Three Fiestas, Two Cultures, One Great Week

Above is a photo of the city from above. I couldn´t fit it all in one photo, but you can tell it´s large!

Here, I live between two cultures. I live with my host family in La Colonia Centro, the oldest colony, which is in the center of Morelia. It is primarily a working, middle class area. The buildings and homes here are all packed together, and there is limited green space. Most people park on the streets, since few have garages, and no one has a yard. When I walk outside of my door, there is a narrow sidewalk, and then a road. My neighborhood has many shops near by in walking distance. All day and night, there are people all over on the streets talking. In the mornings, at least on the weekends, I awake to the sound of ¨las campanas,¨the bells, which are the sounds of the trash man. He comes by every day all morning long beginning at 7:30a.m. Fortunately, I wake up before this during the week. There is also the sounds of two musical trucks every morning, which sell natural gas tanks to use in the homes.

I am student teaching at Varmond School in La Colonia Tres Marias, one of the newest, wealthiest colonies on the outskirts of the city. All of the houses are large, have yards, and are spaced out very much. There are two private gated entrances to my school, and every vehicle of the families and teachers looks relatively new. In the morning, the teachers who don´t have a class during the first hour of the day go outside to open the car doors for the students when their parents drop them off at school. It is a private school, where students dress in uniform. Since the parents pay a lot for tuition and books, my cooperating teacher told me that their more like clients than parents. If there´s something they´re not happy about, the school has to adapt to meet their wishes. For instance, this is why we need to finish all of the workbook pages each month.

I am teaching in the 6th grade, and the students, teachers, and staff at the school are all very nice. This week, there were three fiestas during recess breaks. One was for a student´s b-day, and then each of the two sections of my grade, 6a and 6b, threw me surprise parties (thankfully on two different days!) They brought tons of food including ice cream, cake, chips, fruit with chile, ham with chile, drinks. (Everything with here has chile on it!) Random fact: Apple flavored soda is popular here!

My main teaching goal was to get to know students, the school, and curriculum this week. I think I did pretty well building rapport with students. I have most of their names down. I got to know their abilities a bit by circulating around the class to help them out. I shared a photo book about me at the start of the week, which they enjoyed. I also began a ¨mailbox¨in which the students can ¨send¨me messages, and I´ll write back to them. So far, one student wrote to me. I also played volleyball a few times at recess. My math lessons went well, and I wrote and gave my first math quiz this Friday. From the first set I graded, they did well. I have to thank Dr. Poss for teaching me how to use scrap paper. I encouraged my students to do so, and I think it´s really helping them. The focus in the math part of their book is very much on the answer. There isn´t even enough room to work out a solution. I´m trying to move the emphasis more to the process of math, since that´s where the critical thinking and understanding is.

I have to head out now, but enjoy the weekend. I have a 3 day weekend for El Día de la Candelas. More about that on Tuesday!

Al principio...mis adventuras

Hola from Mexico!! I am here, safe, and quite happy. This adventure began when my host parents (Fernando and Carmen) picked me up from the airport and pointed out that my bottle of laundry detergent broke and poured itself aaaaaall over my suitcase. Cleaning everything out made for quite the ice breaker! My host mom kept saying, ¨Qué triste,¨ (How sad), but I had to find it kind of funny. Fortunately, the few items of clothes I had in this smaller suitcase soaked up most of the soap, and only a few books and papers, most of which were wrapped in saran wrap, got soap around their edges. At least my shoes are nice and clean now..haha!
At my house, I live with my parents, and host siblings Aldo, Abraham, and Nadxelli. All are older than me. In Mexico, it is traditional to live with your parents until you marry, so my siblings range in age from 25 to 30. They are all very kind, and very patient with my imperfect Spanish. They are good about correcting my mistakes, which is incredibly helpful!
Over the weekend, I went to a birthday party with my host parents for one of their uncles. They sure know how to have fun! There was a lot of food, karaoke, and dancing. The tiny bit of salsa I know from SNC classes helped a lot. I still think I looked a bit foolish, but ah well. It was fun. Some of their songs here are American ones that have been translated into Spanish! On Sunday I went to the independent market, where my host mom has a cheese shop. Think farmers market but SUPER SIZE! There was tons of shops and markets packed together with fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, toys, restaurants, clothing, shoes, etc....anything you´d ever think of buying. The most memorable was the meat shops where raw meat covered the entire counter, lay out in the open, and dripped blood down onto the cement pavement below. One man was cutting meat to sell, and I swear I saw it flying out toward the customers passing by. Yikes! I walked quickly!! Sunday night, I went to my first Spanish mass. It was so strange to see people walking in and out of the church throughout the entire mass, and only one third of the church receiving communion. My host father explained to me that here, it is more important just to go to the church, and it doesn´t matter when you arrive or leave. Also, many abide by the rule of going to confession before receiving communion.
At the school, Varmond School, I began teaching math today. I will tell more about all of this later, since I need to wrap this blog up. Until Friday...

Hasta Luego

Photo courtesy of U.S. CIA

I leave for Mexico in just over a week!  I'm excited to meet my host family and begin student teaching there.  If you'd like to learn a little more about where I'm going and what I'm doing, I thought I'd give you a couple interesting links.  I've also included a map above so that you can see where Morelia is. 

Morelia is a beautiful Colonial city in Mexico.  If you would like to see photos of the city, click here.  Then click on the map of the city.  A larger version will show up, and if you scroll over the maroon circles, you'll see some incredible photos.  The architecture of Morelia's buildings is gorgeous.

Varmond School, a bilingual school where I'll be student teaching uses the AMCO curriculum. I think they have an interesting curriculum approach, since the textbooks are updated monthly.  This allows the company to include the most current information, unlike most U.S. textbooks, which update every year or so but are often only updated in schools every several years.  If you'd like to learn more about the AMCO curriculum that I'll be using, click here.  If you go the instructional guides, "Metodo 2" are the guides used in the English classes, which I will be teaching.  These were invaluable for me when I did some preliminary instructional planning.  Since Varmond's workbooks include the entire curriculum that the teachers need to cover for the month, most of my instructional plans for now are ideas for short activities and games that I can integrate into part of my lessons. 

That's all I have for now.  Thanks for checking my blog.  I'll miss all of you in the States!  Take care and keep in touch!