Halfway Point

Today (January 19, radio listeners)  is, according to some fairly picayune calculations, the halfway point in my Tolte adventure, midway between the day I left New York, September 4, and the day I’ll leave Ecuador, June 3. Of course, my hope is that this adventure will in some way lead to another, but that will be another blog on another theme, I imagine. One only gets to describe a nine-month stretch as an English teacher in an Andean village once, I think.

To mark today as special, the sun has come out for the first time in almost two weeks. It’s a beautiful day, of the sort that all my Tolte days were until the end of November. The sun is brilliant, but the air is cool. But sitting in the sun today was the first time I have felt really warm in quite a while—maybe it’s the first time I have felt genuinely warm in 2012. I believe that I will have dry laundry after hanging it up last Saturday. Yes, a couple of things have dried before today, but now I’ll have clean, dry socks. It’s so difficult to have both. The day was also marked by a wolf howling at dawn, a truly beautiful sound, not frightening, but eerie and soulful. Okay, that actually occurred on Tuesday morning, but I;m going to consider it part of the halfway festivities.

I suppose I ought to look back and look ahead. Looking back, my Spanish was a lot rustier when I arrived than I had realized. It was difficult for me to understand a certain amount of what was going on around me or even said to me. This has improved greatly over the past four and a half months. I still can’t really eavesdrop and understand what people are saying to each other, but I can hold me own somewhat better in lunch or dinner table conversation. This is helped, in part, by having a better idea of who is being talked about. I know a good percentage of the population here, but do not necessarily know everyone’s name. I’m even less likely to know what people actually call each other, which is more likely to be some kind of nickname than his or her real name.

Looking back, I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage my classes. Discipline was never really a problem for me when I worked in the Village School. Or when I was a substitute teacher in Worcester, Massachusetts. But the school culture in Tolte is unlike anything I have ever seen, though not necessarily ever heard of. Year after year, children arrive in school and are indoctrinated by the older students to a belief that school is an endless recess away from the farm work they face at home. I will say that the kids do not treat their regular classroom teachers with the wholesale disrespect they offered me, but the problem was still mine to deal with. The suggestion of having a behavior chart with stickers as rewards was a brilliant one. Unfortunately, I only applied it to the fourth grade. I will say that the sixth grade was always well-behaved, and the fifth grade is coming around. The seventh grade remains a problem, but I can teach something to them most days.

Another positive development was my realization that the kids desperately needed additional reading time and support. I had been opening the computer room every afternoon, and sort of ignoring the library. At the beginning of December, I reversed that. Now the children have to earn minutes of reading in the library to spend in the computer room. In the fifteen days that the library has been open since then, about 35 of the 45 children in grades 4-7 have come in to read. They have only averaged about 10 minutes a day, but many have done better than that. And a total of about 45 kids from grades 1-8 have come in to do some reading or at least look at the pictures. I have started teaching a fourth grader to read, and I will also be working with other fourth graders to get their reading more fluent and improve their comprehension. This takes me back to my days in the elementary school library at Metairie Park Country Day School, my first job out of college. It was a miserable experience, but I think that I am remembering some things that have been helpful here.

I know that I also came here with the hope of working with the farmers of Tolte to do some organic agriculture or soil and water conservation. This has not gone so well. I have spent some good Saturdays with farmers, picking potatoes and the like, but I have not found a way to really contribute any knowledge to local agriculture. There are some things I see that might be helpful: improved fruit tree pruning, composted organic waste, mulching, and organic pest and fungus management (which may link back to pruning). I’d like to get someone to build bench terraces for soil conservation. There is little awareness of the erosion problem here, though there is plenty of obvious erosion. Looking forward, I hope that my credibility in this area may eventually reach a point where someone will believe that the English teacher knows something about agronomy. It’s going to be a tough sell.

I suppose the main goal for the next four and a half months is that the children and I will start to have legitimate conversations in English. We’re definitely getting closer. I am able to interview them about who they live with, names, ages, birthdays, and occupations, what they are wearing, and some of their likes and dislikes. This is all done without notes or texts of any kind, but all the result of speaking and listening. They can’t all do it, but those who can do give me a thrill. I’m considering starting an all-star class from grades 4-7 to further advance those who are doing well. I have to decide whether that would leave them bored during their regular class, and whom I would choose for such a group.

I have a sort of recreational goal, too. I definitely want to learn some of the folkloric music of Ecuador, which has a satisfyingly distinct sound. The only new music I have learned here so far are my nifty arrangement of “Anytime” and the flamenco Milonga I learned from sheet music on Sunday. Time to bear down on then local sound, especially with Carneval coming next month.

One thing is certain: these nine months in Tolte are good ones, the ones I;ve had already and the ones I’m going to have. I haven’t been this comfortable with what I was doing in a long time. Comfort isn’t my goal, but I do take it as a good sign.