Tia?

         My host family calls me Pedro. This is fine with me, since that was what my host family in Ecuador called me. I even have friends in the US who call me Pedro. I'm used to answering to it. Its only an issue when someone from WorldTeach calls my house looking for Peter. The first time it happened, my host brother told the caller that nobody with that name lived at the house.

        While Pedro is fine, the baby (well by now he's a toddler) has begun to call me another nickname, which while far more amusing is also much more confusing. He alternatively calls me either tio (uncle) or tia (aunt). This has only started in the past week and is quite odd. I was confused when he was standing outside my door at 7am yelling for tia (aunt). I had no idea he was calling for me.

       The reason he calls me aunt at times is that he has not quite figured out the difference between aunt and uncle in Spanish. For a couple of months every time he sees my host brother, his uncle, he says, "Tia!" and everyone in the room goes, "Tio!" back at him. The last week or so he has seemed to have figured out the difference. Now I'd say half the time he says Tia and half Tio.

      I also just added pictures to my picasa account for anyone who is interested. They are from Easter Week so they're pretty old, but still some of them came out pretty well.

Living in the shadow of a volcano

             The last couple of weeks or so here in Z-13 have been interesting because Volcano Arenal has been more active. The volcano is not doing much more than sending some more smoke up than usual and making some more noise, but it still adds a new dynamic to living here.
             A few nights ago was especially surreal. I fell asleep early just before 10:00. All of a sudden I woke up to a large booming noise.  As I lay in bed, I was discombobulated and unsure of whether I had imagined the volcano making noise or not. It sounded almost like thunder but without the rumbling and it was not raining, so I figured it had to be the volcano.
            The next day, I asked my host family and they confirmed that I had in fact been woken up by the volcano the night before. They asked me if I had told my parents about the volcano. I think they wondered whether I would tell my family for fear of worrying them. I did debate whether or not to write of the volcano, but it is too much a part of my experience here for me to leave it out. 
              Not to mention the fact that the top of my blog is a picture of lava flowing out of the volcano, so its not exactly a secret.  The entire city is built around tourists who want to see the volcano.  There's some other stuff to do, zip lining and canyoning, but for the most part this town is built around the volcano, jobs-wise if not literally.
             My other experience with the volcano came two days ago at about 5:45. I heard what I thought was thunder and then heard my host brother yelling for me to come look at the volcano. A good sized cloud of smoke was billowing out of the top of the volcano. The smoke was a light gray and was mushrooming out of the top of the volcano.
            When the volcano starts acting up I am particularly grateful to have a host family. There are times when I would prefer to be living alone, but the fact that my host family is taking the volcano's actions for granted is comforting. They have lived in its shadow for years, so they obviously have a better sense of whats normal for the volcano to be doing. I would be way more worried if I had no one to ask whether this is normal.
             I wanted new experiences when I came to Costa Rica and being woken up by a volcano is definitely one of them.

Mental Health Day

            I could use another mental health day like the one I had a week ago. Last week on Wednesday, the school day ended at 10:00 and all of the teachers went to have lunch at a local hotel.  Then we all took part in a few activities intended to improve our mental health.

             The social worker showed a slide show about the negative aspects of stress and how it can affect a person. The slide show said that the three most stressful jobs are firefighter, nurse, and elementary school teacher, so it was important for us to work on lessening our stress levels. The slideshow also listed a bunch of medical issues which can arise from too much stress, including cancer. That struck me since I knew some of the other ones like hypertension, but not cancer. I'll admit to some skepticism at that, but still, lessening stress is importantt.

             Then we did a little bit of yoga, once again confirming that I do not enjoy yoga. After, the psychologist led all of the teachers in a meditation style activity. She asked us all to close our eyes and then she narrated a trip we were to take in our minds. We walked towards a river, then we all turned into birds and flew across the river. We ended up seeing a cavern from the air.

              We turned back into people and opened the door to this cavern underneath a mountain. Inside the cavern was a room which we were all supposed to imagine in whatever way we wanted. The psychologist then gave us all markers, colored pencils, and paint for us to draw our room. Everyone then spent maybe 15 minutes drawing what they had seen.

              The most amusing part for me of the experience was that the trip I just described might not have been the trip the psychologist described at all. While I knew 95% of the words which the psychologist was using, the fact that the entire narration was in Spanish meant that it is quite possible that I ended up somewhere completely different from the other people in the group.

              My suspicion of this only increased when I saw what other people had drawn. I drew a room with all sorts of things I would want in an ideal room, such as a computer, frisbee, bookshelves, basketball, my running sneakers, etc. Other people drew the beach or a river in the middle of a forest. One lady drew her house.

              I considered asking one of the other English teachers where the story had taken them, but I figured that would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Since I enjoyed the place I ended up, I figured it all worked out.

Random happenings

          I don't have much time to write full blog posts today, but here are a few snapshots of the past week or so here in La Fortuna.

         My running has been cut short by the fact that the time when I used to run is now the time every day when it pours. While I can run in rain, the lightning and thunder makes me much less willing to go run. Hopefully I will figure out a way around this. The most obvious solution is for me to wake up earlier in the morning, so I'll see if I can pull do that.

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        Today, I taught static electricity to my 5th graders. For this I brought in some balloons and showed them how the balloons will become attracted to each other if they are rubbed together. I also did the trick of sticking my hair up using the balloons.

        About forty-five minutes before the class started I was in the English classroom with the balloons rubbing them together and on my shirt. I needed to make sure that I could actually pull off the experiments I had planned for the class. Thankfully the only person who walked through the office was one of the fifth grade teachers, so she immediately understood why I was rubbing balloons on my head and did not think I was being really strange.

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        Kinder has been interesting the last couple of days. We have played duck, duck goose for a while every day. While I enjoy playing it with them, at the same time I'm not exactly teaching them much English when they only learn those three words. At least they know the same game in Spanish, so hopefully they can connect duck, duck, goose, with pato, pato, ganzo.

       I've figured out that if I have them stand in a circle and throw a ball to them, I can convince them to talk. That's helped my teaching. I still am not particularly adept at teaching Kinder, but at least they can now say good afternoon, how are you, and I'm fine. We'll start working on "I'm 5 years old," today.

Good cafes

It is possible I've already written some of this, but I don't have time to go back through my posts and figure out if I have, so here goes.  La Fortuna is an odd place to live for me because of the focus of the downtown.  The entire town is built around tourism.  While in the outlying areas they are still some farmers, for the most part tourism is how the majority of the people around here make a living.
          I live in a neighborhood, Z-13, next door to the school I teach at, about 3 km up the main road from La Fortuna.   The neighborhood I live in is Costa Rican (or in places Nicaraguan, since there are many immigrants here) through and through.  This is a sharp contrast to the main road down to La Fortuna, which has hotels and restaurants all along its length aimed at tourists who stop on their way to and from the the volcano.
       One aspect which I have been enjoying of living near such a touristy town is the coffee shops in town.  There are two main ones which I frequent.  One is called Rainforest Cafe, though as far as I know it has no relation to the Rainforest Cafes in the US.  This one has the best iced coffees and the people there are nice and helpful.
       The other one is the Vienna Cafe.  Full disclosure, the owner is dating my host sister, so I know him and am biased towards it, but it is very good.  There brownies are excellent and their coffee quite good.  Both places have fast internet and are good bets if visiting La Fortuna.

New talents

The lack of materials and the need for visual aids when teaching in English to my students has led me to improve my drawing ability.  While I used to be able to draw about as well as the average preschooler, now I am pretty much matching the drawings of my average second graders, which is a notable improvement.

The reason I am writing about this is that today I was teaching the three phases of matter to second graders.  Since the vast majority of the stoves here use gas, I drew a tank of gas connected to a stove on the board next to the word GAS.  My students immediately knew what I had drawn and understood what I was talking about.  Talk about satisfying.  Admittedly, being able to draw a convincing frying pan is not exactly difficult, but it was satisfying giving other failed attempts at drawing I have had here.

I also enjoyed when I asked the students for examples of gas and one of my students pointed to his butt and said, "Gas comes from here" in Spanish.  Since he was quite accurate and not really causing trouble, I just agreed and moved on.  It did show understanding of my teaching, which was good, even if it was not an example I was expecting.

May

So I've made it to May.  I am now basically four months into this experience here in Costa Rica.  I still am not totally sure how to teach my students, but I feel like I am learning from some of my earlier mistakes and hopefully will be able to improve upon previous efforts.

The time comsuming activity which I discovered in the past week has been audiobooks.  I bought the newest Dresden Files audiobook from Itunes and spent the last few days listening to the entire book.  While the book was excellent and the reader very good, it took so much time.  The book was 15 hours long, which is an incredibly long time to be listening to one book.  Especially since the Dresden Files books are not particularly long in and of themselves.  I finished it late last night and it was definitely worth it.

Not much else for me to talk about.   Teaching is still the same and there is not much new to say about that.  Tests are coming up for 1st-3rd grade which will be a test for me also, since I am struggling with trying to figure out how to write a test in English for such young grades.

The school has ideas about what it wants to be, but is not always able to live up to those ideals.  This causes stress because the curriculum which I am supposed to teach and the English levels of my students often do not match.  Well, I will simply write the most accurate test I can to their levels and hope they can do well enough on it.  I really don't want to fail a majority of my 2nd or 3rd grade students.

Thats my challenge for the next couple of weeks here.  The weather is perfect today, not too hot nor too rainy and cold.  I hope it stays this way, since I would like to run later this afternoon.