Teaching at the Back Door of the Orphanage

Dusti teaching a group of 6th graders in Limon, Costa Rica.

This has been an interesting week. On Tuesday, Deanne and I finished teaching a combined 5th-6th-grade classroom at the Bocuare 'Jungle' school. That was a great experience. We will teach one more time there in the near future. I will give a presentation to the older kids on how to study and how technology impacts our learning, in both positive and negative ways.

On Thursday, we started teaching English classes at the biggest elementary school in Limon. There are over 1100 kids here, with 550+ going to school in the morning and the other 550+ going in the afternoon. We are only teaching 6th grade, which is the highest grade in the school. They have two morning classes and two afternoon classes of 6th graders. But these classes switch every other day. If you are on the morning schedule on Monday morning, you start at 7am and finish at Noon. On Tuesday, you will be on the afternoon schedule and start at noon and finish at 5pm.

This school is located a few blocks from the orphanage and is where most of their kids go. So we did teach some of the orphans. Having tested all of the ophans in English, we were in for a surprise when we taught our lessons. The students and the teachers were much better at English than we expected. If this initial observation holds up, it indicates that the the orphans are even farther behind in English than most of their peers. I figured there would be a gap, but this suprised me.

Since the school is very close to the orphanage, it also means it is a few blocks from where Deanne and Kit were robbed two months ago. This means that this was a bit of an emotional return. I will also mention that this was an emotional return for me as well. This is the first time I've taught a 6th grade only class since I left California. At the start of my career. I worked with an amazing team of teachers who patiently teamed up with me and helped me learn the true ART of teaching.

So while we wait for the orphanage to come up with a pilot plan for teaching English and Technology, we'll do the best we can. As I was walking out of the school, a little 2nd grader from the orphanage ran up to me. I recognized him immediately because he loves thumb wrestling. So we fist bumped each other and then thumb wrestled. After I won, he quickly asked me a ton of questions in Spanish. I didn't understand most of what he said, but I told him we would try to go to the orphanage soon.