Earth Day and Paper-Based Frustration

We celebrated Earth Day at school with a nice dramatization. A group of kids prepared a presentation about caring for the planet. Each student represented something: water, dirt, plants, animals, human beings, and Earth. Each kid said which they represented and built off the other, saying they needed the preceding living or non-living things to survive. Then the Earth said, "They all live within me. If you don't care for me, all of us will disappear." Then they all jumped up and finished strong: "Let's take care of our planet!" Objectively, it was fantastic, getting the kids involved in an important day, spreading a good message.

Yet I couldn't help but shake my head and grunt throughout the whole presentation.

As I mention in other posts, I'm often shanghaied into doing menial tasks. As always, I try to make it clear to my counterparts that my purpose is to teach English and improve methodologies used by teachers. Their priorities, however, are much more short-term. Namely, silly little presentations during assemblies and school bulletin boards. So last week, I spent most of my time either preparing the cardboard cut-outs used during the assembly or preparing the bulletin board. This bulletin board is a responsibility that rotates among all the elementary school teachers. April was my counterpart's month. We put together the display on April 19th or so. The other teachers made fun of us the whole time. "Wait, it's still March! HAHA! It's super early!"

So throughout the whole prep for this, I shook my head, thinking, Wow. I went to college for four years, only to revert to coloring, cutting and pasting for a living.


You know what, though? I killed it. What a sweet Earth! And look at that stencil work! That right there is tracing from a computer screen.


In a sense, this was good for the planet. I reused an old cardboard box. And look how nice the little pictures turned out.

The overwhelming simplicity of my daily "work" is a recurring frustration. Lack of resources (money or otherwise) means that people often go the old-school way, doing things by hand, as printing everything is both expensive and still considered out of the ordinary. So tests and quizzes are mainly written on the board for students to copy. Essays are hand-written. Posters are often the only visual aid used in classes. I've been trying my hardest to drag the English teachers into the 21st century, but it's a slow process. Even if the school has computers, people aren't accustomed to using them...or even know how. But I digress. The point is that my work sometimes, nay, often, feels like Kindergarten.

As a matter of fact, I just spent all afternoon coloring in sheets of color-coded keyboards that I plan to use for a basic typing class I'm giving to upper elementary students. I plan to laminate the sheets in order to let kids practice the proper hand position of typing, since they're aren't enough computers for everyone to work, even if in pairs. So that took a while, as do most things I want to turn out well. I finish each project and hope that it will lead to something better, a moment with a teacher or some students. I try to focus on what the project might lead to. But it always seems to lead to more of these silly projects. If it's not coloring keyboards, it's making flash cards, writing, cutting, laminating with clear plastic tape, or making posters for teachers and students.

I try to get the teachers to take the initiative to prepare their own materials. Getting my other elementary school teacher to sit down and complete all the steps in the process of making her own flash cards LITERALLY took the entire year. Panamanians often have so little faith in their abilities that I had to baby her through DRAWING PICTURES AND COLORING. This is a grown woman we're talking about. This is the exact same problem I face with kids: they assume they can't draw (or do many things) because they don't try. Someone, usually the teacher, takes their notebook and draws a picture for them. So something as simple as making a poster publicizing a school activity is something outsourced to the Peace Corps volunteer whose "artistic ability" trumps that of most of the school. Why? Because he's the only one willing to sit down for more than five minutes to make a nice poster. Or color-coded practice keyboard. Or flash-cards. Now I know I don't have to do a lot of these silly little projects, but the kids respond to them. I feel like the teachers should catch on and try and start doing similar projects themselves, for the sake of their students.

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I ask myself a serious question and am still curious about the answer. Let's say I do this Peace Corps Fellowship program (Teacher's College at Columbia University in NYC) that would lead me to become an elementary Bilingual Education teacher. Is this--arts and crafts and horribly juvenile endeavors--what the future holds in store for me in the teaching profession? I really hope not, because although I'm a sucker for tangible results of my hard work, I'd really prefer to not have my success measured by a pretty, colorful display of moderately artistic, but altogether meaningless paper and plastic.
Harumph.