second to last weekend here. I feel like I have been gone forever, yet when I look back on my pictures and my blogs I feel like all of this happened just a few days ago! On a personal level, it has been such a humbling experience and honestly the best Lenten journey I have ever been on. It has really made me realize what and who is important to me and what I want out of life. I have realized that I am so truly blessed and that many things that I don’t normally think of as being a privilege I might take for granted i.e. education. I realized that no matter where I go, I will always have my religion and my faith. No matter how far I travel from my family, they will always love me and support me. No matter where I go, my heart stays true to those I love and if anything this trip has solidified what it is that I want from my life and who I want in it.

As a teacher I have learned that I need to be more patient. This does not surprise me because I feel that in my everyday life I still struggle with patience. Here in Belize, I came into the classroom with expectations that these students would be on the same level as my second graders back in America. However, I found that this is not the case and I easily get frustrated with my students when they don’t understand something that I feel they should already know or catch onto very easily so that we can move on. I believe that teaching should be engaging and honestly, I think that is a huge difference between teaching in America and teaching here in Belize. My teaching style and part of my teaching philosophy is that learning should be interactive, hands on and engaging. Students should be involved in their learning through various activities. Here many times the teacher writes notes on the board and never once read them to their students. If this is the only type of teaching they are exposed to, then of course they are not going to understand what they are being “taught”. Also, students learn at different speeds and different ways. My patience with my kids here will help me be more patient and understanding of my future students.