Hi
Thias is Lisa with a few words about school. First a recap about our location. We are in Castro which is a small city (pop. 30,000) on the island of Chiloe Chiloe is famous for being a friendly folksy kind of place. Put another way, we are lving the small town life in the boonies. Carpe Diem, our school is semi subsidized, rather like our idea of a charter school. THe school is pre-K to 12 with each grade having one class of about 25-30 kids. Berto goes to kindergarten in the morning from 8-12:30, hangs out with one of the Kinder teachers till I have lunch at 1, and then goes to 1st grade from 2 till when I finish for the day. (4:30 2 days a week, 3 on 1 day and 1:30 on the other 2 days.) I teach English to the 5th graders to the 12th graders. I have class time of about 25 hours a week with planning and club advising of about 10. School is different. THe high schoolers go to school 8-5 M,T, 8-4 W, 8-3 Th and 8-1 Fr. Classes are 90 minutes each. Since they are in school more hours, there is no homework. Teachers are called Tia or Tio (I am Tia Lisa or Aunt Lisa). Teachers and students eat lunch together in the cafeteria. My host teacher frequently swaps lunch with the kids if he likes their home lunch better than his school lunch. There seems to be at lot less social seperation between kids and adults. Kids wear uniforms to school. during the three 15 minute breaks in the day, kids run in the halls and play soccer with everything from balled up paper to a plastic soda bottle. In class, classroom management is a bit of a challenge as kids are rowdier here than I am used to in the US. Berto is in kindergarten in my school. Since we are minor celebrities in town (the family from Gringolandia) the older students make a big deal out of Berto. Lastly, we live about 5km from school and take the local bus into town at the end of the day. However in the 8 days we have been to school, we have yet to ride the bus home. Every day someone stops and gives us a ride in their car. (When is the last time a parent driving their kid home in the USA stopped to give the teacher a ride home?) I constantly find myself thinking of the differences and trying to figure is it Chile v. USA or small town v. suburb or LS v. Carpe Diem school. In general, I see a lot of things that I would like to bring back to where ever I am teaching next year. The other lesson I am learning is the power of an enthusiastic teacher. My host teacher, Hugo, has the attitude that grammar matters less than getting the kids excited about speaking English. I have free reign to do whatever I want with the vocabulary to make it fun for the kids. With all this loosy goosey fun, the kids like English class, are quite advanced and score higher than other schools on the national exams. So much for rigorous teaching to the test! For more, google Carpe+diem+castro+chile to get to the school´s web page.