Back to School

Monday, September 3, was Back to School Day in Tolte, and things went just about as one might expect. Instead of the carefully prepared introduction to life, in Miss Peach’s classroom, massive traffic and bus delays meant that Sonia arrived 15 minutes late, while Luis and Luis arrive an hour and 15 minutes late, having had to wait for the next bus. The day lasted about an hour, most of that spent in an impromptu meeting between the teachers in the plaza, and then the kids went home. This may be a more authentic representation of a school year than most teachers would dare offer on the first day, but maybe the kids got a truer picture of their year than children do on the first day of school in the States.  And in some cases their answers seemed more  I offer this for US teachers as an introductory statement: “This year, children, I will work in an atmosphere of blame, chaos, and insecurity, doing what I can for you while satisfying the irrelevant demands of a bunch of grown-ups so that I can keep my job. At the end of the year, you will take a test, and you and I will be blamed for the results. Recess for the rest of the day!”

On Tuesday, though, I did show up ready to work. I mean, I was ready to work Monday, but knew I wouldn’t because of first day events which never happened. I was completely prepared for the kids to have forgotten everything. After all, I took off for the US a month before the actual end of the school year, and had not given them a class in 3 months when I saw them on Tuesday. I was ready, armed with Simon Bolivar’s famous quote, “He who serves the Revolution plows the sea.” He who teaches children a foreign language that they will probably never use does the same. And yet they remembered. The children remembered almost everything that I ever taught them, and in some cases their answers seemed more correct and fluent than I remember hearing before. Children who couldn’t respond to me during their final exam (a 5 minute oral response to my questions) managed to respond brightly on Tuesday. How about that? I may have to accept that what I say and do in front of a classroom matters. Sorry, Village School, the message got through a little too late.

What this means is that I have started teaching English pretty much from where we left off in June. I’m using a textbook that is a little more advanced (and useful) than the one used for the first year English course in Ecuadorean public high schools. My new approach is to amplify what they learned last year. For example, last year we learned how to respond to “What is your name?” This year, the children can now respond to “What is my name?” “What is her name?” “What is his name?” “What are your names?” and “What are their names?” With the building blocks apparently in place, the sky’s the limit. In addition, the children’s nightly homework is to teach the day’s lesson to their parents. English as community education: “Yes, it’s cultural imperialism, but the intention is good.”

The good news doesn’t stop there. I finally seem to have a steady flow of customers for my night school English class for adults. We will assume, for the moment, that the motivation to study English is to participate in community tourism, not to flee to “El Jhonny.” The first night I had a good mix of about 14 students, ranging from the seventh grader who was my best student last year up to the AVANTI University scholarship students. They all promised enthusiastically to come back the next night, and if only a few of them did, well, we’re still settling in. But I have had a workable group of 6-10 young people ever since, and things are going well. As the high school kids develop the ability to use the dog’s breakfast of grammar and vocabulary they have been taught, things could get really exciting.

A little side note on language acquisition. Adults both here and in the US are always saying to me, “Isn’t it wonderful how rapidly little kids learn a foreign language?” This year I am not only teaching grades 4-7, but grades 1-3 as well. Trust me: the high school kids are picking things up much, much faster than the little kids, who are only managing to learn about a word a day. When you can’t sit still, have the attention span of a mayfly, and can’t use reading or writing to jog your memory, you’re going to have a tough time learning a foreign language. Sure, the little kids might do better in an immersion situation, but that’s not what we have here. So I’m content that they all know the word “pencil” after four days of instruction, and we’ll leave it at that. If I ever get to the point where I can manage the first grade for more than 15 minutes at a stretch, things may improve. I can handle the third grade for about half an hour, and they’re doing pretty well, I think.

I would also like to mention that Tuesday and Wednesday were big days for concrete. Damasio lured me into mixing and shoveling cement at Mecias, the Teniente Politico’s house on Tuesday, and I was astonished at how much cement it took to cover the roof. Cement alone totaled over 2500 pounds, with equal amounts of sand and gravel to make concrete. Add the water, and something like 5 tons of material were shoveled into buckets and hauled by single pulley (two men pulled on a metal bar at the other end of the rope) up to the roof. Let’s say the buckets held 200 pounds of cement. That’s about 500 bucket loads. All I can say is, I can’t understand why the whole building didn’t just collapse. I also got to know Mecias’ father, Jesus, somewhat better. Here’s a 75 year old man who comes up to my armpit who moved a lot more cement last Tuesday than I did—and then went back to his regular farm labor on Wednesday.  His nephew, the other Mecias, once told me that Jesus used to be really strong, but that his health had been damaged by drink. One can only wonder.

Wednesday was community cement day, as we applied paving blocks to the road nearest m y house. This was difficult as the underlying dirt road is very rough and uneven. Sand was smoothed over it by hand, as one might do for a custom kitchen floor back in the States. We did get the pavers we had placed, but there’s still a ways to go before we reach my house. I can’t say that I was very useful; in this task, as I kept losing track of where I was and walking over recently smoothed areas. But between Tuesday and Wednesday, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised when I threw my back out reaching for my hat on Saturday.

Saturday was another round of the “indoor” championship in Iltus. Tolte defeated Los Tigres del Norte 12-2, which required us to consume more beer and trago than was good for us. I left before the serious trago fest started, thereby saving myself much, though not all, discomfort. I have heard that later that night, there was a rematch between last year’s battling cousins, as reported in an early blog entry. Apparently, this time Wiliam got the expected victory over Gonzalo, which I hope means that Gonzalo will not be challenging for the championship again anytime soon. My theory is that Gonzalo tries to fight with Wiliam because he knows that Wiliam won’t really try to hurt him, being that they are cousins. Except that this time, he was wrong.  Somehow, the Tolte team recovered sufficiently from this experience to win its quarterfinal match on Sunday, with a 15 year old as the goalie. I guess the fighting spirit is not quenched with Pilsener.

Sunday included the usual trip to Chunchi and a farewell party for Ramon and his family, who headed back to England on Monday. I was very sorry to see them go; who knows when or if I’ll ever see them again. Ramon is definitely one of the most loved Toltenos out in “el Extranjero,” and he has a beautiful family. It was hard for me to watch all of his relatives saying goodbye—it must have been even harder for them, although they seem pretty stoical about it. They busied themselves making packages of all sorts of local fruits and vegetables, just in case there’s some sort of food shortage in the UK. Ramon’s nephew David (one of last year’s seventh graders, now at work full time on his mother’s farm) and I carried the luggage out, maybe not the smartest thing I could do considering that the back spasms that started Saturday had not let up in the slightest. But you can’t wimp out in Tolte, so I took myself and my back spasms to school, where my sudden gasps of pain seemed to amuse my students no end.  I’ll have to remember that next time I need to raise their spirits.

So now I am alone in Ramon’s house, which feels very big and empty.  I am expecting an engineer named Gonzalo, from the Ministry of Agriculture (hereafter referred to by its acronym MAGAP) to move in during the next week or two, which should break the silence. I am hoping to persuade him to include some organic agriculture ideas in his extension work. We’ll have to see how that goes. He seemed receptive when he came to work on the integrated farms project that gave me my start in soil conservation in Tolte. I‘m hoping for another lift.