Orientation Week at the CEDEI School

In case you were wondering, I haven't been holding out on you. I decided after our training session on Monday that I was going to wait until training was done on Saturday and post about the whole week all at once. So now that it's Sunday I'll go through each training day's events, or at least the appropriate highlights.
Note: I revised this once, and when I went to publish there were problems with the internet connection. So if you find errors, it's because I don't feel like going back over the whole thing again.

Monday - Nothing. We didn't start until Tuesday.

Tuesday - Sucked.

Wednesday - I'm kidding. No, Tuesday really did suck, but I'm going to explain why. It didn't help, for starters, that Leslie and I saw our bus leaving from the Feria Libre as we arrived to get on it, having just made the 20-minute walk to the station. So we had to wait for the next #27 bus and we were worried we were going to show up late. We were supposed to get to the CEDEI School at 8:30, but when we walked up to the gate at around 8:33 we were among the first 5 of the 24 people to arrive. We didn't really get started until around 9:15, which was the beginning of the end for the Type-A personalities on staff (aka Leslie). We're still adjusting to third-world timing and organization; the only reason I would say something like this is that Ecuadorians say it of themselves. We covered very little pertinent information and whenever the person leading the meetings wasn't saying anything that concerned the international staff, she just went on in Spanish and never explained what she was saying for those of us on the inter team who don't understand Spanish yet. I can say "she" because no "hes" ever led anything; the only two guys teaching at the school are me and Jonatan, the new cuencano psychologist who works with the special needs students. We had been told the week before that there would be a break for a morning snack and also that we would have time in the afternoon to eat lunch. Bullshit. We went straight on from 9ish to 2ish and then we were told to go home, with no food nor time to eat the food Leslie and I (really just Leslie) prepared the night before. We came home totally frustrated and confided our complaining in each other. We decided to wait before we let our frustration be known, thinking that maybe the people in charge didn't have enough time to prepare and/or that it would get better as the week went on.

Wednesday, really - And it did get better and more organized, though those of us on the inter team with teaching credentials are still feeling like the whole school just flies by the seat of its pants. Wednesday officially could not be a bad day starting on the way to the Feria Libre when we saw a random cuencano wearing an Emory sweatshirt. I got his attention and asked him where he got the sweatshirt (in Spanish, of course) and he just said "un amigo." Either he was just shocked and scared because the biggest man he'd ever seen had just been yelling at him to get his attention or he really did get it from a friend, who would have had to been Paul Coloma, the son of the family we're staying with and the reason we're in Cuenca. He was my boss senior year at Emory; I was an RA and he was the building coordinator and we became good friends. When I told him that I / Leslie and I was / were looking for teaching jobs in Spanish-speaking America he told us that if we could find a job in his hometown we could live with his parents. But I digress. Not only did we see a cuencano in an Emory sweatshirt, we also saw some guys pitching dimes. Dad used to tell me stories of his childhood, in which he and his friends pitched pennies. I don't remember exactly how the numbers work out, but I know he left for school every day with either one or two pennies for milk money and if he won a couple more pennies he could get a doughnut with his milk that morning on the way to school. To play, everyone stands an equal distance from a walk and whoever can "pitch" their penny and land it nearest to the corner where the wall meets the ground wins all the pennies. These guys by the Feria Libre were itching dimes, seeing who could land them in or nearest to a crack in the sidewalk. I guess the comparison is that for two dimes a cuencano can get an humita at the market. For gringos they cost $.25-$.30 depending on how good your Spanish is and how fearsome you can look. I can look pretty fearsome.
Honestly, nothing that happened in the training sessions at school on Wednesday mattered as much as the two things we witnessed on the way, though we did learn some important stuff about how the school works and how they plan programs. I inflated one of my dodgeballs at school, and none of the nationals had every seen anything like it before. Everyone who wanted to see it dribbled it like a basketball or juggled it like a soccer ball and asked what it was for. The answer was of course a bunch of games they'd never heard of before because you can't play any of them without a dodgeball. I'm especially excited to get to teach the kids games like dodgeball and foursquare because I now know that they've never even heard of them. Unless they saw that stupid Ben Stiller movie.

Thursday - Leslie wanted to try walking up the big hill to school from an earlier bus stop in order to walk on a paved road instead of walking along the even part of the hill on bumpy dirt roads at the later stop. It didn't take long to realize this was a mistake. We spent most of the day at school talking about how to incorporate special needs kids into our classes. Simone, a Swiss national who now teaches at Wisconsin-Whitewater (thank you for finally beating Mount Union, btw) caught it before I did, but Ecuador is 25 years behind the rest of the Western world when it comes to working with people with special needs. The main thing about it that bothered me was that all of the strategies bottled up all the kids into the "special needs" group and treated them the same, claiming that the same activities and interventions will work with all of them. That's just stupid. I can't think of a swear word that would appropriately emphasize how stupid that is, so I'm just going to call it plain stupid. One thing that surprised me, though, was that the teachers who were at the school the past year all said that all the kids get along well regardless of whether or not they have developmental differences. That made me very happy, especially after working at the MRDD Center in Springfield where I constantly had to keep kids from getting into conflicts with each other.

There's something I would like to explain here; I'll get back to this past Thursday afterward. This is my explanation for why people with special needs deserve different treatment according to their particular individual abilities (I can't stress enough that every person should be considered an individual before anything else, particularly within the context of their own culture and society). It starts with an explanation of the general idea of rights. There are two kinds of rights: negative and positive. I really don't like using these words to classify them, because negative sounds bad when negative rights are actually easier to respect and more feasible to protect. Rights are classified as either Negative or Positive according to whether or not one's society is required to act in order to respect one's right. Negative rights do not require society to do anything in order for them to be respected. In fact, most of them require that society do nothing. Any right that fits this model: "Leave me alone so I can ______," is a negative right. Some examples are the right to free speech, the right the bear arms and the right to marry the person of your choice (though this one is tricky because that person also has to want to marry you). Positive rights are rights that require one's society to do something for him or her (peoples and societies can have rights too, but I'm not talking about those right now; I'm only clarifying all these things because I know at least a few of the people who read this blog enjoy studying Philosophy). Some examples are the rights to nourishment and education. Somebody's gotta provide that food and that schooling for you in order that your rights are respected.
The reason I want to explain this is to say that people with special needs have rights equal to those of any other person. The difference in treatment comes from the fact that people with certain special needs require more from society in order that their Positive rights can be appropriately respected. This is a major issue in the way the American (USA) public thinks about people with special needs. We call them people with special needs because they require special attention from society in order to have their rights respected to the same degree as everyone else's.

Thursday, again - I'm sorry for the digressions. I hate divisions between peoples, like "special needs" people and everybody else, but sometimes it's necessary, at least until we can find a better way to do things. So the important thing that came out of the day's discussions of incorporating special needs students into our teaching that concerned me was that I learned that I will be conducting gym class for blind kids. From what I've heard, each class will have a group of kids who want to compete and play contact sports and a group of kids who would rather pick flowers. My plan is to have two activities going at all times and let the kids pick which one they want to do. One will be a competitive activity and one will be more oriented towards kids who just want to goof off and play, and maybe also can't see.
Though in my opinion, the most important thing that came out of Thursday was an incredible discussion that happened by accident. The national staff went through an inventory of questions concerning how they felt in comparison to each other and the school in general. We all would have done it together, but they were the only ones who had any experience teaching at the school so they were the only ones who went through the questions. Afterwards their answers were explained to us in English. All us internationals were all thinking to ourselves that it was very interesting that they never felt that they were any different from each other when it came to their relations with the school. I dunno, maybe they were rushing through to go home or maybe they really thought of themselves as equals. When it was explained to us that none of them thought their skill sets for working with children and in groups were any different, Simone called bullshit. Not in so many words, of course, but I guarantee you they were equally blunt. What came next was incredibly revealing of the sentiments of the national staff and of cuencanos in general. Whenever cuencanos - and in my experience hispanic people of any kind from any place - express that something is different from something else, it is always implied that one thing is better than the other. In their minds, two things can't be "different" without being qualified as better or worse than each other. So of course none of them felt like their skills were different, because they were all good friends and they didn't feel like any of them were any worse or any better than any others. This evolved into a discussion of the closed-offishness of cuencanos - reflective in my experience of the closed-offishness of hispanic people of any kind from any place though I have heard otherwise of Caribbeans. Cuencanos never branch out of their own social groups. They all marry their high school sweethearts and think down upon people from other high schools. In my experience, and I feel this very strongly about Spain and think I'm sensing it here, this leads to materialsim. You can mark yourself as a member of your social group by wearing lots of jewelry and nice clothes inasmuch as you can afford them. We played a game earlier in the week where any time you "lost" you had to put a piece of jewelry in the middle of the circle we were all sitting in. There were rings and earrings and hair clips coming out of everywhere. Except from the internationals. One girl put in her shoe, another was lucky enough to have her sunglasses nearby, and I was lucky enough to be wearing my pen over my ear. Another unfortunate observation I've made that leads me to think about materialism is that there are other things that give away the financial status of the national teacher's families. They're mostly all our age, by the way, and still living with their parents. They're not all from the same financial bracket, but unless you got to know them you wouldn't be able to tell. I don't like saying things like this about people, but these observations were a part of my experiencing the discussion that the national teachers had about how closed-offish cuencanos are and how in the past ten years Cuenca has slowly become more other-friendly. I want you to be able to experience things as closely to how I did as is made possible by a blog and my writing skills. Still, if I didn't have Leslie and I'm grateful every day that I do, I don't think any of these girls would date me even if we were interested in each other.
The last thing that came out of Thursday was that Prisila, one of the national teachers who lives close to us, gave us a ride home and offered to give us rides to school. That cut our morning prep time by thirty minutes which we really appreciate.

Friday - We spent almost all day setting up the monthly plans for the year. We "visit" a country every month and "re-acquaint" ourselves with a region of Ecuador every month, as well as having nature-friendly themes and activities. My only particular responsibility is to provide visuals of Mongolia in June. I hope I can find a good video of the stuff some of the Mongolian tribes can do on horseback; they can stand on top of a running horse and hit a fox-size target with a bow and arrow. It's crazy. We spent a little time in the afternoon getting the classrooms ready for next year, and made plans to come in Saturday morning to finish the job. This was something we'd already planned on and was already in the "itinerary." Like we had an itinerary, but we were told the week before we'd be coming in on Saturday.