Student teacher afield

Homeward bound

2007-07-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

On the move

2007-07-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

Santa Fe, Venezuela - A fishing town six hours east of Caracas on the Carribean coast. Boats head back to shore midmorning each day, riding low (nearly at water level) laden with loads of sardines (to be shipped in refrigerated trucks to the other side of the country and canned), groupers, dorados, barracuda. This picture is in front of my posada - my office for the past week . . .

Prior to beaching it, I´ve spent some time in Los Lllanos, a region draining the eastside of the Andes. Think Texas meeting Florida. This is a picture of me with a pirhana that I caught while there. Moments after taking this shot, the pirhana bit a chunk of flesh out of my finger. I got the last laugh, however, frying it up for dinner.

Chavez is a lover, not a hater. El Libertador. Notwithstanding the dozens of submarines and fighter jets recently purchased.

Walking in the North Andes. Didn´t see a soul this entire day, except for a riderless horse walking the opposite direction down the trail.

A new set of tracks

2007-06-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

My time in Argentina is coming to a close - I fly out tonight. Student teaching has been a wild ride and each schoolday here has felt packed with opportunities to observe, question, and learn about this whole teaching business. I am excited to point my wagon towards Venezuela - we will see what adventures await me there. Saludos y hasta lluego.

Futbol at La Cancha

2007-05-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

Saw a terrific soccer match this sunday - River Plate v Estudiantes. A sunny afternoon, drinking coca-cola and eating superpanchos, what a day. Baseball games are great but soccer is a million times better I must say. The action is buzzer-to-buzzer, the game is right there in front of you; a high class of play, oh boy. Scoreless the whole game on account of stellar goalkeeping. At the end, however, the visiting Estudiantes snuck a goal in, during the final minute of stoppage time (overtime). The audience was stunned, silent.
The visiting team is kept in a barbed-wire enclosure on the opposite side of the field as the hometeam superfans (Read: hooligans). During the course of the game, fans exchange chants and songs across the stadium. No-one could leave the stadium until the visiting fans left. The knifing of two River fans (by other River fans) in the soccer clubhouse a few weeks ago, combined with the arrest of 30 fans at a previous match means that this stadium is suspended from holding games for the next few weeks.
Even with a scandalous last-minute loss, folks were pretty jovial after the game. There was a clash with riot police on the way out, but there was kind of this "boys-will-be-boys" attitude by the people looking on. The police looked a bit more concerned.

Feeling testy

2007-05-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

I love tests. They are such a precise, effective way to see what students know. I'm working on getting my in-class discussions and questioning strategies to emulate the sleek and calculated nature of a well crafted quiz, test or quest (quiz+test). All kids have an innate respect or fear of these instruments and it seems like a great way to hold students accountable for what we're doing in class. Maybe combining these with more pre-assessing would take the edge off the dread of test-time.
A couple classes are finishing week-long projects and these are awesome for the same reason. It's like having a long conversation with a student about what we've just been studying. It's hard to have this same dialogue in real-time, especially with time limitations and class sizes.

Las casas

2007-05-06T13:12:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I got my hands on a bike and have been cruising the neighborhoods. Many of the houses in this well-to-do 'hood are really swanky and grand but there's some really clever architecture around too, engineering hobbity little homes and smart living spaces.
Here's some photo's of the the casitas that I came across this morning. What a glorious Sunday!

Everybody was out today, walking, biking, rollerblading, brunching on sunny patios.

It is hard to get the mind around the fact that this city has just enjoyed their Summer and this season leads to the winter, rather than the Spring that is eventually leading to Summer in the Pac NW.

Industria Argentina pt 2

2007-04-30T18:06:00.000-07:00

In this corner of the Buenos Aires provence, space is a precious commodity. Existing tracts of non-urbanized and non-used land is rare. This weekend I went up to the Delta region north of the city, where rivers drain the center of the continent and flow out into the Atlantic. I was stumbled upon an industrial district that specializes in furniture manufacturing. This section is grouped into a worker's cooperative: Los Mimbreros cooperativa de productores. 200 different business and artisans have agreed to jointly manage a section of forest in the Delta region, for the benefit of these workers and the forest from which they earn a living. This place was bustling on a Sunday, packed with eager buyers from the city. Argentines take a lot of pride in the quality and quantity of their goods that come from their country. These wares included rocking chairs, dining tables, armoires, all sorts of furnishings of wicker, wood, reeds, and more. Boats were out on the water, families and friends out enjoying a parilla, a beautiful fall day. For more info on the cooperative, here's their web address, in espanol: http://www.losmimbreros.com.ar/.

Industria Argentina

2007-04-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

Argentina is a net exporter of energy, selling natural gas from the north part of the country to surrounding nations. They import a good deal of oil from Venezuela, of course, and buy a little bit of coal from S. Africa, Australia, and the US. After fossil fuels, their next source of energy is hydropower, which supplies about 10% of the nation's power needs. They also have two nuclear plants that round out the energy portfolio.
Also, regarding energy, they and Brazil are the world's top exporters of soybeans, eclipsign the US which is shifting towards corn (like we don't have enough corn) to meet growing ethanol thirst. This is putting these two countries in the south into an interesting position: growing soy was motivated by a market that wanted soy. With the bum rush into the BioFuels industry, both countries have huge amounts of arable land, in addition to existing soy fields that could be converted. Growing corn or sugar cane is yet another cash crop that will undoubtedly have eager buyers abroad.

The nuts and bolts

2007-04-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

School is out in less than two months. This must be the thought, along with "class is out in 36 minutes" that reverberates in the heads of the seniors sitting in my class every other afternoon. We're talking about ecological footprints, global climate change, carbon cycling, plodding through discussions I've carefully planned out but I'm coming to terms with where my students are often at. I'm finding that Argentine students aren't all that different than Washington students in this regard. In fact, concerning the discussions above, I'm finding that kids and adults of virtually any developed/industrialized nations come from similar households.

The backdrop of these private-school attendee's lives is varied. Our conversation today included stories of life in the Dominican Republic, where "to get from one place to another people walk and those who can, drive." Argentina has a similar collection of have's, many of whom attend my school, and have-not's, often living nearly shoulder to shoulder. It's hard to gauge how 17-year-old's are registering their experiences living in multiple countries and seeing these contrasts.

Here's a collection of pictures I've taken around the city. I'm hoping to float over to Uruguay in the next couple weeks so check it out for updates: http://picasaweb.google.com/diggitydow/AboutTown

I'll be dissecting fetal pigs with Adv Bio students saturday, but I don't expect to be posting photo's of this. Eesh.

Criteria

2007-04-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

Just wrapped up a whirlwind enviroscience class. I had a sweet hour-and-a-half planned that went off pretty well but I didn't really take into account the squirrely-nature of a last class of the day on a Friday. I am realizing how important it is to set out criteria or expectations prior to asking students to do something. Otherwise, things can go all over the place, or nowhere at all.

This enviroscience class is great - lots of room to integrate many different topics. Today, for example, we talked about how electricity works, the way dams generate electricity, and where Argentina gets it's energy from. This segued into a resource consumption activity students did based upon things they use. I'm trying to make this stuff relevant to them, a challenge given that there are seven different countries represented in my classroom. As members of developed nations, however, I think they have as much in common as a student from Washington and one from Maryland, for example.

When I'm teaching, I feel like I can tell students what I think they need to know, but that they aren't really listening or thinking about what I'm saying unless I can create opportunities for them to experience or find an answer themself. At the same time, time is limited and it is much easier to dispense information. Also, letting students explore (today students discovered how to light a light bulb with a battery) is lots of fun but it is hard to keep them on task.

The weekend is here. Will be doing some lesson planning on Saturday and paintballing with some departing teachers on Sunday. Yee-Haw!!!

Momentum

2007-04-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

If I were to describe teenagers in terms of mechanical physics, I'd say that a group of them have greater mass than a single one. This greater mass translates into greater inertia - teenagers at rest tend to stay at rest, more so than a lone youth. This was demonstrated this afternoon as the environmental science class was rounding up paper and plastic recycling throughout the school. Jeez! You'd think I was asking for them to do it while singing karaoke naked through the halls, carrying 100 lb saddlebags. Once the ball started rolling, however, it got better but there certainly was some guilt-tripping involved ("Fine, I guess I'll go do this by myself then . . ."). So it goes.
In the kids defense, it is humid and hot today, weird for a Buenos Aires Autumn. I think an afternoon thunderstorm is imminent.
At this point, I have the benefit of watching three teachers at work: two Americans (bio and chem) and an Argentine (physical sci and physics). There is so much to learn via observation and experience. Gotta go to a teacher meeting.

en domingos

2007-04-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

Sunday was a quintessentially Latin/Buenos Aires day - a crosstown futbol rivalry in the afternoon and a Verdi opera in the evening. Firstly, the Boca Juniors vs. River Plate played a qualifying match for the Copa Libertadores tourney. Every time these two teams play it's like the world series: cafes, bars, restaurants, ice cream parlors - any place with a TV has dozens of portenos huddled around it. I sat at a cafe in the city center to watch the game, or what could be seen in my 1 ft x 1 ft line-of-sight. This is kind of like the Red Sox and Yankee's; folks say these games bring out class rivalries but I found it hard to predict who might be a River fan and who roots for Boca: River Plate used to have a stadium in the Boca neighborhood, well-to-do's root for Boca, there isn't necessarily a rhyme or reason to it.. What seems to be consistent, however, is that if you come from a Boca family, you root for Boca, same going for River. It was an exhausting, scrappy match ending 1-1, no overtime. One last note on the soccer: I learned today that Latin America draws out it's World Cup selection process over two years (most other countries take less than a month to qualify teams) so there's sure to be some good national games between here and South Africa 2010.

I had to stay till the end of the game, thus showing up at the opera house late. I was shown a temporary seat till the set break, or intermission I guess it is called. What an enchanting evening! The voices of the performers filled the hall, all five floors of it. The sets and costumes incredible, simple yet effectively transporting players and audience to 16th Century Europe. Intermission left me rubbing elbows with the B.A. elite set, or at least older folks with sharp-looking suits, pearls, and talk-of-the-town scene-stering. Following intermission, I sat closer to the stage and was whisked away again for the last hour. The show ended and the audience ushered out into a warm, gentle Fall evening in the city.

Newborn driving

2007-04-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

The first week of student teaching is in the books and another is about to begin. Being back in front of the classroom is awesome. After two years of being a student again, I feel like a 15-year old behind the wheel of a car. The clutch is kind of sticky, the car lurches forward, stalls, gains speed. It is a familiar feeling working with the youth, humbling, but I now appreciate the breadth of what I've been learning over the past 1 1/2 years in the MIT program. I wish there was a way to integrate these two parts of the grad program experience, to be doing both at the same time. Trying to employ cutting-edge teaching strategies with a group of live teenagers is the best truth serum of "I understand how to use this technique"or "this technique really does/doesn't work well", etc.
Right now I'm planning the next month of instruction for an Intro Bio class and an Enviro Science class. In longer-term planning, it's difficult and time-consuming to figure out is where to begin and what to include/exclude. Having both quality teaching standards and a good curriculum in place is key. A big part of my work right now is trying to sequence each day such that what students are learning fits into a bigger, cohesive picture that adds successive layers of complexity to the understandings the kids are picking up. In this case, I'm using National Science Education Standards (NSES) and AAAS benchmarks. I'm using the existing textbook to help put these in order, but textbooks or longer-term curricula organized around these teaching standards would make life easier for everyone. These LP's and calendar are taking a lot of time to put together.

Carnes

2007-04-15T06:41:00.000-07:00

I had my first milanesa in the city center yesterday. Milanesa is a thin cut of beef, and this one was breaded and filled the plate, hanging over both sides! i haven't visited the meat houses (parilla) or meat buffets (tenedor libre) yet. i actually do a lot of cooking during the week. i've been baking breads, buying fresh pastas, cheeses, meats. In my neighborhood there are a half dozen butchers, cheese and wine vendors, and a couple bakeries (panaderias). Salamis, olives, vegetables, most basic ingredients are from around here. Argentina (and buenos aires) takes a lot of pride in locally-made or nationally-made foods and other goods. Juxtapose this with the spreading of big supermercados like Jumbo, Wal Mart, and Norte, and you can see this country is in flux. I don't know how much the neighborhood grocers and bigger stores compete - younger people could be choosing the latter and older generation choosing former, it's hard saying. All I can say at this point is that I am eating really well.

Llegadas - Arrivals

2007-04-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

It is a balmy breeze that blows through my first afternoon in Buenos Aires. I arrived this morning and have settled into my new home for the next three months. I'm excited and anxious to begin student teaching tomorrow. it seems like a long ways between beginning the teaching program at Western and being here today. Not exactly sure what to expect tomorrow but I do know that I will be teaching science to 9th and 10th grade students, 80% of whom are from all over the world. Many unanswered questions thus far:
- What are these students ideas of home? Most are children of diplomats and embassy employees, moving every few years. Do they have a sense of place, of a familiar community? How different is this than the transitory nature of students and their familes living in the States?
- What will be my sense of place through this experience? Without a firm idea of where I'm at (which is not the Pac NW) how can I effectively teach a science class informed by ideas of the connectedness of natural and human systems when I'm not sure of these communities myself?
- Signs, signs everywhere signs...Walmart, Sony, Maytag . . . how do portenos (BA citizens) and my students see globalization affecting their lives? Their quality of life?
Vamos a ver . . . Highlights of the last 24 hours of travel include watching "Freedom Writers" on the plane flight and a cup of scalding hot coffee spilt directly into my lap upon landing at the airport. I spent a lovely afternoon in a park down the street among families drinking mate and windsurfers in the Mar de Plata. Hasta lluego, I'm off to an asada.