Wack-a Mole_

This past week in the classroom has been like a game of wack-a-mole. I wish I understood how it happens this way, but I don’t.  Today I taught both seventh and eighth grades. My section of seventh graders, the scourge of the school by general agreement, has been a “challenge” as we like to say in the Peace Corps. There are three repeaters, kids who were a problem last year and who have ripened into full blown menaces.  Even the sweet little girls are indisciplinadas. After fighting off despair and the ennui of my counterpart, I responded with a few systems—kids seated in rows segregated by sex, name tags and, finally, a system of sticker rewards.  Amazingly, on Monday, nearly everyone was participating, competing for stickers just like the theory says they ought to.  Meanwhile the eighth grade class which soldiers on in the classroom without a partition wall was impossible to teach because of the noise and inattention.

Today, I arrived to teach eighth grade with a heavy heart but a good lesson plan.  My counterpart was in a bad mood.  She is periodically depressed I have noticed and with good reason.  She has a hard life, hard children, few friends, too much responsibility and not enough money.  When she is depressed she takes it out on the kids, as she did today, but to amazing effect. They kept still, paid attention.  The good lesson kept everyone on task and progressing.  Kids were learning and happy they were doing so.  You can see it—the bright eyes, the little satisfied nods when they get something.  Not everyone, of course, but enough so that the tenor of the class was positive, kids feeling accomplished.  And, as icing on the cake, the teacher in the other half of the classroom had her class under control so that the noise diminished to nothing, at times only the scratch of pen on paper.

I was starting to feel like I finally got this teaching in Nicaragua thing.  Maybe I should give a lecture to someone on how to do it. Heart singing rather than groaning, I climbed up the hill to the instituto to spend an hour with seventh grade again. It couldn’t have been worse. The lesson plan wasn’t brilliant but it wasn’t bad. My counterpart was exhausted from the heat and work and, unlike me, faced an afternoon of lectures on her usual time off.  And  the kids were out of control.  No one had their name tags. Kids were squirrely as hell.  One of the menaces was so bad I walked him out of class and down to the library to sit, an intervention that is not permitted in my school, but I did it anyway. 

Thus is it ever. You just get one thing going right and then it doesn’t. Can’t really prepare yourself for a bad day or a good day because you can’t even guess how it will be.  You just keep working with those teachers to make the best plans you can together and show up and see what happens.  Everything depends on so much-- teachers’ moods, the heat, the time of day, the prospects of the kids that day, and an indefinable, unknowable other thing that always keeps you guessing.

I'm going to try attaching a couple of pictures fro my trip to the Atlantic coast.