Help Educate Kids in Guatemala

El Hato School (Escuela El Hato) is a public school located in an 100% indiginous village. Although it is a public school most students are unable to afford the cost of attending. Earth Lodge is an organization accepting monetary donations to provide school supplies and food for these students. Please read Earth Lodge's blog to find more information on how you can help these kids at El Hato.

Your donations will help to provide:
- school supplies at the beginning of the school year and through out the year as donations are received
- a weekly supply of vegtables to supliment the students' diet

Thank you for taking the time to read this and your consideration of donating is greatly appreciated by this educator.

A great article on keeping up stamina for the school year

Teaching Secrets: After the Honeymoon

Helpful tips for keeping your energy up for the full school year. Mostly common sense stuff, but always good to read about how you can make yourself a better teacher.

New week...

Monday: This week will I will give my first set of final exams: first to my shelter class and then to my TOEFL class. My shelter class exam will be a simple test of basic grammar, but with a short essay response to add a little something more to the exam. My TOEFL test will have students reading an academic passage and answering questions; responding in an essay to a question; and responding by speaking to a different question. These are all things that they will have to do on the actual TOEFL test and it's what we've been practicing for the last five weeks.

Thursday Night: I started this post on Monday morning and never got a chance to finish it. My exams on Wednesday went well. I began grading part of the test and they appear to have done just fine. One section of my exam was a speaking section - this is where I truly learned how well my students might do on their actual TOEFL exam. What they had to do was prepare notes in response to a question and then give a oral response to the question. I graded it on a scale of 1 to 5: I had no 1s and no 2s, a couple of 3s, mostly 4s, and about five 5s. I was pretty happy with the results, but some of my students still have a lot of work to do before they try to take the TOEFL exam. This is where I think my class website might help some of them out. On my website I have included my e-mail address so students can ask me questions and I have also listed useful websites for them to use for preparation. I hope that some of my students try to contact me in the future with questions or concerns about the TOEFL Test. It would mean a lot to me if I could help them in some way.

Next week is my final week with my other classes. With Quinto Secretariado I will be watching an English movie. With Cuarto Secretariado I will be practicing their spelling skills in preparation for their final exam. During the rest of my time at school I will be working on finishing my grading for Quinto Ciencias and for my other classes as well.

Well, I'll try to write again later this weekend or next week. Perhaps I'll be able to put up more of my activities/lesson plans.

Pictures from "Create Your Own Planet"

It's a little messier than I would like, but here they are. And by messy, I mean the layout of this blog post -- not my students work. I was incredibly impressed by what they did. I even created my own poster to display with theirs in class (my poster is the one titled, "Fryce").

Cheers.

"Create Your Own Planet" Assignment

Here is an assignment guide that I created for my lesson: "Create Your Own Planet".

For this project, students write an essay about a planet of their own creation - complete with life forms, physical characteristics, and details about the planet's discovery. Next, students create a poster or artistic representation of their planet that includes: the name of the planet, basic facts about the planet, and a description or picture of the life forms on the planet. I spaced this lesson out over two or three class periods: 1st was an Introduction Day, 2nd Poster/Writing Work Day, 3rd Presentation Day. Between the 2nd and 3rd class period was a weekend period - this allowed students plenty of time for completing their project.

Below is the lesson plan:
“Create Your Own Planet”
Instructions and Guide
Description:
This assignment consists of two main parts: first, an essay report on your planet; second, a poster displaying an image and basic information about your planet. Both the essay and the poster are worth 20 points. This assignment is due Tuesday, August 30, 2011.
Essay Instructions:
Your essay must meet the following requirements:
1. It must be one or two paragraphs long. Each paragraph must have at least three or four sentences.
2. Your essay must answer each of these questions:
a. What is the name of your planet? (Consider: describe how you developed the name or what the name means.)
b. Where is your planet located? (Consider: how far away from Earth is this planet? Is it in our solar system? Is it in a different solar system?
c. How was your planet discovered? (Consider: what is the name of the discoverer and how did he or she discover the planet – satellites, telescopes, or a manned spacecraft?)
d. What are your planet’s physical characteristics? (Consider: are the landforms similar to Earth? Are they different? Is there air to breath or another substance? Is there water?)
e. Does your planet support life?
i. If yes, describe the life forms. (Consider: are they similar to humans or completely different?)
ii. If no, describe why your planet does not support life.
Poster Instructions:
Your poster must meet the following requirements:
1. It must have a picture or a drawing of your planet. (This may be a hand drawn picture or something you create on your computer.)
2. Your poster must have each of the following:
a. The name of your planet.
b. The location of your planet.
c. The basic physical characteristics of your planet.
d. The name and a brief description (or picture) of the life forms that live on your planet.
Both your essay and your poster must also have the following:
1. Your full name
2. Your class
3. The due date of this assignment

Link between Teachers and students

Linking Student Data to Teachers a Complex Task, Experts Say

I got this article from Educationweek.org in a new effort to read more journal, newspaper, and scholarly articles on teaching. I hope to learn more about the issues and concerns of educators in the U.S. in preparation for a future return to the U.S. to teach. I feel this is something that my Northern Education teachers tried to impress upon me as a student, but I never fully grasped the importance of this type of study. Perhaps it was the fact that I was told or required to read only scholarly articles first and forgo articles of equal value, but with less complex jargon.

This article is about efforts to create better technologies to determine how to link teachers to students with the ultimate goal being to base some part of a teacher's overall performance on the performance of their students. I appreciate the effort by the parties involved with this project to try to develop a better way to accurately link students that actually attend class to a particular teacher (or for a teacher to select which students were actually taught by said teacher) but I still am against linking teacher pay to student performance. Especially if the final determiner is a student's performance on a standardized test. Data related to student's actual attendance does seem valuable --- what better way to demonstrate why a student is struggling if you can prove that the student is rarely present in your classroom.


Linking Student Data to Teachers a Complex Task, Experts Say

Regulations, taxes aren't killing small business, owners say | McClatchy

A pretty good article about small business success and failure.

Regulations, taxes aren't killing small business, owners say | McClatchy

A Cardinal Rule of Teaching

Today I almost broke one of my cardinal rules of teaching: never give homework or book work as a punishment for or a threat against misbehavior. My class wasn't really misbehaving, but they were getting on my nerves. I started class like usual with roll and then checked to see if they had done their homework. While I was checking homework I made a comment about "My wife..." and that started a flood of questions. I had no problem with this - it was the first time many had asked about me and I was willing to share. So I told them about how Salem and I ended up here and a little bit about where we're from. They loved it - especially when I told them why Michigan is the coolest state. (If you don't know, it's because you can show someone where you live or grew up in Michigan on your hands.) After our digression I wrangled them back to practicing TOEFL, but there were still one or two students who kept asking me questions. Like I said, I don't mind answering questions but sometimes I just don't want to talk about things with my students. Like, whether or not Salem and I want kids. They can ask, but I'm not going to talk about it with them. Well, no matter how many times I said no, one or two of them kept asking, "Teacher, do you want to have kids?" This was the point when I almost uttered the words: "If you don't stop asking me that I will assign you extra homework..." But I caught myself, took a deep breath, and continued teaching. It was frustrating, but demonstrates that I need to work on controlling how much I talk about and to nip-in-the-bud any potential problem questions a lot quicker. I know this is all a part of continuing to learn how to teach better, but it can be irratating to learn by doing.

On another note, I had a great lesson with 5th Secretarial! They presented and turned in their projects for "Create Your Own Planet" and man, was I ever surprised. I had three or four students create models of their planets, one student had a poster that had a Jupiter-like ring popping out of the page, and I had another student bring in a small tapestry with a Buddhist god on it from which she had drawn inspiration for the life forms on her planet. Needless to say, I was very pleased and I asked their permission to take pictures of their projects. Later I will share my lesson plan from this activity and some pictures from this activity.

An interesting week

This week has been very intersting. It was the "Finishing Week" for two of the graduating groups at Colegio Boston. This means that there were a large number of activities for these two groups to help prepare them for the next phase of their education. Neither of these groups are students of mine, but because the activities they are participating in are useful for my students I didn't have students for most of my classes this week. Monday I spent the day planning and reading (as well as attending a party thrown by my Secretary students for the graduating Secretarial students). Tuesday I had one class in the morning and then nothing for the rest of the day. Wednesday I had one class in the afternoon that went to a seminar on "proper make-up use" and my next class was almost entirely absent. On Thursday I spent the morning working at the hostel and then rode the bus to school for my one class at 2 o'clock; this class went ahead as usual. Today (Friday) has been the only normal day of my week.

So it has been an interesting week filled mostly with a lot of dead time doing planning and reading. I am looking forward to next week when things return to normal and I get to have my students back.

Teaching!

I am now a teacher!

I started working at the same school as my wife about two weeks ago! I am so excited to be teaching again - it is awesome.

I have four classes: one class of 24 seniors preparing for the TOEFL Test, two classes of secretary students (one of 7 students and the other with 15), and a Shelter or English Reinforcement class of 3 students.

So far what I've done with my students (except the Shelter students):

- "Me Poems": I used this assignment as an introductory activity for all my classes, each student wrote six simple statements about themselves in English. Student then shared these "Poems" with the class.

- Create a Movie Scene Activity: I split each class into small groups and gave each group a setting in which they were to create a "Movie Scene". Students had to create dialogue, describe their setting, and introduce their characters. Some of the Scenes were very dramatic and definitely a lot of fun.

- "Create Your Own Planet": This activity is in the process at the moment, but the goal is for each student to create a planet and describe it using an essay and a poster. The essay must be 1 or 2 paragraphs and use lots of descriptive words to describe the planet. The posters are what I'm most excited for - each student must draw their planet and any lifeforms living on their planet. This poster will be presented to the class next week Tuesday when the project is due.

Well, I've done a few other things with my students so far and I will write about those in the future. For the time being I'm super pysched to be teaching again! Yes!

Review on Goodreads.com

The Mystery of Cabin Island by Franklin W. Dixon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I read many of the Hardy Boys books when I was a kid and this one stands out as one of my favorites. To fully review it I will have to re-read it seeing as it has been about 10 years since I read any of these books. However, I can definitely recomend this series to any young person out there (or parent of said young person). The series as a whole is good nature, well written, and very enjoyable.



View all my reviews

Be careful about who is attacking teachers...

Please read:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/28-11

Or a few exerts:

"Test-based teacher evaluation systems have the potential to seriously damage the teaching profession. The National Academy of Sciences found 20 to 30 percent error rates in “value-added” ratings systems based on their own dubious premises. Teachers in the bottom group one year were often in the top group the next and vice versa. The same teachers measured by two different standardized tests produced completely inconsistent results. The basic assumptions of these testing systems are at odds with the way real schools actually work. Bending school practices to accommodate them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes to the willingness of teachers to serve high-needs populations and the collaborative professional culture that good schools depend on for success."

"It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. It took campaigns against child labor, crusades for public taxation, struggles against fear and discrimination directed at immigrants, historic movements for civil rights against legally sanctioned separate and unequal schooling, movements for equal rights and educational access for women, and in more recent decades sustained drives for the rights of special education students, gay and lesbian students, bilingual students, and Native American students. These campaigns are all unfinished and the gains they’ve made are uneven and fragile. But they have made public schools one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose.

But the system’s Achilles’ heel continues to be acute racial and class inequality, which in fact is the Achilles’ heel of the whole society."

We need to be careful about those who call for educational reform. Many are out for profit through privatization of schools, but we must stand up for equal access and equitable resources for all of our children. Free and fair access to public education should be the cornerstone of our society.

What frustrates me most when reading this article is that if we truly valued our kids future and their education then our country would have no debate over education reform. It would end at, "every student, every teacher, every school, will have the full support of every person in the country." If we truly wanted a healthy, successful country our schools should be funded well beyond their needs and our teachers shouldn't have to worry about being judged on merit based systems based on standardized testing that doesn't properly judge students achievement.

None-the-less, what can be taken out of this is that the US education system is at a crucial point...as I'm sure has been said many times before. What will come of this latest move for reform? Increased class sizes to increase market efficiency? If so you can count me out. I'll start my own school here in Guatemala with small class sizes and strong teacher to student connection. Because anyone whose taken an upper-level college class with 10 other students knows the value of small class sizes.

Peace,
LP

A Guatemalan education

So I've not only been a teacher here in Guatemala, I have also been taught many things. First and foremost I've been learning a lot from my students. I especially remember the first couple times I tutored...I had no idea what to do! Do I give them a English quiz to see how much they know or do I just talk with them? Should I create lessons or just trust that they'll have something to do? How much should I allow the parents to get involved? These are all questions that I struggled with when I first began and still struggle with now. Well in answer to the first question, I didn't give them a test to see how much English they knew - I just dived right in. With the older students this wasn't too much of a problem, but with the younger ones who have had less English classes it was nearly impossible.

For one of my students I'm learning that I'm going to need to start creating some ideas of things for us to do. The last few times I've been over he's had no homework, or any desire to actually study English, so we've spent the better part of an hour each time stumbling through conversations half in English and half in Spanish. He is using more English with me than before, but I feel like he's not respecting me as much as he used to...part of that might be tied in to the fact that he's been on the losing end of a few soccer games and I might have rubbed it in his face a bit. Mostly because he tried to tell me I wasn't going to score a single goal...and I scored four or five. I think he also struggles a lot with the concept of "losing gracefully" or losing at all. He doesn't seem the type that's needed to share or lose to a sibling.

As for my other learning experiences here in Guatemala, I have also been learning Spanish. I took a full week of classes at La Union with my wonderful teacher Julia. She and I are now family and she offered to give Salem and I private lessons at a discounted rate! We haven't yet had time to take advantage of that opportunity, but I would like to work with her at least a little bit. My Spanish speaking skills have also improved over the last couple weeks since I started working at the Hostel and Travel agency owned by the parents of one of my students. At the Hostel I have to be able to speak Spanish because most of the staff speaks very little English. All the cleaning ladies, the repairman, and the night watchman speak almost entirely in Spanish. Thus to communicate with them without the help of one of the English speaking staff members, I have to be able to speak in Spanish. I really like talking with the cleaning ladies. They're hilarious and they love to make jokes -- usually at my expense. For example, one of the cleaning ladies named Mary usually chuckles a bit whenever I say something in Spanish -- the best example being when I tried to tell the women I work with that there was a man at the door asking for her, but the work I used to say "for you" might have meant "for her purposes or use"...So they all laughed pretty hard about that.

More to come later...

Peace,
LP

Haven't blogged in a while...

O.k. so I haven't blogged about just myself in a while so I thought what the heck --- I might as well.

For the past two months Salem and I have been in Guatemala. For the most part she's been the one having all the educational experiences. She's been doing her student teaching at a elementary and high school called Colegio Boston near Ciudad Vieja. She has been having a great time and has been doing a wonderful job. A couple weeks ago when her parents were visiting, the three of us tagged along with her to school. It was a lot of fun and quite amazing to be able to watch my wife do something I know she loves so much. Usually I just get to hear about it...on that day I got to see her in action. I loved it! :)

As for my own educational experiences here in Guatemala I've had a few and they've taught me a lot. First is the tutoring that I started about a month ago. I began with one student, a sixteen year-old kid whose had English classes for a long time, and then I added two other students who are younger and have less experience with English. The older student is really easy to talk with and almost a breeze to study English with. For the most part with him my goal has been perfecting and tweaking what he's already learned in his English classes. I have also tried my best to help prepare him for the TOEFL test - an English for primary foreign language speakers used like an entrance exam for U.S. colleges and universities. My other two students are about the same age, but the difference in how they were taught English is evident. One student goes to a school that teaches English almost like an immersion program -- i.e. the school does its best to hire strong English speakers as teachers to influence their students comprehension of English. The other student goes to a primarily Spanish school that teaches English by using Spanish - similar to how Spanish is taught in almost every U.S. school. The down side to the second approach is that the teachers may not have a very strong background in English and thus their influence in English is not very strong either. Both these students are on a similar level of English speaking ability, but it is easily apparent that one comprehends more than the other when spoken to in English. No matter what, it is also apparent that all of my students need to speak more English in practical or real-life settings. That's been a big part of my "un-paid" duties with these kids. I hang out with them and play soccer or video games with them --- all the while speaking almost entirely in English so that they can use what they do know of English in a real-life setting. This also has offered me the opportunity to try to use my blossoming abilities in speaking Spanish...a subject on which I will write at more length at a future date. In the meantime I need to go to bed.
Peace,
LP