In Quito

The blog report is being posted from Quito tonight. We decided to take a couple of days and look around Quito and do some shopping for educational supply items.

The bus ride from Puyo to Quito is normally five hours. Today it was 4:45. The bus was nearly new and very comfortable. Managing restroom stops is easy. There aren't any and there are no facilities aboard the bus. Anticipating this, we had A cup of coffee this morning.

We finished school prior to Easter vacation with a two hour teacher meeting on educational standards. We set up a system of identifying the major concepts taught in each course and grade level. These major concepts and skills are textbook based since it is closer to reality than any written curriculum. We demonstrated how questions would be constructed to test students over the major concepts.

We established a work calendar for the remainder of the year. Identify major concepts, distribute this document to students so they know what to study for, begin writing the exams, an exam schedule and finally a time to review and discuss the results. This was a HUGE undertaking in a culture that tends to operate day by day.