Wednesday Activities

We did not have school on Wednesday. The students performed a flag pledge marching program in the afternoon with all the pom and circumstance that this culture can muster which is substantial. The above picture shows a bit about this ceremony.

The teachers spent the morning hammering out a mission and vision statement for the school. This is new activity for them. We were very pleased with the process. Sharp disagreements were evident about the wording of both documents. To be able to separate issues from people in this culture is remarkable. We believe they now understand why it is so important that the staff go through the frustrations of creating these documents. Ownership was clearly evident at the conclusion of the session. Moreover, I think it was evident that they actually enjoyed the process.

The staff will conclude the discipline policy for the school at their next meeting next week. This has been an 8 hour process so far. We will next tackle some basics in setting academic standards. So, some progress here!

We look forward to the arrival of Nathan and Tiffany Miller from Moline, IL tomorrow afternoon. We will be doing some local touring and so there may be some missing blog posts. Hopefully, we will have some interesting pictures to post later.

A Routine Sunday Morning

We often forget the routine things of life as we go about our business. This series of pictures shows a part of our Sunday morning. Fortunately, MJ carries the camera most of the time and so pictures like this are possible when we think to take them. We have about a 20 minute walk to church. We often take the bus and walk the last few blocks. So the little guys are out shining shoes and a quick shine is available.

As we approach our home, the neighbors have some different looking chickens running around. (Many people keep chickens in their yards all over town). This "fuzz ball" was just different and didn't mind posing for a shot.

There is a little compound of houses built largely of scrap lumber emerging about a block from us. It has been interesting watching the construction in slow motion (over a 6 months period of time). The picture below shows the huge amount of clothes that need to be dried from the people who live in this compound. Of course, the houses are just filled with children. The almost daily rain provides a real challenge to ever get this amount of wash dry.

And finally arriving back at the apartment, the picture below shows our compound, the flowers and "the boss". The blue tank is the rain water supply. because of a number of interruptions lately in city water supply, this has been a real life saver

The bottom line is that life here is a kaleidoscope of sites, sounds and just plain different things.

Pantyhose And Mis-communication

Communication is a problem among people everywhere. Working between two languages with both parties much less than fluent causes even more problems. Consider the following rather funny incident:

The Pre-Kinder teacher came to school Monday with a giant run in her hose of which she was really not pleased. One of the cooks retails hose from her sister's shop and so has some on hand for sale.

The teacher understood that the cook only had hose on hand that might look like something from a XXX movie. MJ understood that XXX mean size and she imagined hose for a huge lady. MJ's co-teacher was telling me that the teacher was going to the kitchen to get three eggs. (XXX sounded like three eggs in her accent). I couldn't imagine the relationship between hose and three eggs but (for once) didn't ask.

Later in the day it came out that three of us had very different concepts of what happened:
1. hose that looked like something from a XXX movie
2. a huge pair of hose for someone wearing XXX
3. And Omer, who is out to lunch, wondering why a problem with a pair of hose involves three eggs in the kitchen.

Most of us had a good laugh over this one.

We now wonder how many of these kinds of situations go undetected and causes us to draw very bad conclusions.

A Different Way of Doing Business

Meetings with the teacher group has been very interesting the last week. We had two staff meeting where the purpose was to write a discipline policy. The interesting part is that this is their first experience of defining a problem and writing solutions. Prior experience has always been a top down approach where the solutions were given to them by the "powers that be."

Not having experience in approaching a problem could have been very difficult. Some thirty questions or ideas to ponder were written by us. We had a bit of difficulty in that the points, even though they were intended as "starter questions" became the only thing looked at. By the second meeting we started to get past that issue.

Discussion was slow at first. By the second meeting things started to take off. It was very interesting to see the experience of discovering that other teachers had common problems unfold. This really seemed to generate the conversation.

Next meeting we will be getting into the "consequences". Hopefully, the concept of collaboration will kick in as well as the power that collaboration can generate. A most interesting experience!

Birthday Party

Welcome to our birthday in first grade. The party girl gets dressed up to serve her cake and jello. The Pre- Kinder teacher doubles as the clown.

Parents take get delight and go to great length to make it a memorable ocassion with her friends. The party is the last thing in the day. What a way to end the day!!!

Sociology 101 And ¨Palanka

Getting things done organizationaly speaking is a trick most anywhere. Trying to get things done in another culture of course requires some working knowledge of how things are done and what it takes to break through the barriers. In this culture ¨palanka¨(not sure of the spelling) is the series of connections between people that is used to accomplish the difficult if not the impossible. In the US we call it ¨connections¨or ¨greasing the skids¨or having ¨pull¨. In Bahrain it was called ¨whasta¨. The frustration of local people becomes apparent when an outsider can come in and do things they could not seem to get done for a long time. Of course it is not that the outsider is so smart, but rather the system is not working in the same way with the outsider.¨Palanka¨means I do something for you and you do something for me. As an outsider I can do for them, but I am not dependent on them doing something for me. The airport in Quito is five hours away and I have nothing to lose if it is necessary to leave. Consequently, the ¨palanka¨game is greatly altered. It is amazing how this brings people around who have not had to come around previously.Latino culture and organization is very top down. If you manage to rise to the top of the organization, a little clever ¨palanka¨can keep you there for a long time. People just accept that you are the boss.The down side of all of this that the power and leverage gained from team work and a collabrative approach is lost. It is amazing how that loss hinders organizations from getting as much done as should be done.And so we continue to work on organizational matters in the school.

Recreation in the Neighborhood

Immediately behind (from our direction) the recreational park is the main bus terminal for Puyo.The picture above shows this terminal. There is another terminal across town too. You just have to know where you are going and go to the right terminal. The one pictured has busses going to Quito so this is where our five hour ride ends or starts when we come and go to or from Quito.

We often tend to overlook the familiar in our neighborhood the longer we are here. So Sunday afternoon we walked around taking a few pictures. Three blocks from where we live we have this large recreational park. the picture above shows this huge water slide. They have other areas for volleyball (carry ball as I watched them) and basketball as well as a couple of tennis courts. The park is about 2 square blocks of space. The only cost is for the pools and waterslide; $3 for adults and $1.50 for kids. We attempted to download more pics but there is a download problems some where.

Long Term School Review

After a two and a half hour meeting this morning with the senior pastor, principal, asst. principal and translator, it seems we may be on a new and long path at the school.
There is a willingness on the part of the senior pastor to explore the concept of a school board (junta in Spanish).
There is no knowledge or practice in this environment of how a junta would work. My first task is to write up a set of rules as to how a well functioning junta would work. So we will get started on that and get the list of do´s and don´ts translated. It is important that potential junta members be informed as to how they are expected to behave and function before they accept the appointment. Yes, at least for starters they will be appointed.
We have suggested before that we will not make another year commitment to this project. However, I did agree to come several times a year on a consulting basis. We can also do a lot of work by email and Skype once we get that all set up.
The list of things to do for a total school review boggles the mind, but there is never a short cut to these kinds of things.

Face Painting The Lesson

As readers can see, we will turn to the lighter (and more interesting) side of things here. Little kids have that entertainment ability without even trying.
Pictured above is MJ's co-teacher, Debora. This is her first year of teaching. It has been a growing experience for her in many ways. She is also our main translator when it comes to speaking to the school "powers that be." She also translate during our sessions with the teaching staff.


These kids are in Pre-Kinder. While studying animals and insects, the teacher paints the creatures on kids faces. They love it!!

There are only four girls out of the 12 students in this class. They know their colors, numbers to 10, shapes and toys.

The teacher shown below is an excellent teacher with the little kids. She has a lot of creative ideas. She uses music and dance as well as art and drama to get her points across. She also speaks English fairly well. Because they don't have children's music, she was thankful and very interested in a series of children's music CD's we brought which were in both English and Spanish. Amazing what a $10 investment can do.

This is MJ's hug source every day

Be sure to click on these pictures for a full screen view. The faces are great!

NO Water In The Rainforest.

Yet another little glich in life here in Puyo. Actually Puyo has become Pooy-o. The city was without water for three days. Restrooms were in desperate need of water!!

In our case, we survived because our landlady has a large rainwater supply tank. We used out of this supply for two days. We had some rain which helped to replenish this supply a bit. A little water was boiled for a spitz bath this morning. Had not gone this route for about 50 years.

The school is just out of town and is on another supply source. We have had our problems there in the past too.

When we returned from school today, water was finally back on. We now appreciate water in the rainforest.

Valentines Day, while celebrated, is a much lower key thing here. MJ might end up with a pizza!

Excellent Teacher Discussion

Yet another day full of surprises! The meeting today at school was to receive an already written mission statement from the school-pastor leadership. Every school accrediting association in the world will tell you that the mission statement has no chance of sucess if it comes from the top down. You can not hand a staff a mission statement. Sooooo, I raised the question in the meeting about who was the author of the mission statement. Apparently it was one dusted off from a number of years ago.
I simply made the point that as good as it might be, it has no chance of taking root because there was obviously no ownership. As soon as I raised this question (bucked the hand down approach) the teacher group changed and there was some considerable discussion about the wording. Finally, it was decided to come back at a later meeting to work on the wording. What a change in attitude by the staff!
This meeting was followed by an hour and a half meeting at our home regarding the discipline policy (or lack there of). We used a structured question approach written out. Without this structure a meeting would be like herding cats. An excellent discussion was held with another meeting set for next week to begin hammering out the details of a discipline policy.
I also used a crude diagram of the parts of school operations. The staff was amazed at the full picture of school operations. Most had copied the diagram from the board and one teacher translated the parts of school operations into Spanish. All in all, it was an excellent meeting. Clearly new ground was broken in that teachers were actually having to work through their own situation.

Changes At The Drop of a Hat

In the posting yesterday, I was sure of the schedule for this week. Well, today that seems to have changed. By the end of the school day we were informed students would be going home early tomorrow because we have an extended meeting at 11:30. Can't seem to find a teacher that has any idea of the topic of the meeting. Life is never boring here. We live for the unexpected.

Weather? Well the sky opened and we had about two days of a lot of rain. This afternoon the sun is out and one could aquire a sunburn within the hour. Makes the orchids grow!

We have found an internet shop very close to our apartment that allows us to connect our laptop for the going rate. Nice to have one's own bookmarks and keyboard.

Just Work & Meetings

Well, it looks like nothing but plain work for this week. In addition to the five school days (we think) we will have a teacher´s English class Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday afternoon there will be a staff discussion on the improvement of the discipline picture at school. On Friday an ëxpert¨will come to speak about how to write better test questions. On Saturday morning we will meet with the principals and the senior pastor about general school improvement topics.

Nobody can say we aren´t trying to get a better handle on things. It will be interesting to see how much patience the staff has for all of this. The listing above is a shock to everyone as we generally don´t have experience with these matters here. We have already notice at the highest level that there is a tendancy to copy other plans rather than work through the issues. We have to be careful that we build ownership into anything that is decided.

What Does an Excellent School Look Like?

Today we might press our luck a bit with the school improvement ideas. At five this PM we will be meeting with the senior pastor, principal, an interpreter, and the vice principal. Although we are not sure of the agenda (the meeting isn´t mine) I think the topic will be approaches to school improvement.

One of the remote possibilities is to look at what it takes to become an accredited school. This is a long shot and may not go any place because we have so far to go. I am recalling in about 1991 we were at this point in Bahrain. The project was a full four year project to become an accredited school. Again we had resources to do it there. Here, it would be a shoe string operation at best.

A major problem here is we have no pratice in answering the question of ¨what does an excellent school look like?¨ We can use the general categories commonly used by most any accrediting organization to give an idea of what characteristics as good school has. I have downloaded some samples from the internet. I hope to find additional examples in Spanish.

A report on this difficult question and how the group today handled it will be forth coming.

Teacher Success!

From time to time I have complained about lack of progress in our projects. MJ says patience is not my strongest point. She may be partly correct (Never will give in completely on this point.)

We have been working for several months to implement a student grading system that is fair to students, communicates to parents, and allows teachers the flexibility needed to use a system on all subject areas as well as age levels. In a meeting Thursday afternoon, a final presentation was made with teachers demonstrating knowledge of a completed system. There were outstanding weighted grading systems presented. The discussion indicated an excellent knowledge of what was done and how it would be used to grade students.

Earlier in the day, I was in the computer room and saw the spreadsheet documents of a few teachers. They were excellent! (We don´t have the luxery of built in spreadsheet systems as most US schools have in their grade report systems. We have to build our own.)

Teachers were obviously pleased with their results as well. At the end of the meeting we asked the question as to which issue we should tackle next. Teaching techniques and discipline were the two top suggestions. Educators throughout America will know that discipline was the final winner. So, we now have a thirty point discipline discussion guide in the hands of teachers to begin thinking about this topic. My co-teacher has translated it so that everyone understands issues and approaches to think about.

IT was a good week!!

Carnival Pics - Finally

Of course, the pics today are from carnival from last Sat through Tuesday. Getting wet is a real possibility. I got the big dump from a bucket of water some three stories up in the down town area. We hear that some areas even dump paint on each other. We are very ¨civilized¨here in Puyo.

The dresses are beautiful and they know how to make the most of what they wear.

A lot of nice looking ladies in these here parts of the world.

Don´t know about people like in the pic below. At least I didn´t recognize him (it).

You guess as to what is being sold here. Business was good, however.

And big smiles all around except on Monday when the parade got rained out. With all the rain around here, it was the first event to get rained out since we have been here. The ¨sinning¨went on in other ways even in the rain. Missed a good picture of two boys about 10 years old sharing a beer on main street watching the parade.

Carnival, Internet, and Volcano

OK, Carnival is over which means, among other things we get internet back in operation. Carnival is such a big deal here that most everything of a business nature comes to a halt including four days of no internet any where in the town of Puyo. Internet is still very slow tonight as many people are back on and getting caught up on news, etc.

The other big news is that the volcano about 30 miles away is blowing. A big erruption ocurred during the night last night. Those readers who are really interested in this should type the name of the volcano, Tungurahua, into the news section of google.com. There is plenty of information on it now. We understand the road to by the volcano that leads eventually to Quito is closed not because it is covered but because the danger is great enough that an erruption to come at any time.

We are again very busy with school with some interesting break throughs. More about that later.

CARNIVAL!

We are attempting to download a series of pictures we took this morning. Carnival holidays are here. We do not have school on Monday and Tuesday. There was a very nice parade this morning and another one on Monday morning. Possibly a few pictures can be sent today. We have a VERY slow internet today which will limit the number of pictures sent.