My First Week In Heredia

     It's been one week now and our schedule has proved to be very industrious for me!  I've begun going to bed earlier so that I won't be so tired in the morning.  Keeping up with the Spanish homework is a big challenge because I am spending so much time with my tico family.  Mama is a stay-at-home mother who watches her grandchildren every day, so when I come home from school all her grandchildren are here at the house and then within the next half hour or so all the parents start filtering in to pick them up.  We always end up talking for an hour because they want to see how much Spanish I've learned and what I did that day with our group.  Family time is very important here at this house and everyone encourages Fabian to help me out with his knowledge of English.  He's a little shy but we've become friends and I try to play soccer and other games with him and Sebastian.  Sometimes, I bring them treats that I pick up from the grocery store on my walk home.

My typical fruit breakfast!

     Every morning, I get up between 5:30-6:00 depending on what our group was doing that day.  I would take a cold shower and then shave with cold water.  It's something I had to learn on my trip to Guatemala, and it reminds me of how much easier life is back home.  I get dressed and head into the dining room where mama always has my breakfast ready as she's making coffee with what looks like as sock full of grounds that she pours hot water into. She varies my breakfast just as she does dinner and always tries to get me to eat more!  The coffee here is wonderful and mama always asks me:  "?una mas?" or "one more?"  We hug before I go back to my room and get my backpack to head out for either the meeting point or onto CPI (our Spanish school).  I always enjoy my walk to school and back home as it gives me time to reflect and occasionally I get to talk to the local people who I meet at the stores or on the street.
     The climate here is very damp at this time of year because it's the rainy season.  I developed some cold like symptoms and started having a cough.  Papa says it's the "clima" and he has the same problem because he suffers from asthma.  Earlier in the week I stopped by the "farmacia" and told them I had a "toser" and the pharmacist asked me in Spanish if I had phloem.  I said yes and she sold me a bottle of medicine that I brought home and showed to mama.  She told me it was good for my cough and my nurse friend back home told me it was a common cold medicine.  In a couple of days, my cough cleared up and I felt a lot better.  Although, I think my main issue was not sleeping the night before we left on the trip and letting my body get run down.  The medicine made me feel "foggy" mentally during school and I struggled at times--this made me think a lot about how children who might be hungry or sick could be feeling as they too struggled in our U.S. schools while learning English. It's hard to tackle a difficult task when you aren't feeling well and sometimes other people may not understand this and mistake it for laziness or even as being less intelligent.
     I've already discovered that there are times where I get really frustrated during the Spanish classes and I'm so thankful for our 20 minute break!  This has made me think how important the recess time is for children!  Our teacher; Pilar actually calls our break "recess" and that has emphasized my empathy with children who may also be hitting that "wall" and have begun to feel frustrated.  After 4 hours of Spanish, I see how important it is every day to have a little time to speak to my friends here in English!  It feels so good to express complex ideas that I'm unable to do at this point in Spanish and I wonder how some of the children make it through the day when they do not have that opportunity?  I feel like it would be very beneficial if they could have only just a few minutes to speak their native language at school each day.

Break time (recess) with cafe con leche!

CPI grounds

     I'm enjoying our classes here and I've noticed that our teachers know their content really well in the sense that they know grammar and of course speak their language very well.  However, they are not all well trained educators and that shows (some more than others)  I'm hearing my peers talk about their experience in class and I'm thinking more about what is working well and what is not working so well so that I can apply it my own classroom in the future. I feel fortunate that we have Pilar as she is making an effort to meet each of us (there is four in our class) at our level and she differentiates here lessons so that she touches upon multiple learning styles (she even creates worksheets that use sentences with each of our names)! I have had two non-credit language classes at the university back home and I noticed that there were students in both courses who attempted to divert the instruction by telling personal stories that consumed a lot of classroom time.  I see that happening here with one of the students in our group, and I assume it is a tactic that is designed to reduce the amount of time that this particular student must face uncertainty and uncomfortableness. I will keep this in mind as I teach ELL student in my own classroom.

Pilar's classroom!