I'm baaack

It’s been a crazy month… or two.

Since I arrived home to Cuernavaca from my backpacking trip, I have hosted visitors (Aunt Betsy, brother Leo, cousin Geordy), changed apartments, begun salsa classes, lost my resident card, killed two (and disposed of one already-dead) giant spiders, adopted a pet gecko (not really but there’s one that hangs around on the walls of my apartment) and started up classes again. All of these topics deserve further elaboration, but since I just finished a night of lesson planning, I will dedicate this post to what is fresh on my mind, teaching.

This is Señor Gecko, who I plan on keeping around, since apparently they eat spiders and scorpions, thus protecting me from the latter two:



Most of my students from last semester have returned, along with a couple new faces. After a first few confusing, Mexican, disorganized days back, we seem to be back into the routine.

Every month thus far I have chosen one overarching cultural topic to focus on, which frames the classrooms work: conversations, articles and writing assignments. This month, January, I have chosen to focus on the education system in the U.S. It has been a fascinating unit for me; in the research I have done to prepare for classes I have learned a ton myself. Mostly I have realized how lucky and blessed I was to be able to attend the quality schools I did. There are far too many American kids whose educational experiences are jokes.

Some of the activities I have done with my classes in this unit include:

1. A power point presentation I put together on the history of education in the states (which really hinges a lot on inequality in education and reforms, ie/ Brown vs. Board, Title IX, desegregation, resegregation, etc.)

2. Songs. I played these two as part of the first introductory lesson on the education system. I had them listen to each song twice and write down every word they heard that is school-related that was part of the lyrics. Then they had to guess which level of schooling the song spoke about based on the vocabulary of the song (high school, kindergarten, college, etc.).

The White Stripes, "We're Gonna Be Friends"


John Mayer, "No Such Thing"


And this one as part of the second lesson, which focused on the inequality and segregated nature of education (WARNING there are like 3 bad words in this song). For this song, I printed out the lyrics and left blanks sporadically throughout the song so they had to listen for the missing words and fill in the blanks.

Blue Scholars, "Commencement Day"


3. Articles. These also turned out to be about segregation, specifically the recent phenomenon of “resegregation,” which refers to studies that show that schools have been steadily separating by race once again, since 1988. Here is one of the articles, from CNN.

And a photo of my attempt to teach the concept of segregation to my visual learners:



4. Show N Tell. In my Tuesday class we had Show N Tell, just for fun, because it was one of the only terms from the songs that they weren’t familiar with. This is one of my students, Gustavo, who brought in his daughter as his item:



5. And this week I will be showing the movie Freedom Writers to all my classes, as a representation of public education in the U.S. I just finished pre-screening the movie, and I actually cried a few times (it’s a happy movie though). I highly recommend it. The day after I saw it for the first time (second semester, freshman year at SJU), I ran to the education department and declared an education minor, which lasted only one semester. Needless to say, it is a very empowering and powerful movie.

Well there you have it, an update of my education escapades.

Hope you all are well!

Peace love and geckos,
Molly