So today I gave another art class, and in the afternoon went to the Casa Materna sat around for an hour waiting with a psychologist for a meeting to start, only one participant arrived so it was a no go. The art class was a blast. The previous one hadn’t gone so well. Trying to get 11 year old boys to sit down and paint shades and tones.
Yesterday was much more interesting. I was in one of the rural communities, where I have the only remnants of a functioning youth group. Myself and the five girls met to plan a class about “How to make a good decision” which we were going to give in the high school.
I’m not going to lie, I was highly skeptical. I thought it was a highly condescending topic, and to compound the problem I have absolutely no Spanish vocabulary to tackle the topic. I can talk all day about pregnancy, the stages of pregnancy, warning signs of complications, HIV/AIDS, the importance off vaccinations, and nutrition all day long, but this topic. Na-uh.
We had the class in second year in the high school, the students aged from 14 to 15. In the main activity we had the class of 45 students break into 6 groups. Each group was given a scenario to think about, come up with your options, and choose one. For example one card said something like “you and your friends are out at a fiesta. They are drinking beers, but you don’t want to because they always make you feel sick. Your friends insist that you drink, otherwise you’re not a ¨Real Man¨ what do you do?” Maybe the students didn’t understand the assignment, but none of the groups seemed able to complete the assignment.
In this specific scenario the boys decided that they needed to drink because they didn’t want to loose their friends. That was it. End of discussion. Not one of the 8 kids in the group could come up with a single other option. It took a lot of poking on the teachers’ part to get any conversation going. It seemed that one person would come up with one option, and that’s as far as they got.
I think the problem was that I took for granted that A. I’m older and with things like problem solving I’ve had more experience than your normal high school sophomore B. In school here its copy- paste- regurgitates- repeat; creative problem solving has no space or funding in the schools. C. I have minimally functioning Spanish. I’ve gotten really accustomed to the deer in the headlights look that I get all the time. The combination of the three, my arrogance in assuming (what’s the saying, when you assume you make and an ASS of U and ME) that this was easy, and my lack of real understanding of their understanding, pretty much hindered the activity. I caught up after class with one of the teachers who was participating, and she said it went really well, that I just need to learn the vocab (damn Spanish! You think after a year I’d have this figured out). So maybe if I can organize, and maybe learn to break the steps down into more basic steps I can maybe reach at least a couple of the 45 students, and that alone I feel, could give me some more meaning to my being here.