Culture Day

This past Tuesday was Culture Day at school. There are all sorts of days here such as day of the arts and day of the tree. To celebrate Culture Day, the teachers split into three groups with each in charge of a country: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and the US. Each group prepared a performance, some food and some decorations about each country.

This was probably my favorite one of these civic days so far this year. Independence Day was interesting, but yesterday was much shorter and sweeter. I was put with the group for the US, obviously. I was told I needed to show up in traditional dress for the US. Needless to say, I was stumped by that request. Not only do I only have the regular clothes I brought from the US and I packed light, but what would I have worn? Thankfully in the end it did not matter. I wore normal clothes and no one seemed to mind.

The performance for the US was a country dance sung. Being from Boston I'm certainly no expert on country music or dancing to it, but I thought the two teachers and two students did an excellent job of it. I don't know what country song they danced to, but it was very representative with good lines about hanging out by the river in Georgia somewhere. The dancers all wore cowboy boots and hats and all around it was really good.

Another performance (I think Nicaraguan but I missed the opening explanation) was a fascinating dance/drama where a boy and girl dressed nicely danced together. Then the boy split off, and one by one 4 other students came out dressed as vagabonds with dirty clothes. The girl continued dancing in the middle and from the side the vagabonds came out dancing with her one by one.

Each of the vagabonds had a different temptation. The first had money, the second alcohol, the third cigarettes, and the fourth a knife. She rejected all the temptations and then the boy came back and they together fought off the vagabonds.

All in all a good message. It was really interesting how the younger students enjoyed it because of the slapstick humor involved, while the older students laughed some but also understood what was being said. Hopefully they took it to heart as they go onto high school.

Then a small skit with a teacher narrating was performed in remembrance of the landing of Columbus in 1502 on the coast of what would become Costa Rica. While a little bit of the noble savage stereotype came out, it was certainly a better description of both the negatives and positives than I learned at the same age, which was good. Maybe too many positives, but it was at least not a celebration of Columbus "discovering" the New World.

After that I served the hot dogs and soda which were the US foods. The Nicaraguan food was a figurón, which is a yucca and meat dish. The Costa Rican food was rice pudding, chicken and rice, and empanadas. A good day was had and it was a lot of fun and hopefully the students learned something about all 3 countries and to respect and appreciate the differences.

The only annoyance was the students dressed in indigenous clothing making the standard "Indian war cries," which I did my best to put an end to. Some listened, some did not, but other than that, the day was pretty good.

Couple of things

So I asked my friend about how to say awkward in Spanish and he said "raro" is the word. Depends on the context because it can also mean weird, but yeah, I might be saying que raro a lot more often.   That is definitely one thing I am going to miss when I leave here. The ability to ask people about various things in Spanish and just speaking Spanish in general.

I am going to have to figure out how to keep my Spanish up when I get back to Boston.  I don't want to lose my Spanish. Well, hopefully I can find some people to speak with, maybe I'll just make time to call my Costa Rican friends and work to stay in touch with them.

In other news, teaching about animals and plants is so much easier in English than the human body or energy and matter.  The kids find it more interesting and they already know a lot of words, like for photosynthesis they knew sunlight, air, water, and oxygen, so it was pretty easy to explain.

2 months

I have just about 2 months left here in Costa Rica.  At times it feels like I'll be leaving too soon and there's so much more I still want to do here.  Other times, two months seems like it will last forever.  My main focus for the next couple of months is to make sure that my teaching is as good as it can be.  As the year winds down, I end up not teaching nearly as much as I expect.

As I've started to find my feet here, its slowly becoming more frustrating that I don't actually teach my students.  I'm working on taking each class individually and not letting a given canceled class or bad class throw me off.  I need to remember the moments when my students understand me exactly, not only when they are hopelessly lost and I'm teaching in Spanish.

In other news, I did get sick yesterday and missed a class.  Very frustrating. The silver lining is this is only the second time I've gotten sick and the last time happened 4 months ago.  Knock on wood I'll be healthy the rest of my time here, since I really can't afford to miss any more classes, given that I'm missing the last week of October to finish my TESOL certification.

Other than that, October has been playing games with my head by not raining, but I'm still waiting.  This is supposed to be the rainy season.  I just hope I find the time to run every day.  Tomorrow I hope to wake up early and run, because it rarely rains in the morning here.

Banned Book Week

This post is different from my usual anecdotal and/or introspective posts on my year teaching here in Costa Rica. While that has been the focus of this blog, I have made sure not to imply that I would only write about my time here. I have written about other topics  and will do so more often as my time here winds down and I return to the US.

This is Banned Book Week in the US. In answer to a post by the Rejectionist, I am writing about To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (from this list) . This will not be a review, as Le R called for, but more focused on why To Kill a Mockingbird is important to me and why book banning is misguided at best. I am focusing on one book to keep this post from becoming book length, since I struggle with brevity in my writing, not because any other book deserves to be banned more.

To Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite book that I read in school, from 1st grade through senior year of college. It is also one of my top 5 favorite books of all time. While it is hyperbolic to say I would not be the same person without this book, to say it opened my eyes to a power of fiction I had previously not experienced is simple truth. It makes me incredibly sad that this book might have been banned from being taught¹ at my high school or even from being shelved at my library.

When I was in middle school and high school, I read as a form of pure escapism. I liked it when the novels addressed weighty issues under the surface, but the majority of my reading was science fiction and fantasy novels (SF/F), with an emphasis on fantasy. Within fantasy, I gravitated towards simplistic Good vs. Evil tales. I loved the unimportant youth grows up to be the Good warrior fighting Evil trope, be it Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, or Tamora Pierce's Alanna (not to say these books are simplistic, since these are three series I still reread). This still holds true, but much less than ten years ago. If my local library had a fantasy series, I had read it by the time I was 14.

To Kill a Mockingbird was the opposite of my normal reading choices. It is a "serious" novel, both in its themes and in its literary style. It deals with shades of reality and how people are while also showing the consequences of the character's choices. Furthermore, I was required to read it for school. While I never had an instinctive dislike for reading assigned work in school, I think To Kill a Mockingbird had a lot to do with that. On the surface it is surprising that I would love a book set in the 1930s, in the Deep South, but that's the power of To Kill a Mockingbird (not to mention the assumption that boys won't read books with girl main characters, but that's a whole other post).

To Kill a Mockingbird taught me about a specific time in US history and social justice. I learned about a time in US history often overlooked in school. I also learned the importance of the day to day grind of fighting for equal rights and that disappointments are a part of the struggle, not a reason to stop. The stake which even the poorest white had in a segregated society was eye-opening, as well as the obviously rank injustice which a black man could face in that time (remember, I was 14).

Are these lessons I would have learned without this one book? Undoubtedly, but not as viscerally, not with the immediacy that To Kill a Mockingbird gave these issues, being as sheltered as I was from such concerns. Much of the book I knew intellectually, but not the stakes nor the ordinariness of the people involved.

Sometimes a self-centered middle class white boy needs to read a great book to see beyond the end of his own concerns and angst. That is what is lost when such books are banned. Be it a classic, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, a book about an all boys high school, The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier (thankfully my all-boys high school was nothing like that), or a book I have not read yet, but will, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, a highly regarded YA book about dealing with rape, they are all important and all should be shelved in libraries available to all youth, since book banning is always framed as for the sake of the children.

If parents wants to stop their own child from reading a book, fine, but children age at different rates. Some age faster because they can and some because there are forced to against their will. To deny them the books to deal with and understand life as it is, not as we wish it to be, is a tragedy.

1. On teaching this book. I understand that the depictions of race relations and the language, in particular the n word, used in the book could cause trouble depending on how it is taught or the situation in which it is taught. I can only imagine if this book were taught to immature middle schoolers the damage it could do. My opinions on whether a given book should be taught are not nearly as strong as about book banning, though I value the lessons I learned from To Kill a Mockingbird in school. Heck, I'm more likely to argue for more nonfiction in high school English classes, not about the choices of fiction.

Awkward

One thing I have noticed as my fluency in Spanish has increased is that there are some words/phrases or just feelings which do not exist in Spanish.  Either that, or I do not have the ability to express them the way I wish.  Awkward is the example confounding me now.   Awkward is a word which I use all the time, as do many of my English-speaking friends, both here in Costa Rica and in the States.  Numerous occasions, situations, comments, people (myself included) are at times awkward.

However, I have yet to find a word which even sort of translates into Spanish. Yes, I can feed it into an online Spanish-English dictionary. For instance, wordreference.com spits out for awkward: torpe, poco elegante, and incomodo.  While those work for some cases torpe is clumsy, poco elegante is inelegant, and incomodo is uncomfortable.  None mean awkward in the sense I usually use it.  When I asked my WT volunteer friends last week, they said raro, which works, but really means weird (not to mention just not something Ticos say, ever).

I even tried to ask my host brother last night because we were watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and there was an awkward moment with Ron and Hermione.  End of story, my host brother thought I was crazy and had no idea what I was talking about.  I even narrated a situation, like randomly seeing an ex with her new boyfriend, but nada.  He was like, "It didn't matter? Or you were mad?"  and I was like, "no, argh!!" in frustration.

Because I'm at the point where I can just talk in Spanish without having to stop and translate first, even though I make grammatical errors, it makes it more noticeable.  I'm going along with a story and then awkward pops into my head and my entire thought process grinds to a screeching halt.  I guess I need to just give it up in Spanish.  I'm used to giving up words and phrases (even entire tenses, future tense anyone?) but I guess awkward is harder for me to give up.

I do wonder whether Ticos are way more socially conscious and so have no need to describe anything as awkward. Or do they focus on other aspects of a given interaction and the relative awkwardness simply does not matter?   It's fun to try to make conclusions about why awkward does not exist in CR, but of course I'm most likely wrong.  Eight months does not give one expertise in another culture, it just makes you less clueless.

Also, related, I am good at Spanish, but there are thousands of words and phrases I do not know. Maybe tomorrow I'll find the perfect way of expressing that moment when you try to pass someone on a narrow sidewalk but you both go the same direction and almost bump noses.... and then do it again the other direction. I hope so.

Unfortunately, my Tico friend who is basically fluent in English is not teaching this week or else I would have asked him as research for this blog post.  Next time I have a chance I'll ask him his take on the differences in language (and possibly culture) which causes me such confusion.  I can't wait to ask him.  Is that awkward?

Since this topic probably interests no one but me, I will try to keep any subsequent posts short and sweet!

TESOL course

I just returned to La Fortuna from a week spent at the beach on the Pacific Coast, more specifically Quepos/ Manuel Antonio.  I was there to take the first half of a two week course in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).  As a WorldTeach volunteer, I'm doing the course in two weeks, rather than the normal month.  Second week is the last week in October, so in a month I get to go back.

While, the week was very busy and tiring, being a student was nice for a change.  I also learned a lot of different teaching ideas to incorporate into my lessons.  While the focus was not on teaching English content lessons (such as science), the instructor did have experience teaching ESL students in the US, so we brainstormed some ideas to help me teach better.

Rather than go on about everything I did during the week (eg. I really like grammar now and surfing is just as hard as I always thought it would be) I'll just talk about why yesterday was such a good day.  One thing that has thrown me this year is the amount of time I spend with people who speak English and its one thing I miss most about the US.

Either, like in January during orientation, or Monday- Friday this past week, I'm with people who speak English all the time all day and it can be overwhelming.  Even this past week when it was some of my closest friends in the WorldTeach group, it was still a bit much by the end of the day, from 6 in the morning till 9 or 10 at night with them.

The other extreme is here in Fortuna, where I speak English with one of the other English teachers, but other than that I speak in Spanish to everyone I know around here and will go weeks without speaking in English to anyone except for friends and family on Skype.  I've gotten much more used to that as this year has gone on, which has been a relief and one of the main reasons I am much more comfortable here now than I was 6 months ago.

Back to yesterday. I spent the morning and afternoon happily reading. napping, and drinking way too much delicious coffee by myself (for the most part).  Then, 4 friends and I went out to the all you can eat sushi place in Quepos and spent 3 hours having great food and fun.  The right amount of alone time and time with friends to make a relaxing Saturday. Now I feel recharged to return to teaching tomorrow and improving my Spanish.

Also, my WT friend's post about anonymity and autonomy is really good.  I have similar feelings and she's a better writer than me.  Win win!

Independence Day

I missed Independence Day in the US, but I celebrated Independence Day here in Costa Rica for the past couple of days  Yesterday, September 15 was Independence Day here in Costa Rica.  All sorts of events have been happening for the past week or so, but the important events happened the 14th and 15th.

On the 14th, in a reenactment of the notice of independence for Central America being brought from Guatemala to Costa Rica, a group of students and professors ran about 8 kilometers (5 miles) with a lit torch and the flag of Costa Rica.  About 20 students and 4 teachers began the run and I was one of the teachers running. I even carried the torch for a little bit.

It was somewhat surreal running in the hills around the volcano with a bunch of cars blaring their horns behind us and our police escort blaring his siren  Every few minutes the torch would go out and the principal, who also ran with us, would relight the torch with a box of matches he carried with him. Adding to those stops, occasional stops for water meant that the experience was not a very satisfying run, but it was worth it anyways.

For anyone who became too tired, they were told to jump in one of the cars driving behind the runners.  I'd estimate about half the students and all the teachers made it the entire way.  We arrived at the school after maybe 45 minutes of running with intermittent breaks.  The torch was put in a stand and an honor guard of 4 students stood behind the torch, with different students rotating  in every 15 minutes for the next hour and half.

At 6 pm an assembly of the students and the parents all came with paper lanterns which had been made by the students in various shapes indicative of Costa Rican culture.  I saw a large ship, an oxcart (the Costa Rican symbol of work), and squares with pictures of various Costa Rican symbols (seal, bird, tree, those types of things) on them among many other designs.

These pictures from San Rafael are a good example of what I am talking about.  The paper lanterns (faroles in Spanish) were judged and then everyone walked around Zeta Trece in a little parade.  This was really pretty and impressive and I really enjoyed being able to witness the celebration.

Yesterday, actual Independence Day, was a lot more like the 4th of July in the US, except without any fireworks.  I spent most of the morning carrying a cooler of water to hand out to the members of the Zeta Trece band as they played and marched in the parade. I saw most of the parade, and some of the bands were quite good.  There were also traditional dancers and the best students from the surrounding schools marched with banners.

I managed to get sunburned like a 4th of July parade in the States because yesterday happened to be the hottest and sunniest day in months, even though we're supposed to be entering into the height of the rainy season.   While that was less than ideal, I really enjoyed the entire experience.  So much of this year is hard to appreciate in the moment, only afterwards can I appreciate what I've done and experienced here. This holiday was one of the few moments this year that I am grateful for both in the moment and afterwards.