It's exam week!

There are three main reasons that I feel this blog is not as interesting as it was when I was teaching in China. One, the Peace Corps tries to pay 'Volunteers' (volunteers don't get paid, hence the quotes) on par with the average people in the community/country they serve. In China I made considerably, considerably more than the average Changzhou resident. Two, the great and mighty US taxpayers are paying me to help the people of Costa Rica meet their need for trained men and women. As opposed to my job at JSTU, where I just had to teach my classes and then could do whatever the heck I felt like. Three, the two aforementioned reasons combined mean that I have a lot fewer opportunities to travel around Costa Rica or nearby countries or to explore various facets of Costa Rican culture. And reason 3a, to me, Costa Rican culture isn't as glaringly, in your face, different from American culture that Chinese culture is. 


But, what I do do with my time is spend a huge chunk of it in classrooms at a Costa Rican high school and Costa Rican night high school. Which means I have boat loads of observations to share about education. I write this little introduction as a sort of forewarning that I have a feeling most of my posts from this point on are going to be much more focused on education. I'm more than excited to be learning more about education and how to make myself a better teacher. Here's one reason for my interest. 


While we're on the subject, and before I move on to the titular subject, I'd like to reflect a bit about my education experience. I've been intimately involved with four education systems in my life. The West Des Moines Community School District, a wonderful, well-funded, award winning, very well supplied and equipped public school district in the suburbs of Des Moines, IA-where I went from kindergarten to twelfth grade. I guess the pre-school I went to for two years might pudddsch the number to 4.5 school systems. The University of Tulsa, a private, liberal arts, well-ranked, well funded, exceptionally equipped university in Tulsa, OK. Jiangsu Teacher's University of Technology, part of the Chinese provincial college system, a middle of the line Chinese college, focused on teacher training, quite well equipped considering it's in a country with $3,744 as GDP per capita. And, currently, the Costa Rican Ministry of Public Education, and specifically Puerto Viejo Technical High School and Puerto Viejo Night School. Haven't figured out a sentence of flowing adjectives yet for this last one. I write this because I know it's super important to be knowledgable of my perspective as I observe (and whether I want to or not: judge) education here. It's bad enough that the only high school I have to compare these to is a school that usually produces 10-15 National Merit Scholars a year (there are ~16,000 a year, there are 18,000+ high schools in the US). On top of this, my only other teaching experience was in East Asia, an area of the world well known for how much importance it places on education, see here for details. (Changzhou is in the same region as Shanghai). 

(study time)

So, working with the high schools here has been, as my buddy Aaron likes to say, a character building experience. The last week and a half was exam week at the regular/day high school, as the first trimester came to an end. There are six exam weeks during the year, one for each trimester and one for the middle of each trimester. Some observations follow. 


Exam week is almost entirely unnecessary. Not in that the tests are unnecessary, but the week part of exam week. School normally goes from 7:00-4:30, with 50 minutes for lunch and two 20 minute breaks. During exam week there are only two 80 minute tests per day. Tests are taken by subject, meaning that one morning everyone is taking their Spanish test, the afternoon everyone is taking math. During the math test, the math teacher(s) is/are floating around between the classrooms to see if the students have any questions-the other teachers proctor the tests. But, because there (supposedly) aren't enough teachers to proctor the exams, only 7th, 8th, and 9th graders take tests for a few days and then only 10th, 11th, and 12th for a few days. This scheduling means that exam week is actually  eight or nine days. Now, normally, except for a few classes (religion, music) every class is either 80 or 120 minutes. All classes are taken at least once per week. So, my crazy theory is, just have the kids take the tests in their normal classes-and then have them take the religion and music tests in one of the classes (math, social studies, English, Spanish, technical specialty) that they have more than once a week. This way, almost nothing needs to be rescheduled, and students don't miss all the classes that they have two or three times a week. And, as an extra bonus, no paper or ink or secretary's time is used to make the testing schedule. Furthermore, each teacher is present when the students are taking their tests, right there in the room ready to answer the questions. Oh, and did I mention that I have yet to see a student take the full 80 minutes to finish an exam. Talking with many a teacher and even more students (and using my own contact-aided vision) I've come to the conclusion that many students are done in 30 minutes, most in 45 minutes, and even on the hardest tests, the last kid leaves after 60 minutes. Thus throwing the argument that the longer testing period is needed for the classes that only meet for 40 minutes out the window. Exam week is unnecessary. 

(exam week=free time week)

The Costa Rican Ministry of Public Education apparently has zero trust in its employees ability to evaluate students. For me, the following was by far the most interesting thing I had seen in awhile (may be a comment on the giant bore that my life is). MEP (the Education Ministry) regulates the type, amount, and distribution of questions the teachers put on every test. As well as how many points can be assigned to each question. Teachers can only use red ink to correct tests. Teachers can't subtract points for spelling, grammar, or usage on any test except Spanish class. What the first point means, is that, yes, every test in Costa Rica looks exactly the same. The first section is multiple choice (no true/false allowed), with ~8-12 questions. The second section is identification/matching, maybe 6-10 questions. The third section is short answer, 4-8 questions. The fourth section is production, one or two questions of 3-5 lines each. Yes, every test, for every class, for every grade, looks exactly like this. You want your test to be just an essay: shucks. You think your students need more short answer questions this trimester-shucks. True false questions would do a great job of evaluating your students-too bad. I couldn't get a clear answer to how tightly this is regulated, but all the teachers seemed to be following. Only one point per question in each section mind you. Don't even think about making some questions worth more than others. I find the red pen thing pedantic, but not too problematic. I was chatting with an English teacher in the teacher's lounge when a social studies teacher started talking about how the kids these days have really horrible spelling. (Note: I always am a bit weary of the 'kids these days' statements' but I think he might kind of have a point.) He blamed the fact that Costa Rican kids don't read at all (probably true) and most of the writing they do is via text message (also probably true) which he thought contributed to it. He was complaining because a student had misspelled a few words as well as written q' instead of que (meaning that) on a short answer question (similar to writing bc instead of because). I asked why he didn't circle the error and take off a point. He said because he couldn't. On one hand, he can't deduct points for spelling/grammar because it's social studies. Secondly, teachers aren't allowed to mark anything but correct on incorrect on the exams, so he can't even circle or correct the spelling errors. When I asked, he said these rules aren't enforced very strictly, but a student could appeal the score-and then he would have to give the student another test. All the teachers agreed that although this is uncommon, enough students know the testing rules and do actually appeal that it's not worth the risk of breaking any of these testing rules. 


On the whole not trusting teachers' ability to evaluate students, every class has the exact same grading structure. The weight for homework, attendance, each test, and "concept" is exactly the same in every class. I've never taught in the States, and my job in China was somewhat of a wild-card job, so maybe these type of rules are more common than I think, but it all seems just a bit too much to me. So, I guess, that's about sums up exam week here in Puerto Viejo, it's all just a bit much. 

No Easter egg hunt this year

Despite the fact that I wear pearl snaps, Wrangler jeans, and have more country music than anything else on my iPod, I’m in no way country. I think I bought my pearl snaps for a fraternity party, and liked the design, the triple buttons on the cuff make me feel classy, and the way you can dramatically rip off a pearl snap is one of the most undervalued things in the world. There’s a Wrangler outlet store in Story City north of Des Moines, and you can’t beat the quality/price combo. And well, my dad grew up in a country-esque suburb (as opposed to my straight up suburban upbringing) so he played George Strait, George Jones, and Garth Brooks in car trips as a kid-so there’s your country music. So, I bet you never would’ve thought that moving to Costa Rica would’ve provided me with the opportunity to corral my first horse. Well it did. And corral the horse I did, shirtless mind you. Yes, the answer is yes, I bragged for at least a week to anyone who would listen about how I corralled my first horse-shirtless-and all the man points I earned doing it.

This all happened during a mostly delightful trip to my host mom’s parents’ farm during semana santa (Holy Week). My host mom’s dad and her younger brother manage the farm, which produces cheese (they live too far off the main road to be able to sell the milk-so they just let it sit and sell the cheese). They also grow some pineapples, sugarcane, and papaya-and little bits of all sorts of other stuff. They have about 15 or 20 horses, some of which are workhorses, and I’m assuming the others are just to sell. Her sisters and most of the cousins, as well as some second cousins were at the farm all week. Many of the aunts/great aunts are super evangelistic fundamentalist Christian and most of their conversation centers around this. This doesn’t interest me, and I have little to offer in their other conversation topic: complaining about their kids, husbands, exes, and babies' daddies. So, I hang out with the cousins. We spent the days riding horses, swimming in the river, or playing pick up games of soccer. Needless to say I came back all sorts of sunburned. But I had a great time. Only downside of the trip was the three hour possessed by tongues type shouting worship session that went on in the kitchen one night while all of us kids were trying to sleep. Luckily for me, listening to podcasts on the porch kept me out of the family disputes that the worship session induced. So, that was my holy week.

Oh, yeah, I corralled a horse. So, before we took the big horse ride, I was helping out the oldest two cousins and the uncle in the barn. By helping I mean I held the door open/closed as they moved a giant cement sink. But, hey, somebody’s got to keep the calves from escaping. So, I was able to snag an early morning ride on one of the horses. When I was out there, another cousin came down and said that I should ride the horse in so he could bring a loose horse up to the barn. I asked if I could do it. He said it was difficult. I said it couldn’t be that hard, give me a try. He did. And, the first 90% of the trip was easy as could be. Ride behind the loose horse, cut him off as he gingerly tried to stray back to the pasture. As we pushed up the hill to the barn, I was feeling pretty good about ol’ Cowboy Ken. In my defense, I didn’t totally understand which set of fences I was supposed to get the horse to turn into. On the other hand, I didn’t get the horse to go into any of the sets of fences. As we got to the top of the hill, and I tried to get my horse on the left of the loose horse, she darted off the path, down the other side of the hill and into the wide open pasture before I could even react.

So, I chased her down through the other pasture, right through the gorgeous herd of all the other horses, back up the hill, to the entrance to the barn. She escaped me again. We went down and up again. She escaped at the last minute again. Yes, the cousin had warned me that this is exactly what happened. I guess I don’t know why the horse doesn’t just run away to begin with, but maybe they just really messing with the punks that sit on their backs and make them run around all day. On my fourth attempt, with some help coaxing her in from André, one of the cousins, we were able to get the horse in the barn, saddled up and ready for the horse ride to the river we would take later that day. So, maybe I didn’t earn as many man points as I told everybody, but hey, a horse corralled is a horse corralled.

Porch teachin'

A while back, maybe in late March, one of the teachers at the high school communicated to me that she was pretty worried about the twelfth graders. The normal school year goes from mid-February to mid-December, but, the twelfth graders take the national graduation exam in September and October. They take it early because they have to then complete a practicum related to their academic focus/specialty. It’s kind of like a high school major, a concept pretty foreign to us Uncle Sammers because almost all U.S. high schools are college preparatory, not technical. Because of the fact that students drop out between tenth grade (when the specialties are chosen) and twelfth grade, some of the specialty groups have only a couple students. So, their small numbers don’t warrant a class just for their specialty, so instead they have a tutorial session with some teacher, which really means that they don’t have class and just turn in a project at the end of the year. So, I communicated with these students, and we arranged for me to teach them during this open block in their schedule. And, a week later, the other twelfth grade section arranged to meet with me on Saturday mornings.

Oh, forgot to mention why the teacher was pretty worried about the twelfth graders. The thing is: these kids didn’t have any English classes for all of February and March because of the Costa Rican teacher placement system. (I think I’ve mentioned that system before.) Oh, and after meeting these kids during our first class, I realized that I was all sorts of worried about them. They explained that in the past year, due to mandatory training for their English teacher, they only received English during the first trimester. And they had little positive to say about the teacher from the year before. I’m not saying these kids have the best study habits or are go-getters studying on their own, but they’re willing to show up on Saturday mornings for an extra class, so I’d say that a big part of the blame for their quite low level of English falls on the lap of the high school-hmm, maybe that’s why the Education Ministry and Peace Corps sent me here.

Well, on to the Peace Corps moment for the brochures. Well, at least the ending. So, it was arranged for me to meet with the Saturday group at the school. In trying to be responsible and all that jazz, I called on Friday and talked to the teacher that said it had been arranged. I pressed the issue that it was a Saturday so no one would be there, so one of the school guards needed to be contacted to open the school and a classroom for me. I was assured that this had been arranged. While not trying to be too much of a jerk (always a struggle) I clarified: ‘so everything’s arranged, all we need to do is show up at nine, there will be someone to open up the gate and a classroom?’ I was told ‘Yeah, it’s all ready.’

Come Saturday morning, I unprofessionally scurry up the street at about 9:01 and am surprised that two students have actually showed up early/on time. They are standing across the street from the gate. Gate’s closed. We chat a bit; I tell them that I was promised someone would come to open up. I also tell them I’m not betting too much dinero on that happening. Some more students show up, some by bike, some have walked from the center of town, some get dropped off by their dads. Gate’s still closed. I call the teacher who assured me that everything was taken care of-you can bet next week's salary those calls/texts don't get answered. We chat some more. I’ve got my track cinch bag with the readings, markers and an eraser; they’ve got notebooks and pencil bags. Gate’s still closed. At about 9:25 we make the decision to head down to my host family’s house. I remembered that my host family has a whiteboard (my host mom used to tutor kids (alongside her own kids) when they lived in San José). So, using the porch furniture, the kitchen chairs, and porch table chairs, with the whiteboard balanced on a chair against the wall, we have our first reading comprehension class on my host family’s porch/car port. My awesome host family (especially host mom) takes it all in stride, happy to have them over and helping me carry chairs out from the kitchen. Unfortunately, I didn’t get anyone to snap a picture of me teaching on the porch. But, hey, at least I can say that a lack of a classroom isn’t keeping your tax dollars from getting some kids to read some English.

*Pictures are of students in classrooms (obviously not a Saturday)
**Also, found out what that fruit was and updated my previous post!

So, what is this I'm eating?

So, one third of my job description is to share aspects of foreign culture with Americans. Obviously this whole blog does that, but I’m going straight to the point with this one. There is a very short list of the things that every single one of the 6.78 billion human beings in the world does every day. I’d put it at sleep, breathe, eat, and excrete. Hunger and famine are very serious issues that are even more obviously not adequately addressed, but I think almost all people are getting at least some food every day. Hunger is not a problem in Puerto Viejo, and partially because it doesn’t take much to find something to eat. Being in the tropics, and in a fairly fertile plain, there’s plenty growing on the tree to just reach up and grab. Which, brings me to the subject of this post-some new and interesting foods I have been exposed to here in Costa Rica.



Day in day out Costa Ricans don’t get too exotic. Rice, beans, boiled chicken, pork chops, maybe some salad and fried plantains or yucca. I mean, heck, sandwiches are pretty common here. And for breakfast, they just stir the beans into the rice and add some sauce and then throw a fried egg on the side. But, when it comes to fruits-that’s when things get a little more exciting. Below are a few of the foods that were in the kitchen the other day when I was inspired to break out the camera.



Our first item is passion fruit. No, I'm not a total ignoramus, I had heard of passion fruit before. But, as far as I know, I had never eaten it. I was just pleasantly sitting, eating my dinner, when I turned around and asked my host mom what the fruit was on the counter; I was told it was a granadilla (or little granada (pomegranate)) which actually makes lots of sense. These passion fruits were super sour, so I loaded up on the salt, and enjoyed the greenish-brownish gooey inside.

Below you see an avocado leaning against the slow cooker (used exclusively for beans). Or maybe you didn't instantly recognize this avocado, because of its green skin. Before coming to Costa Rica, I had only seen (like most Americans) the dark skinned, smaller Hass avocado. (Side note: the Hass avocado tree was the first tree to ever receive a patent in the U.S.) Avocados grow like it's their job here, which is awesome, because they're awesome, and some of the Hass dark, rough skinned ones grow here, but I also see a lot of the larger, softer, lighter skinned ones, as featured below.

Yeah, so me holding a mango isn't really that exotic. Well, whatever, you're stuck reading this post this far, so you may as well keep on trucking. Growing up in Iowa, mangoes weren't exactly something I saw every day. I ate a lot of them in China (the world's number two mango producer-India's got number one by a landslide) but they were always considerably smaller, like half this size, and very yellow. But here, where they grow so prolifically they cover the ground like leaves in some areas, many of the mangoes are purple, red, green, orange, and yellow. And they are considerably larger than the ones I have seen anywhere else.

Below you see some bananas on steroids, right? Well, from what I've gathered, that's about right. I felt better when my host mom stated that she had never seen these corpulent bananas before, considering she grew up in the region, and well, has been cooking and eating Costa Rican food for a few more years than I. There is a popular dish here called patacones, which are green plantains cut a certain way and fried. It really sounded like my host was calling these things platacones, but he's a big time mumbler and non-enunciater, so maybe he was saying patacones, and this type of plantain is just named for the dish it's used for, or maybe they're called platacones. Either way, they need to get on a diet.

This next one is the most mysterious. I've had it about three or four times, and it's delicious. And it's not tamarind. Although it looks very similar to tamarind, and grows on a tree just like tamarind does, it's not. Inside of the pod, which grows on a tree that seems fairly common here, are a line of seeds-approximately six to ten. The seeds are hard and jet black-but are surrounding by a very soft, stringy, white flesh, which is sweet, smooth, and a pleasure to chew off the seed-which is then spit out. If anybody's got any clues, my little bit of googling wasn't able to solve the problem. Oh, yeah, I've been told it's called guaba, what we call guava is guayaba in Spanish (in Costa Rican Spanish v and b are indistinguishable), but I've been unable to google anything that confirms this. I also, could've heard my host sister wrong (very large possibility).

Update!!! Jonathan, an English teacher at the night school who I really enjoy working with, didn't know what guaba was in English when I asked him. But when I then said that no one seems to know, he was all about solving the problem (my kind of guy) and with about 20 minutes of work on his smart phone he had found out that the plant above is Inga feuilleei, or the ice-cream bean. So, there it is kids.

Costita Ricilla

It wouldn’t and doesn’t make much sense to judge a country by its size. There are great countries that are small, and pretty miserable countries that are big. Costa Rica is a pretty small country, coming in as number 128 of about 200 countries in size, with it’s 51,100 square kilometers. It’s smaller than West Virginia and bigger than Maryland, a fact that may be helpful if you live back East. But, either way, it’s country that can be comfortably crossed east-west or north-south in a day. I have no idea whether the size of the country has anything to do with the way people talk, but well, looks like I’ve wasted a few sentences suggesting it. But, what this sloppy introduction is trying to bring about is that the thing I first noticed, and continually notice about the way Costa Ricans talk is that they make everything smaller.

In Spanish, there are three main diminutive suffixes: -ito, –illo, and –ico. Because almost all Spanish nouns end in either o or a (depending on the noun gender (a mostly useless grammar component-if you ask me)), you just replace the o in each of the suffixes if the noun is feminine. Before coming here, I had pretty much just seen these diminutives used to express that something was quite small (exactly what it should be used for) or to make something sound cute. It is also often added to the noun when asking for a favor-just like we say, “can you do me a tiny favor” or “can you do me a little favor”. But, when I got here, it was like every darn thing in this country was small. I noticed this mostly because it was troublesome. Because it’s a suffix, it changes the actual word-instead of just putting a modifying word next to it. I got over it pretty quickly and now am cognizant of listening for and expecting the –ito or –illo to be added to almost everything.

Due to my only other experience in a Spanish speaking country being in Spain, I have no idea if this is unique to Costa Rica or not. I don’t really know why they do it. It could be that everyone is just trying to be super polite, but if so, by everyone doing it all the time, it no longer becomes polite and loses its meaning. (Do we think that I’m overanalyzing things here? maybe). I tend to think that they don’t actually think that everything is little and cute, especially when it’s used for things that aren’t really that small. Obviously, as it’s the way they talk Costa Ricans don’t notice it, and I’ve never brought it up with any Tico. But, I can’t help but think that it’s not just them all trying to be polite, but might have to do with the country’s size and so many Costa Ricans roots in small towns (urbanization has only happened very recently). That’s a big assumption, but I’m a big thinker that environmental/natural surroundings have a big effect on language. I’m thinking this post might be a huge bore, but to me, language differences like this are super interesting-and are a good reminder that I always need to say “we don’t say it that way where I’m from, but other people may say that” when students ask about some English phrase.

(Picture is of some host cousins swimming in Rio Sarapiqui during Holy Week vacation).