Home sweet home

Being back home is definitely bittersweet.  I am so happy to be back with my family and friends again and back to working, but I definitely miss Costa Rica.  I have only been back for a short while and I’m ready to start planning a return trip.  Although the trip had its stressful moments I’ve realized, what class doesn’t?  On the trip there were times that I let the stress get to me more than I should have and that is unfortunate.  I do feel though that even that has been a big part of helping me grow on this trip.  There were trials with homesickness, arguments, stress, and so many other things, but it has ultimately made me a better person, and a better teacher. 

                Before coming on this trip I was very worried about how everything would go with my home stays.  I had never expected the biggest challenge to be with the mix of people on the trip.  But even this was a helpful learning experience.  There are always going to be people that you don’t get along with all the time, especially in teaching teams.  It is very important to be able to work with people even if they aren’t your favorite people in the world.  I think this trip has helped with this a lot.  This past semester a lot of my classmates learned this in our unit groups.  During the semester I got lucky in that I got along with my partners very well, which will also happen sometimes.  However, the fact that this was the ideal situation didn’t help me get used to having to work with people that are very different from me.  On this trip I not only had to interact with them but I had to live with them more or less.  Although I wasn’t working on projects with these people directly, it has still helped to prepare me for what it might be like to work on a teaching team with people that I don’t get along with 100%. 

                There were times on the trip when I was ready to just leave and go back home.  But now, looking back I am more than glad that I went on this trip.  It wasn’t easy but then again nothing worth it is easy.  It was a process but I made it through and I am a stronger and better person for it.  This trip has changed me and I’m glad for that.  I feel such a great pride in myself for taking the step and going on the trip despite how scared I was.  I’m proud that I did the things I did and faced my fears.  This trip truly is a once in a lifetime experience and I would highly recommend it to anyone and everyone in the department.  I went thinking that I would learn about ELL students, but I learned so much more than that.  I learned about myself, and for that I am grateful.  I am grateful to the department and the teachers who all made this trip possible; because getting to learn about myself in this way was priceless.  PURA VIDA!!!!!

What a surprise!

One thing I was not expecting was how attached I have become to this beautiful place.  I knew that this would be the trip of a life time and that I would love ever minute.  But, I never expected to be this ready to move down and teach for a year or two.  I never expected to be able to learn Spanish the way I have.  Heading back to the states, I want to be able to continue my Spanish education so that one day I can go back and I will be able to understand the locals and communicate well with them. 

                I’ve always been terrified of what I would do if I ended up with an ELL student in my class, although I guess that’s more of a ‘when’ than an ‘if.’  This has been one of my greatest concerns heading into teaching, but now I feel much more capable of handling this.  Although I’ve always prided myself on being a rather patient person, I feel like I will now have the patience I need to help those students who don’t speak English.  I think I will be able to guide their learning and thinking to help them achieve everything their classmates can.  In some ways this realization seems surprising to me, but in others this is exactly what I was hoping for going on this trip.  

Education in Costa Rica

The most important experience from this trip has been going to the schools.  This was what I was most excited about when coming to Costa Rica.  I love to take any and every chance I get to interact with kids and have a chance to help them learn, especially given that it helps me to learn too.  After my first school visit here I wanted to go back and spend each day with those kids.  At first they were rather shy but you could tell that it meant a lot to them that we were there to teach and help them.  After that visit the students wrote us letters and drew us pictures.  This was the most rewarding feeling; to know that we had touched their lives and that they were truly grateful for what we could do. 

After going to the Cloud Forest school I felt even more strongly about how rewarding this experience was.  I’ve always been one who wanted to stay close to home and my family.  I’ve never even considered teaching anywhere outside of the St. Louis area unless it was absolutely necessary that I relocate.  After this visit, however, I could see myself moving down to Costa Rica to teach at a school like this or a year or two.  For me, having the opportunity to teach in a school like this for a year would be the greatest opportunity.  I want to be able to give back to this community as much as I feel it’s given to me in the last couple of weeks.  In just a matter of weeks I feel that everything in this culture has impacted me greatly.  I would love to see how much more there is to learn here if given the opportunity to come back and teach.  

Sustainability

I really enjoyed the trip we made to the Sustainable farm in Monteverde.  I have always felt like I was a person who was big on “going green”.  After seeing everything they are doing on this farm however I’m not so sure that I have been into it enough.  I’ve recycled my whole life and I’ve always been one to make sure the lights get turned out when leaving a room.  I always thought this was enough.  I had never thought to have compost or anything like that.  After this visit there are a handful of things that I would love to be able to take back and implement in my life.  For one thing, I would like to learn more about compost and how I can use compost.  I was also impacted by the natural light in the rooms.  This may not always be very practical, but I would love it if I could try to use more natural light and less electricity.  I would also like to have a garden of spices and vegetables.  This isn’t all stuff that I can do in my classroom, but some of it is.  I would love to try and have a class garden and then donate anything we are able to grow to the cafeteria.  I realize this may be difficult to implement but I feel that it is an important issue and it is worth shooting for.  I also would like to have my classes’ research different ways to help with sustainability.  I would like for us as a class to brainstorm things we can do in our classroom, school, or at home to help our planet.  Sustainability is more than just a unit I would want to do.  I would want to continue lessons on sustainability throughout the school year.  I feel that if I can get my future class to work toward making our classroom more sustainable, we can then work to make the school more sustainable as a whole.  I was very impressed with the Cloud Forest School and all of their efforts to keep sustainable and I think this would be a great lesson/project for classes in the U.S. to pick up and start working on.  

My future ELL students

One thing that has definitely changed my thinking in regards to Cambourne’s Conditions is immersion.  I had always thought that for ELL students it would be better for them if they were able to speak both in their native language as well as English while they were just starting to learn English.  After my experiences on this trip however, I am not so sure.  I noticed that being able to talk in English made it harder for me to learn Spanish because I wasn’t practicing as much as I should have.  As far as the rest of Cambourne’s conditions, I feel that I was pretty well on target for how I should teach my ELL students.  I have always felt that demonstrating is the best way for teaching any student whether they are ELL or not and that giving them responsibility for their learning as well as high expectations was the best way to encourage them. 

                Before this trip I didn’t know much of anything about Halliday’s seven functions of language.  I think this knowledge will help me when teaching my ELL students because I will be able to asses their progress based on these seven functions so I know what I need to do to help them achieve all seven functions of language.  I am glad to have this knowledge as a guideline for teaching this students and helping them to progress.  I think this is important for all education majors to know this information because it is hard to know exactly how you can help your ELL students or what you should expect from them.  Knowing Cambourne’s Conditions and Halliday’s functions of language help give me an idea of where I can start with my ELL students.  From there I feel that it will be easier to get more ideas and methods to help them succeed and keep the paces of their classmates.  

In the shoes of my ELL students

This trip has helped me a lot as far as understanding my student’s struggles with learning as ELL students.  Being put into a situation where I have to be able to learn without being able to speak my native language has helped me greatly when being a teacher.  I understand that there are a lot of important things to help create success at teaching my students.  For me, when I was sitting in my Spanish classes I had trouble understanding what the teacher was saying even if he/she was speaking slowly.  I needed her to write the words out on the board for me understand what she was saying.  I could understand the written language better than the spoken language.  This was a huge shock to me because I am primarily an auditory/musical learner.  I was surprised to find out that when it comes to a new language I’m more of a visual learner.  I think this can help me with my future teaching because it shows just how important it is every area of intelligence is used to teach.  I feel like I have always been aware that information should be presented to students in many different ways, but after this experience I realize even more just how important it is, especially for my ELL students.  I feel like this experience has also showed me just how stressful it is to not be allowed to use your own native language.  There were several times when I had trouble not talking to my classmates in English.  If I was having as much trouble as I was having with this I know that it will be even harder for my students.  Where I would like to allow them to be able to speak in their native language some I also know that if I allow this is will delay them learning English.  In my first homestay and my current home stay I have an English speaker.  One the one hand this has been helpful but on the other hand I have noticed that I have not been using Spanish as much as I should be which is making it harder to learn.  For my students I will want to make sure they are required to speak English as much as possible because I feel this will help them learn it more effectively.  This thought has definitely changed since coming on this trip.  

Homesick and more

Today is the last day with my first home stay family.  The rest of my group went to do our first service project in La Carpio today.  Unfortunately I was sick and unable to go.  At the start of the day, I just thought it was a mild stomach problem and that if I got a little more sleep I would be ok enough to go into school for my afternoon classes.  Unfortunately this was not the case.  As the day went on I felt worse and worse.  I ended up having to go to the clinic.  Justin came with me to translate and if I had felt lost and confused in my home stay house, this was on an entirely different level.  Being in a situation not only where I feel miserable and can barely stay standing without passing out is hard enough to go through even if I have my family there.  But this time, I couldn’t have my mother there to take care of me, and I couldn’t understand any of what was being said in the Doctor’s office.  It is scary to have someone doing an exam of you when you are feeling so miserable and not understanding anything that is being said to you.  This situation just showed me even more so how my students would feel.  For me, being in a home stay was scary, but with the age my students will be it will be all the more scary for them.  I feel like being at this doctor’s office and not understanding what was being said to me gave me a better appreciation for what my students will go through on a daily basis.  As much as I wished I could have been at La Carpio, I think that I was able to learn from the situation I was put in.