Pre-Kinder & First Grade

This is the Pre-Kinder class of 11. Debra, my co-teacher is sitting at the table helping them paint a bears head brown. We have just finished a unit on Our Body and the words were head, arms and legs. The regular teacher is sitting at her desk and a Mother is here to talk. I often see Mother's here to complain about something. I would like to start a volunteer Mother's morning out to help the teachers after the first of the year. They might realize that the teacher has her hands full and maybe "Johnny" isn't the perfect little boy at school or maybe he is.

First grade students.

The last 4 pictures are of the 19 First graders. There unit was on My Home. We learned such words as bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen. We drew all kinds of pictures of each room of their house. We were ready for construction and learned howto build a house. We made doors, windows and many designs of flowers and sun on the outside of our houses. To get the roof put on they had to be able to name the 4 parts of the house we had studied. They got to pick out the roof color and take the house home. Omer was with one of the first grade boys family and grandma was having him tell Omer the parts of the house he knew. So for this week they know the house rooms but what about next week?

Rain & Area Outside Our Apartment

Looking into the apartment through the front door. (Only door)




The cobblestone walkway and rain water drain




My barrel runeth over

Click once on the picture to enlarge to full screen

We have written before about rain here in the rainforest area of Ecuador. It is very difficult to capture rain by camera. This afternoon we had a 30 minute down pour that dumped at least 3 inches on us.
We live in an apartment at the back of an enclosed courtyard. The center of the courtyard has a covered patio that is about 30 by 15 wide. Inside is the washer and drier and a general work and storage area. We walk through the covered patio and on back through a covered but open sidewalk to our apartment.
The roof of the patio captures some of the rainwater and channels it into a large blue plastic rain barrel. This water is a supply that is pumped through a system of pipes and is used for washing clothes, flushing stools, etc.
Very often this rain barrel overflows. There is never any problem with stagnant water. Actually, this system provides soft, fresh water for household use in a very efficient way. By the way, we buy all drinking water in five gallon containers which are delivered to our door for $1.25.

For those of you who live in the midwest, please note that these pictures were taken today (Nov. 29) It is NOT beginning to look a lot like Christmas here.

Refurbished Playground

In this volunteer business there are times when your efforts are never seen and then there are other times when you can see immediate results. The kids went crazy when they found out there merry-go-round worked. You see the results here.

I counted up to 15 kids on this little thing at various times. It was clear that many had to learn how to play on the merry-go-round.

And then there are students that will "mug it up" when they see the camera. Refurbishing the playground renewed student interest in playing there.

We spent two hours in meetings after school today talking about grading systems and using course content to help set standards in grading. For some at the meeting this was totally new information. This story will probably go on for some time.

Rain & More Rain

There is a short supply of gopher wood and Noah has been working overtime! Although it rains a lot here all the time, it has now caused the locals to notice and comment on the rain. We estimate we are getting 3 to 4 inches a day for several days running now. When the sun does come out, we have a new definition of humidity.
There is an off chance we might actually have a complete week of school without interruptions. Our bet is that if it does happen, it will never last for two weeks in a row.
For those of you following the condition of my Dad, last week was a very good week. Then on Saturday there was a sudden turn around. He has been on oxygen and has been in a more weakened condition.

Funny Language Incidents

Language can be a funy thing, especially when vocabulary is limited and you use a word you THINK is close enough. Pronounciation can also be a funny thing. Three examples follw.

Students were giving a 10th grade girl a bad time during the break. I asked what was going on. One student said ¨that girl has a poopy face¨. I was about to let them know that this wasn´t funny when another student said ¨she has a face like a poopy¨. Oh yes, the letter U in Spanish is pronounced as öo¨. That explained the entire thing. ¨Puppy face¨is a little more acceptable.

I was working with a staff member looking at the broken merry-go-round on Friday. Both of us could lift it off the pivot by really straining. He was out of shape even more than I. Right in the middle of lifting it off, he needed a break for just a second. He reached for the only English he had at this moment and said Omer, I need a vacation! I wanted to say¨ok Freddie why don´t you take a week off and I will hold this thing myself¨.

Finally, our landlady told us she has a sister named Funny. About three weeks later it dawned on us that her name was probably Fanny.

School Clean Up Day

We have posted a lot of pictures yesterday and today. remember to click on the picture once if you want the picture enlarged. Hit the "back" button to go back to normal blog reading.
So what do all good educators, parents and kids do on a Saturday morning. Head off to school to clean up the campus. We started off with two dump trucks of sand.


If everyone brings some hand equipment, things can go quickly. This picture gives you an idea of a group at work.

The idea is to take the sand (very coarse) and fill in the washed out places in the playground. With the amount of rain we get, a playground can get in bad shape in a short period of time.

We are surrounded by forest right up to our fence. We need to trim the mountainside outside our fence. The PE teacher is very effective with his equipment.

A view from the balcony of the school.

The campus is reached by a winding road edged into the hillside. Both sides of the road need to be clipped.

Sometimes the going gets very steep. Not the place for rider mowers!!!

Some of the playground equipment needed repair. This old merry-go-round was not working all year. I insisted we take it to a welding shop and get it repaired. Hauling it was another issue.

Getting the merry-go-round back on the pivot was another issue as well. Several of us managed to grease the pivot and get things back together.

With the ever present rain, things are always rusting. This swing pivot had not worked for some time. We used a hammer to un-freeze it and then gave it a good greasing.

Everyone has an opinion about how to line things up. No chance that one person could give directions and the rest follow them!

After the project was finished, we walked down to the main road to catch a bus back to town (A .20 fee) While waiting for the bus "Willie Nelson" came by. I am guessing it was an "American hippie" and his dog who were out riding the highways and byways of Ecuador. What a unique transportation he used.

Hazing and RAIN!

The pictures show the initiation/hazing event from back to the beginning. Student had to go into the jungle just outside the school yard gate. They jumped in a pool of water and got pushed back in repeatedly.


Just as the event was about to come to an end, God sent a huge rainstorm that saved all teachers. This girl is exhausted, but seemed to enjoy the day.

Happy, but totally soaked. You will see some of these girls in fancy dress below. Can't believe they are the same people.

You have to mug it up for the camera as you come out of jungle. They were all good sports and nobody was really taken advantage of.

Another muddy, wet and happy student.

This picture is taken just outside the school fence. We are looking down a very steep "hill" to where all the mud and water events took place.

The younger students walked a part of the way to the "action". As soon as the high school students started to emerge from the jungle, they came running to the top of the hill.

Before the mud and wet, there was a fashion show. Each female inductee had to dress up and do the "catwalk" trip in front of the student body.

Another young student "struts her stuff".

some parents came to watch the show. Didn't see but one or two stick around for the wet and mud thing,

The dress up theme selected by one of the students before changing into a formal gown.

The lead off gal walking in front of the student body.

The event sent the student body into a non-productive mood all day. All of the above events were for three class periods. Again we gave thanks for the appropriately timed down pour of rain. More than two inches of rain fell in about 30 minutes.

Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving, like most things, is what you make it. We made it a long work day. Did the usual school thing, taught a group of teachers English in the late afternoon and met with the senior pastor from 6:10 to 7:30 PM. Ended up with some pretty good home made chicken soup. Can any reader equal that for a Thanksgiving day?

The meeting with the senior pastor regarding needed changes at the school was a very positive meeting. He listened, asked appropriate questions and appeared to be thankful for the information and suggestions in spite of the fact that it obviously gave him a major headache. He will take a week or so to work through the mountain of written information I gave him and will get back to us for the next step in all of this.

Tomorrow we are told that a sort of induction/hazing event will take place for all new high school students and teachers. A sort of obstacle course and other ¨surprises¨will be dealt out. Not sure if I am up for this one or not.

Generalizations About Students

I have been wanting to make some general comments about students and their aproach to studies here. Generalizations like this are often not accurate and of course vary from group to group. OK, I will go out on thin ice.

As compared to American students I have worked with students here are more innocent and friendly. Even if you get on their case, they respond in a few minutes as though nothing has happened. They are indeed a warm and friendly people.
Another side of this picture, much of which appears to be driven by the larger culture can drive a teacher crazy. Major exams are considered ¨group work¨. Copy and give the answer out loud so all can benefit. Cheating as defined in the US is somehow not cheating. It is a way of doing business.
Copying and filling in the blanks IS learning. Memorizing whatever without understanding it is absolutely no problem. If you ask a question that requires problem solving, you as the teacher have failed to make yourself clear.
Parents have a concept of ¨helping¨their children by DOING the homework. We have had cases of parents being very upset because their rather obvious work was not graded higher. We have had to adjust our grading system to give little weight to homework.
Loud is good. Speaking all at once is not a problem. What really gets us is that the local teacher appears to hear several responders at the same time with no trouble. WE are the handicapped people because we can deal with only one respondent at a time.
Reciting in the classroom is something to behold. After a student has said what they need to say, the switch is automatically turned off. They see no importance to paying attention to the next student. Ï did my part and I´m done¨is the attitude.
In a setting like this we struggle to answer the question of ¨what is a good educational environment¨?

That Grading System!

Grading students continues to be a story that bugs us, to say the least. The second set of grades are due for this semester. There are three sets of grades per semester.
Today after school the first set of grades were due. The school has a new software package that basically acts as a recording form, although I understand that the full capabilities of the software includes spreadsheet calculating abilities.
Only one teacher entered grades. The remainder will do them on the standard "tomorrow". I did see teachers working on grades and saw some of the same math violations, taking only two grades for the period and the "dart board" system of grading. I am not sure how we are ever going to get a handle on a uniform SYSTEM.
The weather has finally dried out a bit. We see sunshine and upper 70's this afternoon although it was raining at daybreak.

Church & Meeting People

The new interior of the church holds about 500 people. In the first service today it was full. Not sure how many came to the second service. Really something to watch the faces of people as to how intent they are during the service.

Went to lunch with two families who work at MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship). Both of the men are American pilots that fly into the jungle. One told a story of being captured for a week and had his plane confiscated while working in Suriname (northeast coast of South America) about 20 years ago. An interesting set of events!

Ran into an American Peace Corps worker who has lived out in the jungle for two years working on conservation projects. While he has enjoyed his time here, he is ready to go back to graduate school in another 6 months. Fascinating stories of life in the jungle and the attempt of the Indians to accomodate to the modern world. It is not an encouraging story. Living off the few tourist dollars and trying to make it in the modern world appears to be more difficult than "hunting and gathering" that their ancestors did. So when is one well off?

Earthquake Affects & The week Ahead

The picture above is the only evidence we have of the earthquake affects here. You really don't want to see a picture of the immediate surprise when we were wakened out of a sound sleep.

Had a three hour meeting with the principal and assistant principal and MJ's co-teacher Friday evening regarding our grading system and future approaches to improvement at the school. I have an appointment with the senior pastor this coming Thursday evening. We will see how that one on one meeting goes.

We are in one of the "monsoon moments" again here. Rained all night and until about noon today. Sun has finally appeared. We are getting feedback that the fall chill has settled in from Iowa to Florida. Had to imagine as we have our usual 75 degrees here even with the rain.

We know all of you have a short work week and Thanksgiving on the horizon for Thursday. We will be working as usual including a full day at school, teacher classes in the late afternoon and the meeting with the pastor (we think).

Earthquake!!!!

The last two blog postings were ¨business as usual¨postings. That all came to an end at about 10:10 last night. We woke up to the crashing of breaking glass and some rumbling around outside. MJ jumped out of bed. I stayed laying propped up on my arm. I could have sworen I felt the bed move. Then I felt it again and yet again. In the meanwhile, an attempt to discover what broke was underway.
We discovered a glass jar had fallen from a shelf above the bathroom sink. It struck the sink breaking a part of it off. Going outside, we discovered a huge (20 gallon) metal cooking pot that had been propped along the wall had fallen over and rolled a bit. The son of our landlady came out of their house.
All in all we discovered we felt our first earthquake. The center was located on the Pacific side of Ecuador. The tremmers came all the way through the Andes and shock us up a bit. No damage here to speak of, however. We learned today that the quake center was about 50 miles down in the earth. It was measured at 6.7. This was also the second quake in South America in the last two days. We did not feel the first one at all.
We are assured that these quakes will have little if anything to do with activating the several volcanoes in our part of Ecuador. Hopefully, they know what they are talking about. Also, most people here have felt earthquakes before. Some remembered a broken oil pipeline several years ago in these parts.
For those of you who get on our case to publish more pictures, I will remind you that taking any kind of pictures was the last thing on my mind at 10:10 last night. OK, maybe a picture of a broken sink can be managed in the near future.

Christmas Season?????

Now that we have reached mid-November, Christmas starts to show up in most places. We thought it was a bit of a change to experience Christmas in Florida. Many of the ït is really not Christmas¨shows up even more here. The weather has not changed. The length of days has not changed. Although there are some Christmas trees showing up in some of the shops, it appears the commercialization is much more limited here. First, there are basically no department stores and supermarkets as we know them in the US. We will wait to see what emerges as a Christmas push as we move into December. Yesterday we were told that turkey is very expensive (like $50 for a large one) here and may only be eaten at Christmas. We will see. When they heard our price of turkeys, we had volunteers to come to Florida to eat turkey.

We did have another normal day. That is two in a row! Hopefully, we can finish the week with three in a row. Normal also means that traffic is back to normal after the strike. I don´t know who ¨won¨ in the strike issue.

Teaching Teachers & Grading Students

We are back in the groove teaching teachers English in the late afternoon two days per week. Just had a session a little while ago. We appreciate the fact that the classes have become VERY informal and can concentrate on practical spoken English. We have a lot of joking and laughing. They are at ease in asking most any question. An hour and a half session goes by quickly. Now that they have sort of figured out my öff the wall¨humor, it seems to work better also.

The report including several pages of graphs and charts was presented to the principal today regarding our grading situation. Several teachers have also seen the report. There is universal concern about several things:
1. We do not have a single grading system. It is as though we are working in a number of different schools. Informally, there is agreement that we must work toward a single system.
2. There is little understanding of grading according to a fixed standard
3. We can Not have a system where we give nothing but high grades up through 7th grade and then we start to kill our students with tough grading. Of course this brings parents out with their teeth showing.
We know there will be some very sensitive times ahead on this topic. One teacher even told me ¨God go with you¨as I took the report to the principal.

We had a full and normal day of school today. This is a bit rare lately.

SRIKE! - No School Today

Expecting the unexpected is a good motto for daily living here. Today we were waiting for the bus to go to school when a cook at the school stopped by to explain that due to a strike by transportation workers, the roads in the area were all blocked. Turns out this meant a number of things.
1. Taxi and bus drivers in a nearby community of Shell are not happy that Puyo companies can run buses into Shell, but the reverse is not allowed. The best way to gain equity here is to close the roads and strike.
2. The minister of education closed all schools for the day.
3. Bus drivers and all taxis in Puyo honor the strike. Because a low percentage of people own cars here, this means not much happens in down town Puyo. We walked down town this afternoon and were amazed at how empty the streets are when all buses and taxis are off the road. People were walking like a line of ants to and from the down town.
4. We do not know when this strike will be over, but most people assume that things will be back to normal tomorrow.

Transportation is working like the electricity lately. While normally very reliable, Sunday the power was off for about 10 hours. Last night the power was off for about two hours. No word on the "why" of all of this.

We spent most of today analyzing the student grades for the first grading period. As I assumed, Santa Clause is alive and well. The system is a number system of 20 to 1 with 20 being high. 50% of all grades given are either a 20, 19, or 18. My co-teacher was over for lunch today. Even he was shocked. Since his grading tends to resemble more of a bell-shaped curve, he was not happy as he is now the "bad guy" (the anti-Santa Clause). More on this topic later after we have had a chance to discuss it in staff meetings.

Around Puyo

People have asked a few questions about the area around Puyo. We will attempt to answer these questions in a list

1. Rural "farming" consists of very small plots of land. Fowl, pigs, cows ,etc. are kept in very small numbers. These farms tend to be family run operations and are basically subsistence farming. Something such as sugar cane, bananas, extra chickens or truck farming will provide a little cash for the family.

2. The land immediately around Puyo tends to be a larger flood plain of two rivers which meet and flow through Puyo. Just behind the flood plain, the mountains rise in increasingly higher ranges until way off in the distance you can see the snow-capped peaks. the forest around Puyo has been cleared a number of times. However, not far away the dense jungle begins. This dense jungle is only for those who know what they are doing and not for the casual hiker.

3. Most people in Puyo have been born and raised here. While there is some tendency to migrate to town, it is nothing like the huge migrations to a city like Quito. We do NOT seem to have the "squatter neighborhoods". The indigenous Indian population begins about 20 miles (this varies a lot) outside Puyo.

4. Climate changes a lot in a few miles here. Although we get about 200 inches of rain a year, ten miles away at Mera it is said they have another 20 inches per year. One hour away by mountain highway, it gets much drier very quickly. Of course, one can see the rapid change in vegetation as one travels down the highway.

We were back in a regular day of school today. Kids and teachers haven't seen this schedule since last Tuesday. Tonight we will be doing some statistical analysis of the first grading period. I KNOW we are going to have some questions after this report is done.

A Part Of The Parade

We have posted pictures of parades before. Today we were part of the parade. Three months in the country and already you are part of the picture. There was another school parade celebration and of course our school took part. Shown in this picture is a group of our students when they finished the parade. Any vendor of lemonade worth his juice was set up at the end of the parade.

The parade started at central park. This shot shows only a small part of the hundreds of participants that gathered for the parade.

They leave the simple things to me. Everyone has to feel useful.

Of course every parade brings out the cute kids. I am not sure what this very small girl was doing. She would be too young for school. Maybe mom was just showing her off.

Nine o'clock in the morning is NOT too early for ice cream if you are a little kid. At this age, you can get most of it in your mouth but you also have to wear some.

The vendors of all kinds come out of the woodwork. I am always amazed at how much "stuff" they can carry around. Dozens of different kinds of balloons are always a big hit.

The vendor "kings" are the cotton candy vendors. I count about 50 cotton candy packs on one stick. They walk around with these towers of sugar and of course the little kids have to have some.

We marched for about an hour. This was at a slow pace with plenty of stops. The viewers were about four deep on the sidewalk on both sides of the street all the way around. This culture loves a celebration with a parade. The luck of the organizers is amazing so far this fall. Four parades and no rain. Last night it rained about 7 hours. This late afternoon it is dumping it again. However, during the parade we got a slight sun burn. Just a reminder to those readers in the northern USA, we still have summer here with the usual 75 to 80 degrees.

Rural Kids Day Camp # 2

(Be sure to click on the picture once to enlarge it)
This was the second day of "rural children" day camp. We will comment based on the pictures. a highlight of the day was when we rode the bus to deliver the children home. We never got more than about eight miles from Puyo. The picture above shows a cement bridge we decided NOT to cross with our large bus. The outside duals would have hung off the edge of the bridge. Two teachers got out to examine the situation and decided that if the driver wanted to cross the bridge, they weren't riding. That made the driver decide to turn around.


The place where we turned around was a small house and some out buildings with a few animals and turkeys. This picture gives you an idea of the clearing.

This picture shows "the road not taken". Would have been fun to venture up this one, but the bridge didn't allow.

The rural kids were delightful. They so appreciated the camp facilities. It was obvious that many had not played on a swing and slide much. The large assembly hall and the camp facilities were a thing of awe to many. They thanked us for the day.

Kids represented their individual rural schools in the sports competitions. Great team spirit!!

The large covered facilities were just right for mass team competitions. Notice the forest background.

One quick story. Yesterday a 10 year old boy was watching me on the bus ride home. When I spoke to my co-teacher in English, this kid's eyes locked on me and never left for about thirty minutes. It was truly a "meet the creature" moment for the kid.