Classrooms

Teaching here is a completely different feel.  Teachers move classrooms instead of students, the available resources are extremely limited, and there is no AC.  The classrooms are all the same size but can vary from 18-38 students.  They all have assigned desks and chairs so if you want to rearrange the seating, students have to carry their desk and chairs to their newly designated area. Here's an example of a classroom:

You can see the teacher standing talking to students.  The windows are all open because that is the only way air circulates through the room.  The desks are very simple, and yes the students have plastic lawn chairs for seats.  They all have to wear a uniform and the dress code is strictly enforced.  The red ties you see the girls wearing designate their grade level (red is 4th form, which basically means that they are seniors).  The walls are plain and the back wall is actually a divider between the connecting classroom and sound travels very easily through it.  The floor is concrete and provides for a lot of noise when movement is required.  Almost all of the students have a bottle of water present with them since it is usually around 85-90 degrees.  At another angle you can see the board that the teacher have to use.  They have a plain blackboard with white chalk to write with.  While there is not much to use, the teachers do not complain and the students are not bothered by anything in the classroom. We rely heavily on electronics and handouts while here they do not even have luxuries like air conditioning.  The most impressive things about the school is the students.  They do not complain and they all seem to want to learn everyday.  They enjoy the lessons and are active in class discussions.  Everyday there is a genuine greeting for their teachers and sit to do their work when asked.

Perceptions

While teaching in the classroom, I have not noticed disabilities.  The students all get along and there is no calling out based on differences.  This makes me believe that there is good inclusion of everyone in the school.  While this is an important topic for school, I have seen more inclusion of people with disabilities in the community.  Everyone on the island treats each other equally.  Everyone is treated the same and there is no blocking out of someone based on a disability they may have.  This seems to be a cultural thing in the area because everyone is extremely upbeat, relaxed, and happy.  One such individual in the community is a local painter named Kurt.  He is partially paralyzed but he enjoys his days painting outside a shop and people come and talk to him just to enjoy his conversation.

Teaching Strategies

While teaching in Belize I have noticed that there are not many things done to help students that may have difficulty in class.  I see a lot of distracted students and the teachers seem to just let them sit there and not work.  In my 2A class I have seen this quite a bit.  In order to help this issue I have started to co-teach with my placement teacher.  I thought that this might keep the students focused since there is more than one person to listen to and the teacher that is not teaching can help students if they need it.  After doing this for three straight days I have noticed that the students are having a better time in class and are paying more attention.  This has also helped me out because it proves to be more fun for everyone in the class.

Zoo day

First off, I apologize for the previous post.  For some reason it messed up and I can't fix it, so the order of the blogs is now off and the text doesn't match up with the pics, but you can figure it out.

Now, on our last day inland we left the place we were staying at 9am.  I had heard that some people in the group had gone to this iguana place the previous day, and since I love lizards so much, I had to go.  And I am glad I did.  I walk to this resort at 7:50am and start the tour at 8am.  I get a brief intro and we head into the iguana area.  I see a buch of rather large iguanas and start snapping pics.

This guy's name is Gomes.  He was a fun iguana and also the biggest in the reserve.

He was very calm, cold, and people friendly.




The guy leading the tour decided to show me exactly how friendly Gomes and the other large iguana are.

Just when I thought I couldn't be happier, we head to the baby iguana area.  These little guys were still very green and young and were perfectly fine around people.  Since they were all comfortable around people, the guide decided to have some fun with me.

He starts by putting some of the smaller ones on my hand to hold and I snap some shots with my free hand (thanks to Colin for letting me use his camera).



The guide then gets a little lizard happy and starts sticking them all over my torso.  In the pic on the right I've got those 4 on me plus the ones in my hand.

He then goes a little overboard:

I think there are about 20-25 iguanas on me at this point (there were a couple on my back) and I couldn't be happier.  This set up the rest of my day perfectly.

Once we left San Ignacio, we headed to the belize zoo.  At the entrance there was a sign where you could buy passes for "encounters" with some of the animals.  One of which was the jaguar, so naturally I had to do it.  Five of us split the cost ($10 U.S. per person) and went straight to the jaguar cage.  Here is what we saw:
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In case you couldn't tell what was happening when I'm laughing and you can't see the jaguar's mouth at the end of the video, this is what was happening:

This wonderful shot (taken by Colin) made my day.

After the jaguar we continued around the zoo checking out the different animals.  Here's a shortened version of some of the cooler/funnier moments.
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2nd Excursion

On Wednesday we went to a caving/museum place called ATM (Actun Tunichil Muknal).  We had to hike a bit to it, which was fun.  We had to cross a river 3 times to get to it and we had a camera happy guide named Martin. 

We trekked through the woods and into the river wearing all of our clothes (including shoes, which my purple high top adidas retain a ridiculous amount of water).  

After a good hike we come up to the main camp part before we get to the cave and I see one of my favorite things:

After getting the pic of the lizard we head to the entrance of the cave we're going into (hence the helmet attached to me in the pic above the lizard).  

We get there and see an amazing entrance to the cave. 

We go into the mouth and swim around a bit, do some jumping into the water off a formation in the cave. From here some of us follow a new guide, Emil, who's been doing this tour for 11 years, so we feel we're in good hands.  We head into the cave and do some squeezing and climbing and walking and get to an area that is a in location museum.  In this area are old Mayan artifacts from well over a thousand years ago. 

These pots are still very well preserved and were broken by the Mayans for ceremonial purposes.

The picture to the right is of a skull of what is believed to be a human sacrifice.

Below is an almost complete skeleton of another sacrifice that is found at the very end of the tour.

After this we head back to the entrance, taking a different route than the one we took in that included some more difficult climbing, but it was a lot of fun.  This tour cemented a decision to go to a more intense cave that our guide, Diego, talked about at Caracol.  

Crystal Cave

So, after the ATM tour myself and 3 other interns went to Crystal Cave with our guide from Tuesday.  We hiked up a bit to the entrance of the cave and then Diego went to work in setting up our anchor to rappel into the cave.  I of course decide to film the entrance (you'll see that in a second) and Colin decided to take some pictures of me since they said I looked like I was going to play basketball.

You can't really tell how intense the mouth of this cave is in these pictures but the videos will.  In the video is a series of clips that include our guide rappelling into the cave, a small "room" we climbed down into, shots of the various formations throughout the cave, including the farthest part of it, and a little special clip at the end.
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On the next blog: ANIMALS!

Belizean Culture

As I've been meandering around Belize, I've taken notice to some of the cultural aspects that are seen often.  Almost everywhere I've been music has been present and they are very active in festivities.  Also, the entire town of San Pedro shut down during Easter.  Many businesses were closed during the day and it became a little difficult to locate food during breakfast and lunch.  The entire town is religious and everyone follows, what I assume, are the standard religious practices during this time, which is very different from the U.S.  There is also a large emphasis put on enjoying oneself with others around.  This includes dancing in the street, eating with others and having a good time.  This is interesting to see and it ties in very well with seeing how the students are.  While they do have a religious backing at home, they clearly like to be out and about and doing things with others whenever they can.  They'll meet up for meals at any point in the day and they do everything from playing soccer and volleyball to having dance parties in the street.  This should help me with working with the students.

Service Project

While in San Pedro, we're working on a service project.  We all worked with some elementary aged kids at a day camp during the easter break.  We also walked some dogs at the local humain society.  While everyone has their personal projects, writing children's books and what not, I think I got really lucky with mine.  I met some students who have an interest in dance and they asked if I could mentor them so I've been talking dance and helping some students learn choreography and helping them with their free-styling.  While it's been fun, I've found something out about the mindset of the students.  We set up many meet up times and days and so far I've talked with them at one meeting and danced in one other.  They miss designated meet up times, show up late, leave for a little bit and come back.  There is little importance given to time and meetings.  While it's hard now, it should be easier once school starts and see them everyday.  It'll be fun and the end project we have in mind should be awesome, so look out for that.

First Inland Excursion

So this past week we went inland to San Ignacio.  We had an interesting ride in, using a water taxi and then a bus nicknamed the "chicken bus."  Monday was mostly a travel day but we did went into the interesting parts on Tuesday.

We took a van ride to Caracol, which is a Mayan site.  We had an awesome guide named Diego, and here's a brief video of him explaining an aspect of the ruins:
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We walked around and checked out the various ruins.  On the way to the main area, we ran into these guys:

These howler monkeys stayed quiet the whole time but they were moving around and watching us intently.  As soon as we walked away from the monkeys, this is what we saw:

This ruin was pretty large, but the biggest one was across from it and here's the video of me climbing up it: <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/RUXNSF28Soc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The view from the top was amazing.



The panoramic view was even better:












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And of course I can't go anywhere without eating something weird.  Our guide found a termite nest and taught us how to get them,
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Believe it or not, they were really good.  Had a good minty taste.

After the ruins we went to a waterfall and did some cliff jumping.

We did some swimming to the waterfall and were jumping off the sides into the pool near the waterfall.  It was a lot of fun.  This day was awesome but we had a lot of fun on Wednesday as well.

With these blogs I have specified responses I have to write about. The first one is "What were you unprepared to handle in your assigned classroom and how did you respond? What strategies did you use to figure out what you needed to do?"  Since I went inland with my class in our first week, my experience was a little more different.  The biggest thing I came into was having met my teacher the day before and not have met any of the students.  Getting to know them was the main issue I had with my first week in class.  Since it was a field trip and not a classroom setting, everyone was far more relaxed and were having fun with their friends.  I wanted to try to start talking with the students and get to know them but all of them were speaking creole.  This barrier took me a while to catch up on, but eventually I was able to understand what they were saying.  I wasn't able to start making connections with them until the first night when we were all relaxing.  After spending time with a few of the students some would come and talk to me during the second day which opened up the other students was well.  The second night is when I got to know a lot of the students better.  We had to stay in cabins and my teacher and I stayed in one with six or seven students.  We had fun talking, it helped that the teacher was there, and then we went up for dinner.  It was after dinner when they started playing music and since I had told a couple of students that I danced, they demanded proof.  I started dancing and the students got really excited and started to have fun with me.  I spent the rest of the night talking with students and it continued the next day.  I also met a student that initiated an idea for my service project while I'm down here.  More on that later.

This week is our first week in the schools.  While everyone else in the group is going to the schools, I'm lucky enough to join my partner teacher on a field trip to mainland Belize.  The trip is for the senior students who are taking the business track in school.  All of the students are in the spanish class that my partner teacher has so it's a great opportunity to get to know the students.  The first place we stop at is a citrus production factory where the students take a tour.










The students had fun but the best part for me was hanging in the waiting area for other students to go on their tour (only 10 could go at a time and there were 39 students).  They started doing beat circles on the table and this is what it looked like:
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The students had a lot of fun and the man in the pinkish shirt is my partner teacher.  This went on for quite a while but it was all fun.
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After this trip we went to a hot sauce factory called Marie Sharp's.  We took a tour and the students learned about how it was made and the export process.  Here's of the peppers they use:

This was the last leg of the first day and we went at a nice place to stay for the night.  The next day we checked out another hot sauce factory as well as a dairy processing plant.  That night was a lot of fun as I got to know a lot of the students.  There was karaoke and a dance circle (in which I did do some dancing, the students liked that a lot). We spent the rest of the night scaring other students and having fun.  I got to experience a ton of culture while in the mainland and met a student that is interested in dancing and I plan to meet with him to help with his stuff.  The students were great and I can't wait to help in the classroom.

See the school

After getting used to the island we got to check out the school that I will be working at.  It's a nice spot with an open air auditorium and a bunch of classrooms (without airconditioning).  Here's a quick look at it:

The area is quite nice.  It's right on the beach, close to some little shops and even has it's own little cantina right near the auditorium (which you can see the bleachers of on the far right of the pic).  There is one main school building (on the left) where most of the classes are held and a smaller building toward the back with another 4 or 5 classrooms.  Everyone was extremely friendly and happy to see us.




It also happened that the day we came by was the schools Open Day.  What this consists of is many of the students showing off their different projects that they had made.  There were various chemistry projects (most of which included the use of fire, some with projectiles), physics projects, building projects, business models, and many others.  One of the more interesting ones was a pressure gun that a student had made using piping.  He would use a bike pump to build the pressure in the gun and then had a challenge that if you shot the target you would win $3 Belize ($1.50 U.S.), with a $1 Belize buy in.  One of my fellow UNCW student teachers gave it a try:
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The open day was a lot of fun.  I'm looking forward to meeting my teacher and the students soon.

First Days in Belize

After a day of travel, I arrive in Belize about 1pm local time (3pm East Coast).  I hop on a little puddle jumper and fly from Belize City to San Pedro.  As I climb into the seat directly behind the pilot (I could have tapped him on the shoulder), I see this:

So I'm feeling really good about this trip at this point.  The scenery is beautiful and the plane ride was a lot of fun.  We touch down and I grab a cab with another person that arrived with me from our group.  We pull up to the place in which we'll be staying for quite awhile. Not too shabby.

We stay in a hostel like area and the owner of the place is awesome.  He's a fun guy to talk to and he's quite the character. While it looks fun, we're already starting to work on the stuff we have to. Luckily, as you can see with Colin, we get to do our work right next to the pool.

We also have some visitors at the hostel on our first day.

The next spot we go to on the island is the High School.  This and more on the next post.

(Here's a quick video of what we see more than once a day walking around belize.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVRJwVm5f0M&list=UUzDPi8VhiibqV09rV5Y8MzQ&index=2&feature=plcp