The rest of the week

Well, we we last left things, I was very frustrated with the training for school this year. But that was three days ago, and things have gotten better each day. The organization has increased significantly each day, and I think we will be mostly ready for school to start on Monday.
I don't really remember what we did on Wednesday, except that it mostly had us all sitting in one of the classrooms in really small chairs and talking about stuff. The really small chairs actually give you a really great leg workout because you either have your legs bent and tensed (working your muscles) or stuck out and stretching. But I digress.
We finished about 1pm on Wednesday, which was nice because it meant that Slocomb and I could go downtown and do some stuff. I have some pictures that I want to print out for the staff lounge (the flowers of the home states of the international team as well as a rose for Ecuador), so we went in search of a photo shop. The first place we went couldn't read my 4GB memory card, and when we arrived at the second place, we discovered that I'd saved the pictures in the wrong format so they wouldn't print. So I'm still working on the pictures. We also went to the post office so I could mail a few things to the US. Unfortunately, it costs $2 to send something to the US (about as much as you should pay for a quick lunch in Cuenca). So I won't be sending tons of letters and postcards, sorry.
We had pizza for dinner at a place called La Fornace, which offered a personal pizza, soda, and ice cream for $4 (the same as I spent at the post office, urrg). It was actually really good pizza, but next time we go, I'm going to get plain cheese. The sauce reminds me of pizza sauce in England, so I want to be able to taste it next time. After dinner we went over to Jenn, Livia, and Erin's place (they live in a big house in downtown that has about 8 rented bedrooms on one side and the family still living on the other side). We just hung around and chatted for a little while before Slocomb had to come home for his fantasy football draft. I didn't complan, because this whole getting up at 7 or earlier thing is really a bummer.
Thursday we were back at the school (in the little bitty chairs) for another day. Our topic for Thursday was the special needs students at the school and how to design lessons to include them, etc. We had several interesting discussions. In the morning, we broke into two groups, national teachers in one and international teachers in the other, with two of the special needs teachers in each group. We talked about how to make sure that both the special needs and regular students get what they need and whether or not a completely inclusive classroom meets everyone's needs. I'm currently of the opinion that inclusivity should be balanced with individual therapy so that the special needs students can fully learn the skills they need (in therapy) and also have the opportunity and need to use them (in the classroom). But I'm completely a beginner at this, so don't take my ideas for much.
In the afternoon, we went outside because they were working on the roof in our classroom and continued the discussion about special needs pedagogy. We broke up into our groups again and talked about the practical matters of inclusivity at CEDEI school. It was a little frustrating because there were only three people in our group of eight who had worked at the school before, so we weren't really able to evaluate how the school is doing. Once we got back together into the big group of all of the teachers, we had a really interesting discussion about difference in Cuenca society. The national teachers (actually about 4 of them) did most of the talking, so it was almost exclusively in Spanish. For me, it was really cool because I was able to follow and take a lot from the conversation, even though I definitely didn't understand all of it. One of the first discoveries that we made was that there is no neutral way to say "different" in Spanish. When you say "differente," it always implies either better or worse than. Different often has a negative connotation in English, but it is possible to say, its just different without making a value judgment. Not so in Spanish. Which makes it a lot more difficult for a group of people to talk about their differences.
Our second discovery (at least for the international team; I think most of the national team knew this already even if they hadn't really ever talked about is) was that Cuenca is a very conservative and traditional city. People here often spend their entire lives in Cuenca, and the social hierarchy in which people will live their whole lives is well defined. This means that a school like CEDEI school which emphasizes difference, both in nationality and in, lets say, ability, goes against the grain to a great degree. Not that Cuenca is hostile to CEDEI school, but it is something that people don't understand and don't really want to understand.
The last thing we did on Thursday was to design a mock lesson plan including the special needs students. I was in a group with Pris, Gladis, and Jonatan, and Pris is the only one who speaks any English at all. It was quite interesting for me (and my bad Spanish skills) to try to work with this group, but it turned out really well. We designed an English lesson about identifying fruits. We thought that it would be really fun to incorporate some of the blind students by having the entire lesson based on the other senses besides sight. We would have the children be able to feel, smell, and taste the fruits, learn the English names in the process, and have a quiz based on the names and the senses at the end. We did work very slowly, and my ipod translator came in very handy, but we designed a cool lesson despite the language barrier.
Today was a much more practical day. We laid out the entire school year's monthly themes, cultural events at the school, found out when the holidays were (not nearly enough!!), and decided on some of the field trips. It took about 3 and a half hours, but we got through it finally. It was actually really fun to work together, and the language barrier wasn't actually a huge problem. There were a couple of times where the national teachers went off on a tangent, giggling and yelling and carrying on, but then the international teachers did our share of distraction as well. We're not really at the point where we can have jokes and tons of laughter as a whole staff yet, but I think that's primarily because several of the international teachers (myself included) don't really have a sense of humor in Spanish yet.
This afternoon we got into setting up classrooms for Monday. I worked mainly with Tami and Vero, the two preschool teachers, and we cleaned and arranged furniture mainly. Tomorrow we are all coming in to do more decorating, but hopefully we can get things squared away in the morning so we can all have a Saturday afternoon.
Some things are still really frustrating about school, like the fact that none of the international teachers have books yet, but things are definitely much better than they were at the beginning of the week. I guess I should mention that the international team is only observing for the first week, so we have a little bit longer to get ready before beginning our own lessons week after next. Its going to be busy, and I'm going to have to go out of my way to use Spanish since I can't speak Spanish at school, but I think its going to shape up to be a really fun school year.