Little Lessons

Lordy, Lordy. I am the worst. Practically two months since the last post. Forgive me.

As most of you people that read this blog know, I was home for two and a half weeks celebrating the marriage of my sister, Colleen, and my new brother-in-law, Chris. Even with a few days of being terribly, deathly sick, it was the best trip home that I could ever imagined. The wedding celebrations were beautiful and fun. And I was able to spend time with everyone that I miss so much.

Since arriving back in Costa Rica, however, I have been on the go. I’ll have to write a few posts about everything I am doing, but I promise that I’ll do it before February.

On October 16^th Guanacaste had its first ever Regional English Spelling Bee. I, along with three other volunteers, held local spelling bees in our schools and decided to organize a Regional Bee for each of our top three participants. I had three students from El Capulin and three students from JFK. We had classes outside of school about three times a week and my students went from not even knowing the pronunciation of the letters in English, to spelling words that I cannot spell myself.

The Regional Bee was in Liberia at the Regional Ministry of Education office. Our fantastic Regional English Assessor, Max, helped us to secure the venue and Taylor, another volunteer in La Cruz, and I were off to scour Liberia for donations of prizes and food. It was quite the task and did not actually work out as well as we hoped. Unfortunately, with the end of the year coming up, a lot of places already donated what they were going to donate. We did get fruit donated from a locally owned and locally grown store, which cut a lot of our costs, but we ended up buying a few prizes for the winners.

The entire event turned out awesome. We had 15 fifth and sixth graders from six different schools participating and these kids really knew their stuff. It was really rewarding to see how far they had come, and they not only learned how to spell 120 new words, but also their meanings. My students did an incredible job and they all asked when practices for next year began.

I sometimes feel like I am not doing a whole lot here and that if I wasn’t working at these two schools no one would really care. But after the Bee, after hearing the students talk about how much they liked it and wanted to continue learning, I realized that through these little events, that are stressful to organize and half the time I don’t want to bother with or don’t think the kids are paying enough attention or care, they really are learning. And they are learning a lot more than I am blatantly teaching. Throughout practices the students were consistently showing up late. And I consistently told them that they weren’t respecting my time. And every practice they started showing up closer to the starting time until one practice I arrived two minutes late and they were all there ready to tell me that I was two minutes late. And another practice where they arrived at my house asking me why I wasn’t at school yet and it was seven minutes before class was supposed to begin.

Throughout my time in Costa Rica, honestly probably every day, I have to remind myself that even if I am not doing some huge-scale event, or building a English Center, or even teaching every day, I still have influence and I can still teach what I know through my actions and everyday life. While it is always difficult, and probably always will be difficult, to feel completely useful here, I hope that through my conversations and actions I can teach my students life skills and open-mindedness. My three fifth grade students learned the value of being on time; not an easy feat in Costa Rica. Hopefully this is just be the beginning of a bundle of little lessons that I can share.