Teaching is a Divine Comedy

VWP: niña—girl (n.)  However, in the school setting kids do not call their teachers “maestra,” instead they call them “niña.”  So a child may raise his or her hand and say “Niña, puede ayudarme con mi tarea?” (Teacher/girl, can you help me with my homework?).  I realize it sounds strange to call your teacher “girl,” practically making her the equivalent as the student, but it’s the truth!

A classy-looking Dante Alighieri

This past week I began my new internship at Escuela Dante Alighieri, a public elementary school nestled in the Lourdes neighborhood.  That’s right, my school is named after the very man who wrote Divine Comedy in the 14^th century—pretty epic.  You might say that with the Costa Rican sun the walk to work can feel like an inferno sometimes…okay, I’m done with the Dante puns (for now).  My day starts at 7 am when I arrive at the school to assist Karla, an energetic and spunky Costa Rican, with her English classes.  During her college career at the prestigious public university here, University of Costa Rica, she majored in "Teaching English" and then lived in Wilmington, NC for a few years teaching Spanish.  Karla teaches three or four classes a day, five days a week, and rarely sees the same class twice in the same week.  With each class filling in around 15 kids, she's teaching more than 100 different first through third graders in a week.  Karla’s classes always begin with a kind of call and response interaction where she shouts out, very slowly, with a slight Costa Rican accent (I’m going to write how it sounds phonetically to me):

The classroom prior to
the daily student invasion

Karla: “Goooood morning!” (She puts a cupped hand to her ear to show she would like a response from the fidgeting, seated crowd.)    

Kids: “Gud moorning, teacher!” (There’s always a few who end a few seconds after the rest, causing a slight stadium echo feel)

Karla: “How are you tudae?”

Kids: “Fayne thanku.  Eand you?”        

Karla: “Whayt’s yur fahvoriet coulour?” This kind of question asking process continues on until we’ve covered the class’ favorite color, animal, number, day of the week, and month of the year. 

 During my first week helping out  Karla’s class she used me as a conversation model for the kids as they asked me “what’s your name?,” “what’s your favorite animal?” and “what’s your favorite number?” in order to get to know me.  Adorably, a few times kids would think they were asking a question to me, but instead they'd just say “My favorite color is blue” since they’d learned the response so many times but rarely had been the ones asking the questions.  After the third class (remember that we teach over 10 different classes in one week) of kids’ interrogating me about my favorite color, animal, number, etc. I soon learned that “My favorite animal is a dog” was a total crowd-pleaser, and in general kids approved of my favorite number being five by showing me a few smiles that were missing their front baby teeth.  Occasionally they were enthralled that “my favorite color is blue” and I would receive a short-lived applause.  It’s nice being the teacher’s assistant and not the actual teacher because I get to be the loved one and Karla has to be the heavy.  Being the good cop in the good cop-bad cop partnership when it comes to a classroom full of little kids is always a good thing; for my kindness and smiles I get rewarded by the kids with stickers, hugs, and small chats when they hunt me down during recess.  I have already started a sticker collection in the front of my journal, all donated to me by the kids. 

Behold two of my lovely stickers

Right now my favorite is a sparkly, slightly crumpled star-shaped sticker that says “You Rock!” Why, thank you.  

Karla does use me a lot even though I am just her assistant for the next month—because I have a true American accent, she likes for the kids to hear me speak as much as possible, and whenever we do an oral exercise (like reviewing the weather--sunny, cloudy, rainy-- or greetings--good morning, good afternoon, good evening) she always asks me to be the speaker.  It’s at times like this that I'm glad my accent is pretty much neutral between a Northern and Southern accent so I don’t shift all of these kids’ accents into Southern sweet tea mode. 

One downside to working in a kids’ classroom is my growing hatred for kids’ sing-along songs.  If you turned on a CD player right now and blasted “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” I might just smash the CD player to pieces.  You’ve all been warned now.  However, I have learned to appreciate the usefulness and effectiveness of using songs to teach little kids words, especially action words.   I have a feeling the kids will absolutely remember what an alligator is, for example, since every time we get to the part in “Five Little Monkeys Swinging On A Tree” where the alligator chows down on one of the monkeys, Karla always synchronizes the word “Snap!” (Alligator has caught the poor unfortunate monkey) with a large face-eating motion with her arms right in front of one of the kids’ wide-eyed, half-scared, half-excited face. 

After my lunch break I switch gears and help a fifth grade social studies teacher with her various classes.  I’m sure you can imagine that I appreciate the change in volume of the kids’ voices (at this point fifth graders are no longer screaming youngins—for the most part) and getting to return to Spanish can be quite the relief since English is really quite ugly sounding in comparison to the fluid vowels of Spanish.  I only work with the fifth graders for an hour and a half every day, so I’m still waiting to get a feel for the class.  However, the odd thing about the Costa Rican public school system is that they don’t have middle school.  Grades 1-5 are all lower schoolers and then grades 6-11 (or 12 if you decide to follow a technical skill career, not an academic one) are high schoolers. 

The kids participating in a reenactment of the Batalla de Santa Rosa during an assembly. 

Even though I can tell this school is struggling with certain issues, it is still an exceptional school in many ways.  For instance, the school is overcrowded, they lack green areas for the kids to play in, and they don’t have a physical education teacher at all.  At the same time though, the kids have a computer lab and on a weekly basis the school has mini-assemblies regarding the environment, civility, and peace.  More importantly, the kids themselves are affectionate and caring.  Some mornings I'm sluggishly making my way into school at 7 am, wishing I'd taken that last sip of coffee a bit more seriously, and then one of my students will run up to me and say "Good morning, teacher Kellie!" (They have trouble pronouncing Katie for some reason, so I'm generally referred to as Kellie).  Regardless of whether the English greeting was perfect or a little awkward or whether they call me Katie or Kellie, the students make getting up before 6 am totally worth it.