I had an enlightening conversation with my World Wise school class at Riverside High a week ago. I was talking with a few of the students on Skype; they had just asked me what a school day was like here in Nanchoc. Upon my saying that they students are only in school from 8am to 1pm the Riverside students faces lit up, “god that’s so not fair, why can’t we have half days?” was the general consensus. I was taken aback. Not exactly sure why, I know had I been talking to myself my senior year of high school I would have loved the idea of half days just as much as they did. But now, 6 years after graduation (god that makes me feel old) all I can think of is how much I took for granted what we have in the states.
The teachers here are teaching because it is a lucrative job—in my town they receive better pay than both the nurse AND the OB-GYN at the health post. The teachers here lack the spark that I saw in my teachers growing up. At first I accredited the lack of enthusiasm to the differences in the educational system (I guessed that the teachers enjoyed straight-up-lectures just as much as their students didn’t) then I found out about the pay and it all clicked. The teachers are teachers for the money, not for the love of teaching.
Now that being said, I can recall a few teachers growing up that just didn’t have a real interest in their job. It was just that, a job. But the majority of my teachers loved their jobs and were quite good at it—however bad of a student I might have been.
Mr. Carter, my 6th grade AIG Math teacher had the ability to simultaneously scare the begeezeuos out of us and inspire us to do better. We were graded on hamburgers. McDonalds is a cruddy grade because their burgers aren’t all that great; they’re edible, not enjoyable. But a Wendy’s burger, they were the best because a Wendy’s burger is square—they don’t cut corners. “Good, Better, Best. Better than the rest, until your good is always better and your better is the best,” it was his credo for our class. His aspiration for us was to always do better. At the time I’m sure I rolled my eyes. What self respecting 6th grader wouldn’t have? But now, I think Mr. Carter had the right idea. I’ve got that credo written out on paper stuck to the back of the door to my room-- just a little personal reminder. Good. Better. Best. McDonalds bad, Wendy’s good.
I think an entire teaching style can be accredited to Mr. Quackenbush (yes that’s a real name), my high school physics teacher. He was a hippie in all definitions and forms. Long, gray hair almost always worn in a pony tail and occasionally he’d wear his Star Trek shirt…not a black shirt that said Star Trek, but a real Spaceship-whatever-beam-me-up-Scottie shirt. We all overlooked the fact that he looked like a crazy person (okay, maybe he was crazy…) because he made the material fun. When learning about gravity and ramps we pushed his old F-150 down a slope and did some calculations. A few painful Excel-Sheet-induced hours later: BAM! g=9.8m/s/s. Well I’ll be darned. Then who wants to learn about projectile motion from a book? Not any student I’ve ever seen. What did we do? Why we turned the football goal posts into a huge slingshot! A few rolls of duct tape and a handful of bungee cords later and we had sent a Basketball flying across the field (all videotaped so we could call it research of course). A good week later we had figured out, with a lot of help from Excel, that the dern ball moved up with the same speed that it fell down with. Go figure. Then I won’t even go into the details about the electricity labs, I´ll just say that it’s a lot of fun to blow things up. And that you can blow things up and learn at the same time. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone from my Physics or AP Physics class what they learned, you’ll get 2 answers: There is such a thing as a rubber tree, it can be grown in a pot, and it really has rubber inside; and that a=v/t and a=g for something falling straight down. Call his teaching style what you will, but learning can be fun. Mr. Q taught me that.
If I have to thank one teacher above all others it would be my art teachers. Now, I know what you’re thinking. I studied math, I should thank a math teacher, or a science teacher. Mr. Carter and Mr. Q inspire me now-- now that I’m older and wiser and all that jazz—but when I was in school there was one class that I could walk out of and always, no matter what, feel like I was the king of my world. Art class. Why art you ask? Because it taught me to be creative—a trait that I just don’t see in my students here.
If I give a sheet of paper to 10 students and then say draw your house; they will all draw the same box with triangle roof and a triangle mountain-scape in the background (yes, the high school students too). The color might be different, but the idea, the same. I didn’t realize how much I had taken for granted us having art growing up. And real art, a whole hour to ourselves to play with clay, to make a mess with paint, and to develop creative thought. Here art class is nothing more than students regurgitation lines to a play they have no interest in, or the mandated dance class that no one seems to enjoy. Rarely are they allowed to draw (material costs too much) and even more rarely are they told that their work is beautiful. But in all the art classes I could remember we all walked out having learned something; more likely than not, something about ourselves. At the end of a class I could say to myself, “wow, who knew I had the patience to draw that stairwell in perfect perspective?” And I’d say it with pride. I can say after spending 15 hours cursing at (working on) a MatLab program the last thing I’d think was, “wow who knew I had the patience for that?” It was more likely I’d let out an exasperated “holy cow thank the lord that’s over with. Get me out of here.”
I had spent a lot of time thinking about how much I took for granted in my schooling all week—both the fun and the un-fun. I looked at school as something I was required to do, not something to appreciate or something to be thankful for. So here’s a extremely late “Thank You” for all of those teachers who taught me that learning is supposed to be fun, that I can do anything that I try to do, and that I am my own individual and I have the right to my own ideas and thoughts. Now I know that our way of doing things isn’t perfect in the Sates, but it wasn’t until I left and saw how others learn did I realize how grateful I should be.
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