Turning the Power On – from Jake Pinkston on teaching mission in Honduras

As I type, the sounds of smooth Latin love songs are shaking the table that my laptop is sitting on. All around me there are teens in skinny jeans and mothers trooping around herds of children. There is a stiff breeze from the industrial fan above my head and I am overcome with the smells of fried food and disinfectant. Where am I? Why the food court at the Mall of course, the only place within two square miles that has power right now.

It seems the power company is changing out some of the telephone poles that have been massacred by termites with concrete ones. This is a rather delicate task as the preferred method of telecommunications maintenance is just put a new wire next to the one that isn’t working and call it a day. Moving the tangled spider web is an all day affair however so I have had to relocate in order to get my work done. As there is no public library to speak of in the city and my favorite coffee shop is also off the grid, my next best option was a table across from Pop-Eye’s next to the twinkling Christmas tree with massive ornaments (it has a power outlet). Honduras just scored a goal on the television. People are going nuts!

I have been having trouble the last few weeks with the internet connection at my house and loading my blog entries onto the St. James website. I think it is sorted out for now though. I have posted my blogs for the last two weeks below for your reading pleasure.

The new after school tutoring program got off the ground this week which is exciting. The goal of the program is to identify the students that are failing or very close to failing, get some extra time in to figure out what is going on and hopefully turn it around. The students have to stay after school for an hour once a week for every subject they have below a 75 until the midterm (most of the participants are repeat offenders), when if they have pulled up their grades, they are no longer required to attend. Each of my science classes has a day for review while math and English are also participating.

The eighth grade managed to use a chaotic end of the day on Tuesday to run out the door before I could gently remind them that they had to stay after so I did not get to work with them. I cannot say I was disappointed as they had been bouncing off the walls all day but I will make sure to get them next week.

Wednesday was complicated by the two hour, after school detention that the entire secondary school got for misbehaving during their chorus classes over the past few weeks. My 7th grade after-school group ended up being the entire class. The first hour was actually really fun as we reviewed for the upcoming Life Science quiz on the chemistry of organisms. I set up a jeopardy game on the board and split the class into teams to answer questions using their notebooks. It got a little out of hand at the end as the students were getting a little over competitive and apparently I was not doing a very good job keeping the scores straight but it was an effective review.

The next hour was a bit of a challenge for multiple reasons. The teachers who imposed the detention had commitments and could not stay for the full time, which left myself and Veronica watching 4 classes. The students normally don’t eat breakfast, eat their main meal at 9:40 then eat as soon as they go home at 2pm. At 3:30, they were all flipping out because they did not bring food for detention and were dying of starvation. It did not help that 10th grader girls had found a way to have Wendy’s delivered and were eating it while walking by the classroom. I was very happy when 4:00pm finally came around and we could all go home.

Thursday and Friday were also all school detention but went a lot more smoothly. I spent Thursday with the 10th grade reviewing dimensional analysis, which just a fancy way of saying converting quantities from one unit to another. I put six problems on the board and they worked through them, yelling at me to come over and help them now and again. I had a great time because by the fourth problem they had figured it out and were just calling me over for a pat on the back and to lecture me on why I should find a Honduran girlfriend. I spent a half hour on Friday talking with the four boys who are all hovering around the 70 mark in my 9th grade Physical Science class, discussing strategies for studying and communicating when they are lost, which is often.

I am optimistic that the program will be successful for at least a couple of the students who are falling behind. There are a few however that seem to be giving up and not really caring, which is frustrating because it would not take much effort for them to turn it around and that attitude is contagious. A lot of it has to do with their English abilities as well as the fact that they have always been able to get by with the minimum effort. I am hoping that the extra attention will get them back on the right track. However, like the telephone poles, it is going to take some effort before I will be able to turn that light on.