Power Outages and Recycled Instruments

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It’s been a while since I’ve updated, but I haven’t been very interesting lately. School has been crazy with the first marking period ending and grades/ other stuff being due last week, plus getting ready for “Culture Day” next week (my “leadership position” at school is Event Planner, along with one other teacher, which means I’m left to plan/ run around like a crazy person every time there’s a school event).

As a quick throwback to my food blogging days, I feel it necessary to mention that I tried breadfruit the other day. The fruit is quite intimidating, since it's so huge, and yields a lot of food. The texture, once cooked, is similar to a potato. I made some of it into a kind of French fry, and some of it I boiled and mashed. The French fries were good with some garlic and ketchup and the mashed breadfruit reminded me more of oatmeal than mashed potatoes, but both were good.


Anyway, I’m back to living at the school, since my month of housesitting just ended. Being here is good because I have more time to stay after school and get work done, instead of focusing most of my energy on hitching a ride home with another teacher, but it’s also making it really easy to become a workaholic. This past weekend it rained most of the time, and then the power went out on Sunday as well, so I just went to my classroom and got a bunch of stuff done. Productive, but not quite a relaxing weekend.

Today the power was out for most of the morning at school, and it wasn’t even raining. In the US I’m pretty sure that a 2 hour power outage would be enough to end school for the day, but here we just kept teaching as best we could. The good thing about being in a school with barely any technology is that when there’s no power, it doesn’t make much of a difference. The only annoying things were that it was a bit dim to read, and the fact that we had no water (when the power goes out, so does the water). Yay for hand sanitizer!

I’ve begun to get (more) creative with my music classroom, and have started creating percussion instruments out of plastic bottles, cans, and stuff like that. It turns out that kids just really like playing “instruments”, including anything I start calling an instrument. I even came up with various techniques for playing the instruments to get different sounds out of them. Of course I would rather be using rhythm sticks and tambourines instead of water bottles and Pringles cans, but I’m making do with what I’ve got and so far the kids don’t really seem to notice or mind.

Time for the list! Things that happened at school that I found entertaining:

How you know you’re teaching in Central America: When you ask the kids to name fruits, the first ones they mention are mango, lychee, watermelon, and coconut. Like I said, my life isn’t too terribly interesting at the moment. I’ll take the little bits of entertainment that I can get.

During a quick dance party to celebrate a student’s birthday, I put on some swing music. All my little boys immediately grabbed each other and started doing the tango around the room.

I had to sub for the gym teacher last week, and taught the 2nd and 3rd graders a dance to “I like to Move It” from Madagascar. It was great.

I’ve figured out that a bunch of my 2nd graders (all boys) will try and play with my hair any chance they get. I guess I should be glad that they’re not feeling pressured into fitting gender stereotypes.

Well, that's about it. Hopefully this weekend will be nice so I can get to the beach or do something exciting.

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Photos

Sunset!
This has nothing to do with what I wrote about. It's just pretty.

Comments

[katie]

<3
i love you random little tidbits about your day, they make me smile :)

[Andi]

Expanding your horizons
Rachel, So good to hear you are getting to experience all kinds of different, interesting and challenging things. Sounds like music class is getting to be more fun. Hands-on music experiences are were it\'s at for little kids! I can only imagine what kind of culture shock you\'ll have when you come back to the states! I know after living in NC for 7 years, there were some of my perceptions that definitely changed! Yes, teaching can easily become a 24/7 kind of job because there are always things to research, figure out, and new ideas to cultivate. Have fun!!!