Poetry analysis

This and the next blog post are going to offer two distinctly different accounts of my job. The words help and support are can be pretty widely interpreted, and thus, my job has plenty of variety, which is great. Now, usually, people want to hear the bad news first, but as my last blog post was borderline querulous about my schools, I’m going to start with the good news.

Although it started out with a very typically for a meeting in Costa Rica-postponed twice without too much notice, Jonathan, a teacher at the night school came over to my house and picked me up-well actually Yendry, his girlfriend/common-law wife-he’s been chilling on getting his driver’s license. We got to their very nice house and Jonathan and I went into the TV room for me to help him with his homework. Jonathan, like about half of my teachers, isn’t done with college yet, so he takes classes on the weekends at a university branch in Guapiles, the nearest city. Due to an imbalance in supply/demand for teachers, although the Ministry of Education would ideally like all high school teachers to have graduated from college, in rural areas like Sarapiqui (my canton) that’s not the case.

I’m using Jonathan’s name because I doubt he’d mind, and he’s a great guy. He’s always happy to have me in class, and often will invite me to co-teach with him when I’m in class helping him. Some other teachers have instead tried to get me to just teach an hour or half-hour of their classes-which might be better for the students-but isn’t really developing their skills at all. But Jonathan is great about asking me to explain some point he doesn’t understand, or to have me explain the pronunciation-and then he’ll explain meaning or usage in Spanish. He has a lot of interest in English and has actually (although rarely) taken me up on my incessant offers to look over his tests or handouts (and before he prints the tests-something some other teachers haven’t seem to caught on to). So, I was more than happy to help him with his homework, because although it doesn’t really directly benefit his students-it certainly will improve his English abilities-which will make him a more confident and competent teacher. (Yes, I am well aware that being good at something doesn’t make one a good teacher-don’t even think about commenting.)

Our first challenge was figuring out what the assignment was. The syllabus and paper title said he was to write a reaction paper to Robert Frost’s poem “The Pasture”. Except that the rest of the assignment instructions and everything that the professor had been telling them in class were instructions for writing a poem analysis. So, we went with that. It seemed to me that his professor wanted all the students to just expound upon his interpretation of the poem (which reminded me of how literature analysis classes worked at good old JSTU). After Jonathan told me a few times about how the professor said that this meant that, I had to roughly tell him a Paul McCartney quote, "We write songs. We know what we mean by them. But in a week someone else says something about it, and you can't deny it. ... You put your own meaning at your own level to our songs.” Which perfectly sums up what I feel about people ‘knowing’ what a poem, song, or book means. So eventually I was able to help him out, by having him answer prompt questions I would give to elicit some analysis of the various elements in the poem. Along with some help from the Internet, I was able to put him on really good footing to write the paper. I also was able to help contextualize and explain words from the poem, and other words related to the assignment.

After looking at the syllabus, I’m especially excited about getting the call for help when they get to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Also included in the evening was a delightful dinner and conversation with Jonathan and Yendry. His girlfriend works as a regional assessor for the public pre school programs, and we mostly talked about some of Jonathan’s problem students-it was considerably more invigorating conversation than I normally have during meals here, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I could certainly get used to this getting picked up, dropped off, and fed dinner (fresh pineapple juice included!) in exchange for helping with some English homework. On one hand I’d hope Jonathan gets better at writing papers on his own, but mostly I’m hoping he keeps asking for help.