#natalieu

I have officially been home from Costa Rica for 48 hours. It doesn’t actually seem real that I was gone for six weeks; it just feels like I was gone for a long weekend. Then I think about my time in Costa Rica and realize what a different person I am. I am so much more confident in myself and my ability to survive in a foreign country.

Towards the end of my time in Costa Rica I realized how much I had learned about the country. In Spanish there are two different words for “to know” the verb “saber” which is to know information and the verb “conocer” which is to know in a familiar way. Towards the end of the trip I finally felt comfortable saying “Yo conozco Costa Rica.” What made me realize that I really conozco Costa Rica was one time on the bus. Leila and I had gotten on the correct bus at a new stop we had never used before. Then a few stops later some people who did not look like the typical Ticos got on the bus. The bus costs 265 colones (about 50 cents) and one of the boys tried to pay with a $5 bill. We immediately recognized that this wasn’t going to work well since the busses don’t have change for United States dollars on board. Luckily there were other people in his party who had colones for him to pay with. After they took their seats in front of us we were able to assist them in getting off the bus and figuring out where they were going (they had already gotten lost once). This experience caused me to reflect on how at one point, I was exactly like them, I had no clue what bus to get on or how they worked, and by that time I was able to give directions and explain how to use the busses.

From that experience I gained so much self-confidence. I went into Costa Rica knowing almost nothing about the country and remembering almost none of my high school Spanish. I took eight days of Spanish classes and was shown around my immediate area for three days, and then Leila and I were on our own to figure out the country. I think we did an amazing job of figuring everything out! The first time we took a bus by ourselves we took a bus going to wrong direction, but that was the only time that we got lost. There were other times when we took busses that we going along routes that we were not expecting, but we always could get ourselves home without another bus. Only getting really lost once showed me that I could go somewhere that I had limited knowledge of and figure out how to get where I needed to go.

Finally, I became so much more confident in my ability to learn language. I have always struggled to learn languages; I struggle to remember the vocabulary most of all. Unfortunately the vocabulary is the most important part, if you have the vocabulary, you can typically get your point across, but without vocabulary, grammar won’t help you. Somehow I managed to pick up enough vocabulary and mime my way through six weeks of Spanish. Of course, people in Costa Rica knew a good amount of English and would speak to me in English, and in the schools I let them, but when out in town, I would always challenge myself to speak Spanish to everyone. Now I can do pretty much everything I need to in order to survive in Spanish!  

Spending four weeks in a Costa Rican school has been a wonderful experience for me. It allowed me to experience how schools in another country are different. It showed me how difficult it can be to teach English as a second language and how to teach it effectively. And perhaps most importantly it showed me what is important to me as a teacher.

I have had a very skewed experience of the school system in Costa Rica. For the past four weeks I have been in a private school in Costa Rica. It is not really fair to compare their private schools to our public schools. I feel like I have experienced different types of public schools in the US from my experiences being a student to my experiences as a teacher. I do not feel this way about Costa Rica, I have experienced one school that I have been told is not representative of the schools in Costa Rica. That being said, I can compare what I have heard and experienced in schools in Costa Rica and the United States.

During my time in school in Costa Rica, two of the four weeks that I was there for were test weeks. This was something that was very similar and different to the education system in the US at the same time. At first glance it is very similar. These tests are supposed to be everything that the students have learned over the past trimester, very similar to standardized tests in the US. Everything else pauses for these tests. Nothing new can be learned during these two weeks. Students should not be doing or learning anything outside of their tests. The school has fun activities for the students to do between tests to let them relax. This reminded me very much of when I was in high school and we had HSAs where the entire school would stop so that we could take tests. What makes these tests different from standardized tests in America was that the teachers made the tests based off of what they had taught instead of teaching what was on the test. My mentor teacher had kept very specific records of how many lessons she had spent teaching each subject and was careful to create the test in proportion to what she had taught. This made the tests seem more like a final exam rather than standardized test.

Another thing that I noticed between these school systems was the teacher-student relationships. In the US it is always obvious that teachers care deeply for their students. They are willing to do almost anything for them to ensure that they are able to succeed. Teachers in Costa Rica love their students an equal amount, but show their affection in a very different way. In my private school, teachers were very close with the students and did not have as much of a professional relationship with their students as a personal one. Many students had my mentor teacher’s cell phone number. When she left for a three week vacation all of the students had better contact with her than I did. There was one day when I was in a sixth grade class the students were trying to make sentences in the past perfect in English. One of the students said that Teacher Ana loved him. She agreed with him and kissed him on the top of his head before correcting him about how to use the past perfect. Teachers in the US are cautioned against hugging their students, no less kissing them. I also worked with a male teacher in this school, male teachers in the US have to continuously think about how their actions could be viewed and whether they could be viewed as sexual harassment. This male teacher seemed to have none of that fear. I saw many students come to him complaining of various injuries, if it was an upper body injury he had no problems lifting a student’s shirt to see exactly what the problem was and apply appropriate medical care. In the US I would not lift a student’s shirt for fear of it being considered sexual harassment. These differences may be because I am in a very small private school where most of the families have been with the school for years and know the teachers and administration very well.

Natalie- Costa Rica Blog #8

I am one of the worst people at making friends. I am very introverted and can be painfully shy. I don’t like talking to new people and social interactions exhaust me. Because of these things I struggle to make friends and often only have a few close friends. I usually make friends with people who I am forced to interact with. This is basically what happened to me in Costa Rica. The people that I would consider to be friends are my classmates, one of the teachers at my school, and one of my host brothers.

I was lucky enough to come into the program with a friend already which was wonderful, but Leila and I have become much closer through this experience. There are very few things that we do separately now. Whenever I tell my host mom that I am going out to do things, her first questions is “con Leila?” The answer is always yes. The other classmate that I have become friends with is a wonderful girl named Samantha. She also graduated last May and is studying to be a teacher. The three of us were really just meant to be friends. She was the only student taking classes at ICADS when Leila and I were taking classes, so she was someone who was able to teach us about San Jose and how to get around Costa Rica and we were there so she wasn’t at a school by herself. The three of us have become almost inseparable and I honestly can’t imagine traveling without them. We even have a special order to take selfies in that maximizes our abilities to get ourselves and important landmarks in the picture.

My next friend I couldn’t have gotten through teaching without, and he wasn’t even my mentor teacher! My mentor teacher went on a trip for three of the four weeks that I was there and I was working with a substitute. The other English teacher became my work friend. He is fantastic because I don’t feel confident enough in my Spanish to participate in teacher lounge conversations in Spanish, so after we eat, we will go downstairs and supervise the kids during recreo and talk in English. He also translates everything for me. There was a story teller who came to our school and started telling this story. I didn’t understand a little of what was happening. I understood that Juan Ma was the king, and that was about it. Then the story teller looked right at me and told me that I was the queen. So I got up in front of the entire school and acted in a language that I didn’t really understand. Thank goodness Juan Ma was the king because it meant that he was next to me the entire time to whisper translations and what we needed to be doing.* This was our real bonding moment where I knew that we would be friends. Even though we haven’t done anything outside of school, I feel like I would consider him to be one of my closest friends here in Costa Rica.

My final friend I am just getting to know and am very upset that I am going to be leaving him at the end of the week. My host family actually had two students staying here while I was here, I was here for six weeks and for the first four the other student was in Nicaragua doing field research, but then on the fourth weekend I was here I came back from a day out and met Julio. We bonded pretty quickly because both of us speak Spanish poorly and need it to be spoken slowly so we talk to each other in broken Spanglish. We also often work together to communicate our thoughts and the culture of the United States to our host family. When I first met him my Mami Tica introduced him as Julio. The first time that we went out together with my friends, I was introducing him to Sam, at the same exact moment I introduced him he said “HI, I’m Jaxon (pronounced Jackson).” Apparently my host family calls him Julio the way they call me Natalia because it is easier to say, but he didn’t think this was important information. Now he is Julio Jaxon to me and one day I will forgive him for not telling me his real name.

Even though I am awful at making friends, I have found a few friends who I hope to keep in touch with well into the future. Leila and I already plan to visit Sam in Wisconsin, and to make her visit us on the St. Mary’s River. Juan Ma and I will keep in touch on FB and he will keep me in practice with my Spanish. Hopefully Julio Jaxon and I will be able to keep in touch and have a strong friendship. Regardless of what happens in the future, these people have made my experience in Costa Rica what it has been and I wouldn’t change any of them for the world and am going to miss them terribly when I leave. I can’t believe I have less than a week left here!

I have seen an amazing amount of English taught in my placement in my two short weeks here in my school. I am teaching English grammar to grades 3rd through 6th, I have each class for 7 periods a week and each period is 40 minutes long, so each class gets about 4 and a half hours of English grammar every week. Then they have a separate class for English reading, 3rd through 6th grade also has this class for 7 periods a week. This means that in total my students are in English class for 9 hours a week. This is significantly more that students would be in Spanish class in the United States. When I was in elementary school, I would have a Spanish special once a week for 40 minutes. Even this was not normal, in every other elementary school I have been in, there has been no foreign language class.

Another thing that was amazing to me was the level of English proficiency expected from my students. In the United States, all of my Spanish classes were taught in English with a few select phrases in Spanish. Because of this experience, I was worried about teaching the classes. I know functional Spanish, enough to make a point and get around, but that is nowhere near enough to be able to teach a class or even bond with students. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the classes are taught almost only in English.

On my first day in the classroom, my teacher had to leave for a doctor’s appointment which meant that my first time in front of a class in Costa Rica was completely on my own. I was terrified. The teacher told me to just speak to them in English (I don’t think she realized how little Spanish I knew) and they might get frustrated but only explain in Spanish if they really had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I hoped and prayed that it wouldn’t come to that. I went in and spoke to them in English. There were a few things that I or other students had to translate, but overall, the students understood what I was saying and didn’t need me to translate into Spanish! The most shocking part was that these were my third graders. As I went to fourth, fifth, and sixth grade I realized how much more these students understand and can speak English.

The most challenging part of teaching English as a foreign language for me has been in the upper grades, especially sixth grade, is when I realize that I don’t know the English that they are learning. I can use the tenses correctly, but when asked what the tenses are or when to use them, I really don’t know. They are things that I have learned from hearing English all of my life and rarely having to think about what tense I am using or why I am using it. When you think about the tense and why you are using it, it actually gets really complicated and confusing. Even as a native speaker, I often consult the book to ensure that I am giving the students the correct answer!

I, through ups and downs, about how I feel about how much language I have learned. There are some days when I feel like I have made huge strides in how much Spanish I am able to understand and speak, and there are other days when I feel like I have lost language skills. Overall though, everyone tells me that my Spanish is improving.

The first two weeks that I was here in Costa Rica, I had Spanish class for four hours every morning. Well, almost every morning; the first week was Semana Santa (Holy Week) so we only have classes the first three days. During those two weeks I learned an amazing amount. All morning and evening I was only able to communicate in Spanish. In the mornings I would try to pick up as much vocabulary as I could because my teachers would be able to tell me unknown vocabulary, but once I got home it was a combination of charades and talking around different words. I always tried my hardest not to just look up words because I would forget what they meant almost immediately. The only times I would not be talking in Spanish was between about noon and four when I would be able to spend time with Leila and ICADS teachers would be teaching us things in English. This means that I was able to learn a lot of Spanish through pure exposure.

After that, I started in the schools where I have been for a week and a half now. At first I thought I was going to lose a lot of the Spanish skills I had just gained because surprise, surprise everything is in English. I am teaching English grammar to 3rd-6th grades, I assumed that the classes would be mostly in Spanish, but they are all almost only in English. The third grade needs more Spanish because they haven’t been exposed to as much English. All of the grades speak a surprising amount of English though, and the two teachers that I am working most closely with are fluent in English and so they talk to me almost solely in English.

I have still managed to learn a lot more Spanish. The kids LOVE to teach me Spanish phrases. Part of one class that I was teaching was dedicated to teaching me Tico-isms. One of my 5th graders taught me how to say “where’s the party at” (I don’t remember what it is, but it was not “donde esta la fiesta”) which my mentor teacher only translated for me after I had written it on the board. Apparently my kids think I need to go out more. The teacher’s lounge is also a great place for me to work on my Spanish. Even though a lot of the teachers speak at least basic English, they are all more comfortable in Spanish and speak Spanish to one another, so if I want to participate in or even just listen to the conversation I have to listen to and speak Spanish. I think this has been one ways that I have learned the most Spanish just because there is so much language going on around me and no one is slowing down for me. Although, Juan Ma will often stop and ask if I am understanding any of the conversation and if I’m not translate enough for me to catch up.

During this time though, I felt like I lost a lot of English language skills. All of a sudden when I am speaking in English I can’t come up with the word for the concept that I am thinking of. If someone is explaining a concept to me in Spanish, I will understand what they mean, but be completely unable to formulate the thought coherently in English. The worst is when in my 6th grade English grammar class the students ask me how to say something correctly in English and I honestly have no idea because it sounds weird no matter how I say it.

I started teaching on Monday and that was beyond crazy. I got there and everything was going well. I found out that I will be working with an English grammar teacher who teaches third through sixth grade. My mentor teacher wasn’t there yet because she doesn’t teach until the afternoon, but that wasn’t a big deal, I got to observe a third grade teacher teaching Spanish. I found out that teachers in my school are called “Teacher” and their first name. I followed most of the lesson and was really excited about that. Then the kids had a short recreo, which is basically their recess. What confused me was that the teacher said it was time for recreo and then left. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be watching the students or if leaving them alone was normal. After observing other classes I realized that it is normal to just leave the students and trust them to take care of themselves. This was very different for me and will take some time to adjust to. After that I was able to go and observe a first grade classroom during reading. That class looked very similar to what I was doing with my first graders when I left, they were working on phonics and the basics of reading sentences.

After that class, I got to meet my mentor and the English reading teacher who is really going to be more of my mentor over the next few weeks. The reason that I am with the grammar teacher is that next week, she is taking a leave of absence for her health. I will be taking over her classes with a sub (thank goodness the classes are almost exclusively in English!). This means that the reading teacher is going to be mentoring me, but I will be teaching different classes. They also told me that my teacher would not be there in the afternoon, so I was going to have the third graders to myself.

After this receo, I went to meet the fifth graders with the English reading teacher. The reading teacher asked if it was okay if he step out in the middle of class to talk to a parent. I told him it was fine, but I was secretly panicking. I knew we were going to be introducing poetry to the kids, but that was about it. When class started Teacher Juan was there and introduced me to the class and had me tell them about myself in English and then let them ask questions about me. Then he had to step out and the class had the chance to introduce themselves to me. They loved that, and I was very impressed with their English! When we finished, Teacher Juan wasn’t back yet, so I started talking with the students about music they liked and how songs are poems. They were pretty excited about the music conversation, but as soon as I mentioned poems (in Spanish) they were pretty unexcited. Luckily Teacher Juan came back then and it was time for lunch.

After lunch was when I gained a whole new respect for substitute teachers. Having 20 students that you don’t know, teaching a lesson that you didn’t plan, and not knowing any of the classroom expectations is terrifying and then of course I added not knowing the students native language very well. Needless to say, my months of work in classroom management was all gone within seconds. None of the things that I usually do to calm my class down worked. I got to a point rather quickly where I was just trying to make it through the two hours. They were continuing work on “this”, “that”, “these”, and “those”. In order to do that we had to go over numbers, everything I taught they seemed to understand well, I just had no control of the class.

Thus far I am really enjoying all of the differences between San Jose and Maryland. Only the fruit is better, the rest of the things I have noticed are just different, not better or worse. As I progress through this journey, I am sure that some things will seem better and worse about both countries, but I look forward to finding all of those things! Ciao!

After arriving in Costa Rica, I immediately noticed a few differences. The major difference for me is living in a city. In the United States, I live in Southern Maryland which is pretty rural. Here in Costa Rica, I am living in San Jose which is the capital of the country. The houses are much closer together, and by that I mean that my house has houses connected to it on three sides. My house isn’t huge, but it is big enough for the five of us living here. My room is bigger than the one in my apartment, so that’s a plus! I also have a bathroom to myself for the first time ever in my life! Here we throw toilet paper in the trashcan instead of the toilet because of the septic tank; that is really throwing me off and I forget all the time. I really hope I don’t overflow the septic tank!

Another huge difference between San Jose and Southern Maryland is transportation. Taking the bus is something that I have never really had the opportunity to do besides to and home from school. Now I am taking the bus often. I could take it to school every day, I take it to get downtown. Just having public transportation is something that is new to me. Then there is the fact that everything is very close, and most things are within walking distance. I can walk to the grocery store, I walk to school every day, and I can walk to Leila’s house. It takes a few extra minutes to walk than it would to drive, but I can’t drive here anyways, so it is necessary that I walk everywhere, but walking is something that is not possible at home.

The last major transportation difference is the way people drive here. It amazes me how close the cars come to hitting one another without actually touching one another. No one seems to follow traffic laws. The speed limit is posted, but that seems to be more of a suggestion since most people drive well above 20 kph (a little more than 12 mph) above the speed limit. Turn signals are not something that is widely used, knowing where people are going is a gamble. Most importantly, we have been told that pedestrians do not have the right of way again and again. While this is truer that in America, I have not seen it to the extent that it has been stressed to Leila and I. We thought that every time we crossed the street we would be putting our lives at risk, but it has not been like that. People will stop and let us cross the street, they have never come close to hitting us, and we have never been honked at for taking too long to cross the street. I am very happy about that!

I have finally made it to Costa Rica. It was a LONG day, but over all a good and fairly easy one. Our flight plan was a two hour plane ride to Atlanta, then a 7 hour layover before our 4 hour flight to Costa Rica! The first flight out of Baltimore left at 8:45 am. That meant I left my house at 5:30 to get to the Baltimore Washington International Airport at 6:30, about an hour and a half before boarding started. My parents were not thrilled about that! We managed to leave the house on time and make it to the airport in time to meet Leila. Leila and I had both checked into the flight before we got to the airport, so all we had to do was drop our checked bags off. I then said goodbye to my parents for six weeks, I think that is the longest I have gone without seeing them! Leila and I made it through security without incident. The line was surprisingly short and we made it through in about 10 minutes. Then we had lots of time to kill before it was time for our flight. We got breakfast sandwiches and just hung out in our terminal until it was time to go.

When we boarded the plane, we were both extremely excited to start our journey to Costa Rica! Leila had the window seat and we both looked out the window and tried to identify everything we were flying over. We both realized we needed to work on our East Coast geography! We couldn’t figure out where we were from the minute we took off. We made it through the rest of the flight uneventfully; we hit no turbulence and landed safely at the Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport at 10:45 a.m.

Then it was time to start our 7 hour layover. First we were afraid that they were going to take our bags off of the first plane and make us check them again, so we went and checked the baggage carousel for our luggage and when it wasn’t there we went off for our Atlanta Adventure. The first thing on the list was lunch at an unknown location, then the World of Coca-Cola. The first thing we had to do was find the MARTA (Atlanta’s version of the Metro). I asked a security guard where the Metro was and got a really weird look before pointing me in the right direction. I guess Metro is really only a Maryland thing. When we got into the MARTA station there was someone on the overhead speaker telling us the red line was closed. Of course that was the line we needed. WE asked a security guard what to do and he said that the yellow line ran alongside the red line for the entire time we would need so we could take that instead. We found out that in Atlanta the trains leave and arrive at specified times, we had just missed on train, the next came into the station soon after, but we had to wait 20 minutes before it was time for that train to leave. We used this time to figure out where we wanted to go for lunch. We decided on a bar-b-que restaurant named Twin Smokers, had get the real Southern food before we left the US. It was delicious. We both had pulled pork sandwiches and had to sample all of the BBQ sauces in the place before we could settle on one. I also had mashed sweet potatoes and our meals both came with pork rinds. The entire thing was delicious and fairly cheap. I would definitely recommend going there if you are ever in Downtown Atlanta!

When we had finished lunch, we made our way over to the World of Coca-Cola. We bought our tickets and went into this holding room while we waited for the guided part of the tour to start. Our tour guide took us into a room off of the waiting area with all sorts of Coke memorabilia and told us a little bit about the history of Coca-Cola. She then led us into a theater where we watched an inspirational video featuring Coca-Cola. Then we were set free to explore the rest of the museum. Of course our first stop was the tasting room! There were different flavors of Coke from all over the world that we were able to sample. Here Leila and I discovered that we have very different tastes, she likes the very sweet juice like sodas, and I like the more spice flavor soda. The soda that we agreed on the most was the Beverly, and we decided that was AWFUL! It is a soda sold in Italy that is meant to aid in digestion between meals and courses. It tasted like you had taken a root from a tree and liquefied it. It was awful, but it was lots of fun to watch people who had not tried it before make awful faces when they did. Leila and I could not believe that people actually drank Beverly in Italy, so we looked it up and found out that it is no long made, but many reviews we read said that it is an acquired taste that almost no one likes at first because of its bitter quality. There was one flavor from Costa Rica that we had to try! It was a flavor of Fanta called Kolita that was very sweet but good. I will have to see how it compares to the real stuff in Costa Rica. On our way out of the tasting room we got a free glass bottle of Coke. After the tasting room we wanted to go get our picture taken with the polar bear, but we didn’t realize the way we left the tasting room was the way to exit. So we started to make our way back to the airport before realizing that we couldn’t take the Cokes on the plane. Our first real challenge was opening the glass bottle without a bottle opener and without damaging the bottles. We drank the Cokes and saved the bottles as souvenirs.

Getting back to the airport was easy enough, but getting through the airport was more of a challenge. There were signs for where to go for domestic flights all over the place, but no signs for international flights. A security guard finally pointed us in the right direction and we made it through security once again without incident. Although my hands were tested for bomb residue, it was negative just in case you were worried. Then we managed to find our gate which was in a wing of the airport with lots of other international flights. We got dinner to eat on the plane, and saw the Brazilian women’s national swimming team. Then there was a lot more sitting and waiting. The flight was slightly late boarding, but somehow we managed to take off on time. On the flight we got customs cards to fill out, thankfully they were translated into English, although they were still surprisingly hard to fill out and we had quite a few questions about how to complete them appropriately. We weren’t stopped at customs though, so we must have done it right! On the flight we were given a light snack that consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich with a blondie bar. It was okay, pretty dry, but not awful. We got to watch sunset through the plane window, and I even managed to sleep a bit. We landed at the Juan Santa Maria International Airport at 8 o’clock local time which is 10 p.m. in Maryland.

We managed our way through customs. I didn’t know much about where I was staying other than it was in the city of San Jose, so at customs when they asked where I was visiting I told them San Jose and they didn’t seem to like that answer, but they let me through anyways. Leila and I picked up our baggage, mine came out right away, but hers took a while and we were both scared that it hadn’t made the flight! Eventually it did come and we made our way out of the airport. There were tons of taxi drivers offering rides and it was just as overwhelming as ICADS had fore warned us. I put on my determined face and was on a mission to get to the payphones where the ICADS driver was supposed to be waiting. Along the way, Leila luckily found our driver who I just breezed past.