S-P-E-L-L

With huge thanks to my coworkers Beth D. and Marlene R., I've had something very productive going on in site ever since after the 15 day holiday in July. They had the grand idea to try to put together a spelling bee (in English of course-as we're TEFL volunteers) in various schools across the country. They found some information from Peace Corps volunteers that had done them in other countries and put together guidelines, word lists, and sent out information to volunteers. I was able to get the sixth and fifth grade teachers to let me come into their classrooms a few times a week for a month. It was tough at first, both with the kids seeing the time I came to class as the time to screw around, and with the English teacher at the elementary school having not done a great job of teaching the kids the alphabet. So, instead of starting with trying to spell words from memory, we started with trying to correctly pronounce the letters. But, I shortened the word list to seventy words, and with flashcards and persistence was able to make some progress. 

(me with all the students and the English teacher)

At the high school, I worked with the English teacher to identify some of the better students in English or those with lots of interest and formed a group of eleven or twelve students. We met twice a week for a month as well. The group wasn't always constant, as sometimes the students couldn't get permission to leave class, and shockingly, shockingly indeed some of the students said they were going to spelling practice but would skip out and head to town or to the woods. But, a committed group of students did a great job learning the words and had a positive attitude each week as I brought more and more words for them to learn. 

(a student grabs scratch paper to write his word before spelling it)

So, towards the end of August I arranged a spelling bee at the elementary school and the high school. The elementary school bee was a bit rough, for two reasons. The first was that I didn't have a whole lot of support from the principal or English teacher, the sixth grade teacher was helpful, but got called to meet with the principal just before I was ready to begin. So, I was both managing the behavior of thirty five or so sixth and fifth graders that decided to participate in the spelling bee and trying to run the spelling bee. It went okay, but due to so many students having such a poor background in English that my few sessions just couldn't overcome, a lot of students went out in the first or second round. I was down to the five or six students that I thought I would be down to (minus one unfortunate first round exit) by the third round. By the fourth I had just three students (which worked out great-because that's how many I would be taking to regionals) and by the sixth round one student had won. 

(handing the certificate and prize to the 1st place winner)

The high school bee went much better, both because I was just working with a small group, and because the teacher at the high school was more helpful in planning it with me. So, we had some treats for the kids and parents (two moms showed up!), the counselor and teacher were there watching, as well as José, one of my bosses-who was passing by that afternoon-so I contacted him and he worked his schedule around coming. The audience gave it a good atmosphere as well as the fact that two students had studied quite well, and although after five rounds only the two of them remained, they went until the 11th round until one of them committed an error.

Soon, I'll post about how my elementary school winners did at the regional bee! 

Ask the American

Two of the Peace Corps' three goals have to do with sharing-sharing American culture in the country in which a volunteer serves and sharing that country's culture with friends and family back in the States. I'm sure back in the '60s it was all about sharing the American values of freedom of expression and of the markets, as opposed to the principles espoused by the Soviet Union. While there are occasionally chances to share about some of America's great attributes (diversity, freedom of expression, great infrastructure, an entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit), more often than not I end up sharing about much more quotidian details of American life (or at least American life as known by me). Even more often than any of this, I get asked questions about the United States that are hard to answer without a lot of explanation. Many of these questions are hard to answer because the US is so diverse. When I lived in Jiangsu Province in China, which has over 99% of the population of the same ethnicity, people didn't like my long answer as to what a 'normal' American looks like. These long answers often tests my listener's patience, but more than that leaves them wondering whether I have any clue what I'm talking about. Added on to these simple questions that don't have simple answers are often very obscure questions. In a country like Costa Rica, which has less people than the Houston area, it's not that hard to know all the really famous people in the country. Yet, for an American, there are easily more than a few world famous Americans I know little or nothing about. Needless to say, again, people doubt whether I'm really American or criticize my ignorance about my country. 

The other day, within about an hour, I received two questions from my host family that were worth writing down-mostly because they both left me thinking about them far after I had finished answering them. The first question occurred when JuanCarlos, the husband of my host mom's cousin's daughter and my next door neighbor, had an English question for me. He came into my room with a piece of paper on which was written: "please rejoin group at the embankment." I went straight into it, and did my best job to translate it-the only problem being that I wasn't quite sure how to translate embankment. In checking later, I realized I didn't really know exactly what an embankment was in English. Either way, I gave it my best shot, and Juan Carlos seemed to understand exactly what I meant. I hadn't a clue why he wanted this translated. I asked him, and when he explained for a "war genre video game" I immediately understood. Granted, there are students that want to learn English to communicate with English speakers in order to get a good job. Yet, this afternoon, the culture sharing needed of me was to figure out where to go in a video game. 

Later that same night, as we were watching Primer Impacto, a highly entertaining news program made in the US for Latin Americans living in the US, but shown throughout Latin America, they mentioned something that had been posted to Twitter. This prompted my host dad to ask what it was and then my host mom asked which was better Twitter or Facebook. Both my host parents have Facebook accounts, and are pretty active users. Hopefully you see the problem with this question, but I'll explain it nonetheless. As Twitter and Facebook serve similar, but different, purposes they can't really be compared so simply as one being better than the other. That's more or less how I answered-as my most mom cut in once or twice trying to get me to declare one as better than the other. My host mom and dad are pretty aware people, they've both worked in other countries, and although not very well educated, have been around the block once or twice. Yet, questions like this have happened more than once. I'm not really sure why questions like this get asked, or why people seem impatient with my explanation, but hey it's part of the job. 

Most wonderful about these two questions was that the impetus to my host dad's question about Twitter was that he had heard that it was where a photo of Sofia Vergara's thong could be seen-due to a wardrobe malfunction at the Emmys-and thus wanted to get involved with Twitter.