1/15/2020 – 1/16/2020 Wednesday and Thursday teaching

On Wednesday we taught 6 (!) classes – Materia y Sostenibilidad (2), Matematicas para la Toma de Decisiones (2), and two English classes. They all went pretty well I thought (except one math class which went quite poorly :[ ), and it felt pretty strange giving them an introduction to sustainability. I felt like I didn’t deserve to be attempting to impart on them the importance of quite possibly the biggest topic of our time: climate change and responsibility. But I think that they at least walked out of the room with some different emotions than they came in, and that’s all I can hope for. The one math class that went poorly seemed to show the difference between a slightly less confident delivery and a slightly more confident one, of which the slightly less confident delivery caused much more confusion than the other, although we ended up saying almost exactly the same things. The other thing was we quickly saw the common conflict between what the teacher expects of the kids and what they are able to grasp at that moment, as we had to abandon the worksheet we made for the second round of the math class (oops). We made some more friends on Wednesday, a group of girls who offered to take us to the town on Friday! We’re super excited to do that (and also to learn their names)! We chatted with one girl named Natalia for a while, who was super nice, and I thought her thoughts on British English vs American English were funny; she felt like American English is more fluent, and British English feels more enunciated and perhaps harder to say sometimes. Of course, they learn British English through textbooks here, but they all tend to speak in more of an American accent if anything.

On Thursday we didn’t have much because our trip to Orizaba with the college students was cancelled, so we got some planning done and listened in on two Trig classes (taught in complete Spanish of which I would say I understood a good majority of !).

The food of course of the days (including my first pambazos, which are native only to el estado de Veracruz and are made apparently to look like the Pico de Orizaba with its snow cap: