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June 25, 2009
A Memorable Trip to the Beach
Ian Starnes '11 - This past weekend we had the opportunity of going to the treasured coast of Ecuador. It was an amazing experience. It really gave our class a new perception of Ecuador and the culture we are immersed in. The coast of Ecuador is very different from the central mountain district we had been staying in our first two weeks. For one the temperature is much warmer here. Quito is about eleven to twelve thousand feet above sea level and here… well, the coast is at sea level! We started our weekend excursion by checking in at out lovely hotel in the city of Puerto Lopez. We then hoped in some very unusual taxi (carts attached to motorcycles) and zipped off to a national park to swim in a sulfur lake and hike through some desert terrain to see some Incan ruins. The whole time we were on the coast we were accompanied by our very own tour guide, named Carlos. Carlos was very helpful and very informative as well. After visited the ruins we went to a secluded beach that was absolutely picturesque. The beach was my favorite part of the trip. The next day we visited La Isla de Planta, which is an island about an hour off the coast that many consider to be part of the Galapagos Islands. We saw amazing wildlife and enjoyed a lot of laughs. The trip to the coast was rewarding in terms of educating us even further, but I gained a lot in the form of friendships and relationships over the weekend. Our group, which is comprised, of Independents Fraternity men and a couple DePauw girls has bonded and formed a bond that cannot be broken. Even when we return from Ecuador, we will still be close. This month we have shared together has been life altering and all of us realize how fortunate we are to be with each other. The professors, the students, and everyone who contributed to this trip have bonded and our relationships are going to continue to grow. The information we have learned while here will also be brought back to the classroom at Wabash and that is why I believe immersion trips are so beneficial. They allow the individuals on the trip to grow, but also bring back to Wabash the information they learned and share it with there peers.
June 18, 2009
Evan Isaacs '11 - OVERWHELMING! This is the first word that comes to mind when I think about my first ever teaching experience. On our eight minute walk to Collegio Emilio Uzcátegui I had no idea what to expect. I am not involved in the teacher education program at all and have never had any teaching aspirations post Wabash. I walked into a small classroom with Jon Funston, Chris Pearcy, and Jake German; the group of teachers more commonly known as “The Dream Team.” We had discussed earlier that day that our lesson plans should revolve around simple conversational sentences that the students would have to write out. For instance, “My name is ___. I like to play ____. My favorite food is _____. I am ____ years old.”  We were told months prior that our students would have a pretty good grasp of the English language, however, after the first minute of being in the classroom I knew we were in for an interesting night. These students knew little to no English, which made it difficult to teach because my Spanish speaking skills are not as fluent as one would think. At the beginning of the period we decided to break up the class of 22 students into two different groups where Chris and I took half and Jon and Jake took the other half.
The teaching was off to a rocky start because we expected the students to know more English than what they did, but I think I can speak for all of us when I say we were feeling more confident about teaching as time went on, or at least we thought. Then, before I knew it, we had 45 students in this small classroom. 20-plus students walked in up to 30 minutes late. This is where the OVERWHELMING feeling started to kick in. Chris and I were teaching on a one-on-one basis with the students. I really felt that students were getting a lot out of this, but at the same time I knew they were not getting as much done as what they could have. Some were really self-motivated, while others needed to be pushed. It seemed like every time I turned around and looked at the class five more new faces appeared in the sea of students. Every time I saw a new face, I knew I would have to start moving faster, student to student. When the class ended all I could do was try to comprehend what had happened in that hour and a half blur. Teaching is one thing, but teaching to a group of students who speak another modern language is a completely different story. Before class I was pretty excited to get to speak in English for the majority of class, but my excitement level passed as my OVERWHELMING feeling kicked in. Though I am not fluent in Spanish I was able to comprehend and teach in Spanish (I know, this is astonishing). The only problem that I didn’t realize until later that night was that I spoke too much Spanish than what I should have. The students NEED to hear English. Although I feel like I let them down to an extent, I think my Spanish improved at least 5% (possibly 7.5%). I will not make the same mistake again tonight! English all the way (or at least most of the way). This experience blew my mind, but it surprisingly left me wanting to teach more. I obviously have a better appreciation for modern language teachers because of the language barrier. The patience that goes into teaching a different language is one that is hard to match. A teacher can prepare lesson plans all day, but until you are standing at the head of the classroom full of 16-20 year old Ecuadoreans and have 45 pairs of eyes glaring at you (most in space), you never know how ready you are until you start teaching. [Note to self: Teaching is nothing more than being flexible at all times!]
June 15, 2009
A Note of Thanks From Ecuador
Prof. Jane Hardy - Here is a 'thank you' letter written to our students by Eric Rindal, the English teacher at Yachana High School. During their last week in Ecuador, the students volunteered at Yachana Colegio Técnico (Yachana Technical High School), a boarding school in the Amazon that serves primarily indigenous students. The Wabash students did work projects in the morning and then assisted with English classes in the afternoon. The English teacher at the high school, Eric Rindal, gave them this letter on the morning of their departure. Dear Wabash & DePauw friends, I know you all have been traveling and teaching around Ecuador for some time now, and receive “thank-yous” from each place you visit. But please accept my gratitude with the greatest sincerity. It has been great working with the guys and girls from both universities, and our time in classes and around the school has been quite fun ... Hopefully within your time here you all have seen what Yachana is all about and have been able to connect with the students. Most importantly I hope you remember all your experiences you’ve had here and the classes you have taught (and hopefully forget about the food and your soaked clothes!) Teaching with you has actually been a blast. I honestly was not certain how it would turn out to have more volunteers than students, but you all were great to work with and really helped during classes ...
I’m really not the type of person who writes thank-you notes, but once you gave me multi-colored markers AND magazines, I knew I wouldn’t allow you to leave without letting you know how I appreciated your gifts. They are essentially gold to me ... Well I hope you all leave Ecuador more inspired to do little things in your life that change others’ lives, like you have done here. You really made a tremendous impact on Yachana, if not in the English classes then it was probably when you taught them the “Solja Boy” dance ... [Note: After being invited to a presentation of traditional Ecuadorian dance, the Wabash and DePauw students taught the Ecuadorian students one of their own dances.] It was a pleasure to meet you all,
Eric Rindal
June 10, 2009
Ecuadorian Students Want Improved Future
Jake German '11 - Our first actual teaching experience came at a school in South Quito. We were staying at a foundation called Tierra Nueva. South Quito is different from North Quito just like two sides of a penny are different. The poverty level was greater and the everyday struggles to meet basic needs was more difficult. However, one constant remained: the desire to learn. 'The school we taught at offered both classes during the day and at night. The students who came during the day had a fairly normal school-day experience. The students who came at night all had jobs during the day. Many worked in their homes taking care of siblings while their parents worked. Others worked in hospitals, restaurants, and clothing stores. Some of the most dedicated students I met worked in a fabric factory for 8 hours during the day and then attended school at night. We tried to teach the students practical lessons. We focused on introductions, greetings, the weather, directions, and good-byes. Most students had a very basic English level. The students' responses were eerily similar when asked, "Why do you want to learn English?" They all said for their futures. The students wanted to learn English so they could move to the United States and Spain to get a job. With the determination they showed in their everyday lives, I have no doubt that some will succeed. It was a special opportunity for us as student/teachers and Wabash College men to help such determined students.
June 08, 2009
An Unbelievable Jungle Education
Chris Pearcy '10 - I’m sitting in the airport right now waiting to board my already delayed flight. The rest of the Wabash students have left already for Houston and I’m headed to Miami. Being here by myself has given me some time to think about my experiences over the past four weeks or so here in Ecuador. This place is different. At least for me it has been four weeks of uncomfortable situations, language barriers, cultural exposure, and relationship building with host family, students, and friends, both from our program and from Ecuador). .jpg) Just yesterday we returned from the bush. We had been living at Yachana High School for the past week. Yachana is a very unique education system that is literally situated directly in the middle of NO WHERE. The Lodge is there to help support the school financially as much as possible. The school itself is 20 percent self-sustaining in food, finances, power, etc. From raising cows, pigs, and chickens, to running a microsized hydroelectric dam for power, the ultimate goal is to be 100 percent self sustaining. The students wake up every morning for breakfast at 6AM. Breakfast was definitely interesting, anything from plantain mush, to spaghetti with chicken still on the bone and of course more plantains. After breakfast they get together for assembly and go over the day’s tasks as well as a “thought for the day” type of thing. After assembly the students are divided into four groups and each group is assigned a different job for the morning. They work from 7 a.m. until 10 a.m. and the work isn’t easy. The first day Jake German, Josh Johnson, and I all had to carry 6-10 foot Mahogany beams over a quarter mile on our shoulders. The beams will be used to build an additional greenhouse. After work, we had a much needed break for about two hours. The kids all went and changed clothes and went to their daily classes. Then we had lunch and after lunch we got to do some teaching.  My first teaching experience at Yachana is what really opened my eyes to how the place works. Every student was there to learn. Most of them were attentive and nearly none of them were disruptive. They showed a level of maturity that I didn’t see in South Quito. I struggled all week trying to figure out where the change in behavior and attitude toward learning may have come from. I never heard a single complaint out of anyone in the morning when the breakfast bell sounded at six. I never heard a complaint about carrying 150 lbs on a shoulder, or planting an entire field (over 250) Papaya trees. Furthermore, they were ready and focused during their classes for the entire day, from 10:15 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. The students showed a high level of camaraderie especially for high school students. Something about the working together for a common goal, I suppose, is what makes them so close. But I found something even more interesting when I talked to the students one on one. Every student shared the aspiration of attending a university after their third term at Yachana. Some wanted to venture to the US, while others were content with the schools in Ecuador. And every student, wanted to return to their homes, various villages, cities by the coast, even some from Quito, to try to help their home communities. This is what really impressed me about Yachana. A completely different outlook on education than the kids from South Quito. Surely, differences in childhood upbringing elicited some of this attitude in the students at Yachana, but I believe that the school itself also fosters the “giving back” attitude. Of course, we had some interesting moments in our free time as well, more cultural/jungle exposure than anything. A few pretty interesting hikes during the day and the night landed me in a few not-so-usual situations. During the day hike I was dubbed jungle Shaman and got a nice face painting to show it. When we went for the night hike, our guide, Abel, assured me it was fine to put the four inch scorpion spider on my face. So I went ahead and tried it. I’ll try anything twice. Then the usual personal hygiene problems, giant spiders and tree frogs needed chased out prior to taking a refreshing, ice-cold shower. And, last but not least, I managed to hold an impressive 20ish bbpn (bug bites per night) average for the entire week. We were there for four nights, you do the math. Other than that I had a wonderful time in the Amazon, and I would definitely go back! The animal and plant life we saw, and the experiences we had, were worth the distress of the jungle..
June 04, 2009
Resilience, Resolve, Confidence, Care, and Competition!
Professor of Education Deborah Butler Friday May, 22 -- A night flight into Quito. It’s late and the hotel bed is much welcomed as is the next slow two days until the students and Jane Hardy and I meet to go to the Centro de Formacion on Sunday evening in South Quito, one of the poorest urban sections of this very large Andean city.  The Centro is a lovely compound in South Quito that exists, like an oasis, both physically and academically, to offer south Quito youth positive options opposed to a life that can become immersed in alcohol, drugs, violent behavior, and grueling physical work. During the summers, youth in this part of the city can come here during the day and have enriching academic and social experiences at an extremely low cost. Right now though, Quito schools are still in session, so it is the job of the 12 Wabash and two DePauw students to live in the compound and to walk daily to a local “Colegio” or high school (ages 12 – 18 plus) to teach English as a Foreign Language to Ecuadorian students in the mornings, while teaching thematic units everyone prepared in March and April on campus to groups of students in the afternoon at the Centro. We arrive holding our breath, ready for a week’s worth of hard but exciting work, work we hope will bring a true service to an area in need. One of the first things we notice as we enter this lovely compound is the faint twinkle of sharp glass edging the top of the compound walls. This juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness is pretty much a metaphor for the week.  We learn immediately that nothing is what it seemed. There will be no students at the Centro for us, and our Colegio classes will be the third shift at night, 6:20 to 9:45 every evening. Que lastima! What will we do? We are about to learn our first life lesson: it takes resilience to quickly shift gears, modifying plans Monday morning and afternoon to fit our new groups of students. Monday night we learn that this high school, with roughly grades 6 – 12, is like nothing that any of us ever attended or taught in. Picture each room as a concrete box: there are no acoustics, just four concrete walls, a concrete floor, one blackboard in the front of each room with 45 – 60 desks filled with students in each room, no projectors or computers or DVD players. The windows are all either open to the sound of the central courtyard below or the glass is broken out. In either case, the noise from other rooms and from outside is deafening. Sounds echo constantly, as Wabash and DePauw students quickly find out that the English level of most students is well below that needed for their prepared lessons. More resilience as we all quickly revise and move to teaching students what they normally don’t get: how to communicate in English about real topics and questions they may use now or in their futures. We all worked hard to make the experience work, and at Tuesday morning’s debriefing, we question: Will what we do make a difference? And this is where our resolve wins out: Wabash and DePauw students in this Colegio have already brought out the energy and the eagerness to learn in their classrooms for most students. These students were delighted that the Americans came to their school, to their English classrooms, a privilege so often reserved for the better schools of Quito. They are important enough for this to happen. We may not see the difference that our teaching makes this week we agreed, but for how many kids will our presence send a positive message that they matter? That their speaking English matters for their future? On Tuesday, Victor Nava appears at break and says to me: “I have a bone to pick with our education program!” “Why?” I ask. “Well, nowhere in our methods courses did I ever learn how to teach in the dark and what to do when my students bring their babies to class! I think we will have to re-do the education program curricula.” I ask,” Well, what did you do?” “I asked the baby’s name as we all introduced ourselves, and we just kept talking and trying to learn.” Good ideas all; I don’t think we can teach him how to make those decisions in a methods course! On Wednesday and Thursday I watch Patrick Garrett ham up his vocabulary teaching, putting himself into every moment, and I see that every kids’ eyes are on him; all are smiling and laughing and repeating everything he wants them to learn. They learn, but what about Patrick? “Confidence,” he grins. I watch Alex and Jake, Jon and Michael take command of the board and the classroom and role-play and involve their classes in English speaking role-plays, getting kids up and saying English who have clearly never done these things before. I see Josh cover a science class because no teacher showed up that night to teach. I watch Ryan, Chris, Drew, Danni and Carolyn work with their small groups, and during break, I see Ian teaching Ecuadorians how to dance in the school courtyard. The Ecuadorians are charmed. They can sense the care and the interest from all of us. Jane and I ask about “low points of the week” later and Victor says: “I had no low points this week!”  Was it all collaborative and smooth? By no means. Two afternoons Wabash and DePauw met the Ecuadorians for “futbol” competition. As helpful as I think we all were in the classroom, the Wabash/Depauw team members were savages on that field. For the record, the Ecuadorians won one game and we won one. In spite of Evan’s twisted ankle and Jon’s blisters, we held up pretty well! It’s hard to know in one week if you really made a difference. The last night, Jane and I asked our students to spend five minutes at the end of the night asking the Ecuadorian students what they had learned, generally and specifically. In one classroom, one student in the back jumped up out of his chair and said looking at Jake: “What is your favorite color? My favorite color is blue.” I left on that note as Jake looked at me, pointed at that particular student, and said: “That is HUGE!” Maybe it is for someone who doesn’t get many chances to speak in English sentences. June 1 - And now it is on to Yachana for Wabash, and back to the States for me. I will miss seeing what Ecuadorians AND the Americans learn, but I have a feeling it will be something as unforgettable as this past week.
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