December 17, 2011
We find that every day that we spend here we discover something new to be thankful about. A few weeks ago we were talking to our host sister, Paula, who is in her sophomore year of high school and at the time was studying for her December finals. It is really pretty impressive that she is still attending school at all, considering that a lot of girls her age are already married with children. It is even more impressive when you consider that she has to travel 40 minutes every day by motorcycle to get to school. That might not sound like that much, but consider that it costs her family over $100 pesos a day for the gas money to send her to school. That's equivalent to a day or two of food for the family. Then consider what happens if something goes wrong with their motorcycle, as happened last week. In that case, Paula has to get up an hour earlier than usual to stand at the entrance of our campo hoping that she can catch a free ride with someone else to school. Or if that fails, then she has to walk an hour and half to get there (including crossing a river).
On top of this, the school system here is atrocious. What we think of as learning is a totally foreign concept here. From what we have gathered so far, it seems that the students spend their day in school writing down notes verbatim from the chalkboard. There isn’t any discussion or activity about the lesson, so essentially the students don’t learn anything about what they’ve written down. When a test rolls around, the students then have to memorize their notes and regurgitate them verbatim for the test. Unfortunately, this means that the students never actually learn the material. If you happen to ask a student to explain their school lesson to you, they can only read to you from their notes. This also means that the youth here don't really have any critical thinking skills and do not understand the concept of creativity.
When you consider all this, you realize that we really have a lot to be thankful about. Unlike a lot of the people here, we actually have the opportunity to attend good schools in our country, learn, and hopefully move on to good careers and make something of ourselves. Unfortunately for the people here, schooling usually ends at high school if they are lucky enough to get that far and does not often lead to other opportunities like going to a university or pursuing a career.
We find that every day that we spend here we discover something new to be thankful about. A few weeks ago we were talking to our host sister, Paula, who is in her sophomore year of high school and at the time was studying for her December finals. It is really pretty impressive that she is still attending school at all, considering that a lot of girls her age are already married with children. It is even more impressive when you consider that she has to travel 40 minutes every day by motorcycle to get to school. That might not sound like that much, but consider that it costs her family over $100 pesos a day for the gas money to send her to school. That's equivalent to a day or two of food for the family. Then consider what happens if something goes wrong with their motorcycle, as happened last week. In that case, Paula has to get up an hour earlier than usual to stand at the entrance of our campo hoping that she can catch a free ride with someone else to school. Or if that fails, then she has to walk an hour and half to get there (including crossing a river).
On top of this, the school system here is atrocious. What we think of as learning is a totally foreign concept here. From what we have gathered so far, it seems that the students spend their day in school writing down notes verbatim from the chalkboard. There isn’t any discussion or activity about the lesson, so essentially the students don’t learn anything about what they’ve written down. When a test rolls around, the students then have to memorize their notes and regurgitate them verbatim for the test. Unfortunately, this means that the students never actually learn the material. If you happen to ask a student to explain their school lesson to you, they can only read to you from their notes. This also means that the youth here don't really have any critical thinking skills and do not understand the concept of creativity.
When you consider all this, you realize that we really have a lot to be thankful about. Unlike a lot of the people here, we actually have the opportunity to attend good schools in our country, learn, and hopefully move on to good careers and make something of ourselves. Unfortunately for the people here, schooling usually ends at high school if they are lucky enough to get that far and does not often lead to other opportunities like going to a university or pursuing a career.
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