Gray

There's a lot of gray area in Belize.  Like they used up all the definitive, bright colors on the children's playground at the center of town.

I knew by Friday that somewhere there was wifi. 

I needed to reschedule my flight before all the flights were taken - it was my own oversight booking my flight on Thursday.  After the impending storm delayed my flight twice, I was unable to get off the island to make it.

As I attempted to get on the free wifi, I realized how many people were encroaching on the wifi, eager to do something techie - maybe snapchat?  Maybe post a vine?  Maybe tweet?  I just needed my flight changed, but the internet browser churned.  I should have bought an international plan for my phone.

I headed back, frustrated.  However, I saw the water taxi guys and asked them where they'd be tomorrow in case I could get a flight.  They assured me they'd be right by the library.

This is the gray part.  If you ask anyone in San Pedro anything, they will give you an answer.  You'll take the answer as the truth, as fact, as indisputable.

Then, you'll discover that they were just talking, blabbing, making conversation.  I arrived bright and early in town after getting through to my husband to book my flight for Saturday afternoon.  The water taxi, was in fact, not there.  Frustrated, but hoping they just zipped out for a bit as I was really early, I grabbed breakfast at the Coffee Bar.  I was still discovering new places even as I left.

I then went back in a reasonable amount of time to find no one was there except another frustrated American.  In America, we expect customer service.  We caught each other's eye and realized we both were disappointed customers ready to ask for the manager, and a discount.

I walked back with him to a restaurant so we could call the company.  I was tempted to just buy the international plan for my cell phone, but I was so close to shedding my international skin that I thought I could make it one more day.  He came out and said the waitress said the taxis were running off the dock on the lagoon.  He asked the taxi driver outside, who said there were no water taxis and that all the docks had been wiped away.  Their phone number just rang and rang.  I was right across from the local airport, which had no seats that day for me.

For such a small island, you think they'd get their story straight.

I did what any rational American would do: I called upon my ancestors who forged a path West, and walked and walked until I found a sign for another water taxi company.  My roundtrip ticket for the other company a lost cause, I paid twice what I had paid and had just missed the first one.  I had to kill an hour with two pieces of small luggage.  I headed for the bar.

The bar was empty at 9 a.m. I talked with Raul, the bartender, for an hour.  We somehow fell into his dream to own his own restaurant or dojo; we discovered we both were abandoned by our fathers, but were able to reconnect with them as adults.  Instead of the "drunk tourist spilling her life story" trope, I had gotten his.  I told him I'd look for his restaurant, or dojo, if I ever returned.  I wished him luck, but "there was a boat waiting for me" like some cheesy line from a Tennessee Williams play.

While waiting for the boat, I noticed a dog and a little girl.  It made me really homesick.  It was the picture I landed on when something got stuck in our rudder; there was still so much debris washing up, so I just prayed they could do something about it.  They drove slowly for 10 minutes when finally, the attendant somehow knocked it out.  The little girl from the picture awoke suddenly at the jolt, but pressed against her mother's breast in peaceful resignation, just like my daughter did when she was small.

Getting off the island after a hurricane was nearly impossible.  If you've not watched Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with John Candy, then you may not be able to relate to what I went through.  In 24 hours I had ridden a golf cart, a bike, a boat, a taxi, a plane, a train, a plane, and a car just to get home.  

Turns out home was just a bunch of people eating some good food and telling some old stories. Guess I hadn't left after all.

The Calm Before the Storm

With summer camps and professional development cancelled, many of us didn't know what to do with our free time.  We expected to be busy planning, teaching, crafting, exchanging, blogging.  We didn't plan on flooding, packing, waiting for Hurricane Earl.

Our last big event before the hurricane was at the cultural center.  From the street, the center looks like one of those barbecue places you see driving down a road your GPS insisted was faster.  At dusk we entered, the sweltering heat suffocating any doubt we may have had about eating here.

I am a reformed picky eater.  It was not a point of contention with my husband when we got married, but he simply saw it as a challenge.  He was very much a foodie who had grown tired of his small town food; I grew up on a farm eating the exact same Southern recipes and was tired of them.  We spent the first 7 years of our marriage with me insisting I didn't like something, and him insisting on cooking it.  It wasn't until I hit middle age that I knew I needed to eat less potato, more tomato.  I began to experiment and find things I like; I quickly turned into an even more picky eater because instead of only liking a few foods one way, I liked lots of different foods in VERY specific ways.  I wasn't afraid to try the traditional Garifuna food, but I wasn't hopeful that I would enjoy it.

We were welcomed into a bar area with an old tube television in the corner.  The wicker furniture was unstable, worn from the various groups who had come to experience the story of a triumphant culture celebrating their ability to preserve history.  The docent began the video, and through that old vacuum tube we were transported through the story before the story.  We were reminded of the Middle Passage, bodies tossed overboard like banana peels out a car window, and European insistence that Africans were meant to be enslaved.  Although these stories are not new to those of us in education, the storytellers were new. Garifuna telling the story of the Garifuna; all people should get to tell their own story.

After the video we were served buffet style; I asked the attendant what each dish was, not to in any way dismiss it, but to simply know what I was trying.  I dipped the serving spoon intimately into a piece of their history; fish that sustained them on the coast, and cassava root that leads to the matriarchal branch of each family tree. Their story begged to be consumed.

Paulo Friere, in his essay "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," posits that "human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men transform the world" (p. 157).  The Garifuna continue to be nourished by the words of their people -- written, spoken, and sung.  Friere urges that educators transform the world through awareness of the essentials of another's reality; the reality is that the Garifuna know they are only one voice among many.  In fact, they embrace the country they share with the Chinese, Lebanese, Mayan, Creole and European populations.

They share their voice with anyone who will listen.  As the hurricane approached our tiny island, I could hear settlement day songs from each cloud.  As the leaves bent toward the ground I could see the young dancer bending over to wash her clothes, as the drums memorialized those before her.  The trembling coconuts resembled the hips of the Punta dance, if I just squinted a little.  It's easy to let a storm brew inside you, to be disappointed and frustrated at history; what's harder is to let the storm pass over you and realize that history is constantly happening, and you are a part of it, just like everyone else before you.

References:
Freire, P.  (2013). Pedagogy of the oppressed. In D. Flinders & S. Thornton (Eds.), The Curriculum Studies Reader (pp. 157 - 166). New York, NY: Routledge.

Facing the Storm

I'm here in Belize as a student, to learn and be humbled.  Instead, I am reminded, slapped in the face by the reason I went to college: poverty and summer.

I never went to summer camp as a child.  The closest I had was four days of Bible school, and that depended upon summer crops.

My summer camps were tobacco fields and chopping weeds.  We didn't have migrant workers.  We had two teenage cousins, my parents, myself, and other local farmers.  Farmers are one of the most communal social groups.  The first time I worked through the heat in the field I was 8.  I would follow the tractor and pick up stray tobacco leaves to be tied, cured and sold.

On the dusty roads to the local schools, I am reminded how I would ride my bike down the mile long driveway to escape my life as a farm child; but I couldn't escape not matter how far I pedaled.  I wanted a small glimpse of civilization.  Of new cars and getting the mail.  These roads in Belize are actually in better shape than my rural driveway.  I wonder if they drag their dirt roads with a tractor as my stepdad did, when he got home from his day job to work the farm. It's something his entire family had done.

I became a teacher because I had worked every summer of my life.  When I was looking for a profession, I wanted a profession that would pay a decent salary, always be available, and would not require me to work during the summer.  Teaching it was, and I was a natural at it.  My mom, who volunteered at my school during the winter when farm work was slow, would bring home old textbooks.  I would then teach my sisters cursive; one of the first lessons I taught was about caterpillars.  As John Dewey and Maria Montessori emphasized experiential learning and literacy, I was already understanding the need to experience.  I would take my sisters in the woods and we would look for caterpillars, capturing them in old canning jars that we used to scoop jam out of with our fingers.  This time, we weren't scooping jam, but shaking a potential butterfly off our tiny digits.

I didn't intend to be a science teacher; I loved reading and writing.  But, I also loved people, and so becoming a special education teacher after learning my grandfather was illiterate, and trying to cope with my young, deaf cousin's death, would mean I teach everything.

Perhaps there is something I can offer these students and teachers.  I can offer them not help, but hope.  I've faced the storm that is poverty.  Through my own will, I fought up and out of that storm.  Of the storm of stress when the crops didn't make, of the storm when the government shut down our tobacco crops.

Our students will make it through this storm in a day.  However, the storm brewing in them will require more time.

No Man is an Island

I've learned here not to lower my expectations, but to have no expectations.  In a tropical tourist destination no one worries, and changes in schedule are met with a smile and shrug.

I woke up early to review my notes, eat breakfast and make contact with my family.  I was met with a flurry of activity as undergraduates prepared for summer camp and literacy camp; their excitement was contagious.  After a shuffling of schedules I learned I would join in on the summer camps, helping the leader of the camp.  As a community college instructor I was comfortable with working with undergraduates, but was disappointed that I couldn't do more for the local school system.

I ended up doing something for a school I never thought I'd have to do: prepare for a hurricane.

Attendance at my professional development for teachers was light; overnight an Atlantic storm had transformed into a tropical storm that would hit Belize.  Families were preparing their homes for the storm.

During professional development, fostering a sense of professional community was something that they wanted.  On their exit tickets as they left my session, most appreciated how interactive my session was; they yearned more time with each other to share successes and develop strategies.  Michael Apple notes in his text Educating the Right Way: Markets, Standards, God and Inequality that curriculum represents a struggle for power.  Perhaps the voices of these teachers are not being heard.  Perhaps their island is their inability to control their curriculum.

However, it was easy to notice their sense of community elsewhere.  At the morning summer camp, half a dozen people were moving desks to create a shelter in case the storm hit.  At the afternoon literacy camp, the library had people ebbing and flowing who would pack up books and secure technology. The sole librarian was obviously grateful. No man was an island here, even though they lived on one.

How would I help them transfer that sense of community during disasters into their professional learning communities?

References
Apple, M.W. (2006). Educating the "right" way: Markets, standards, God and inequality.  New York: Routledge Falmer.

I Have Arrived

I arrived on Sunday not only into my internship destination, but into an educator's worst fear: professional development planning.

Most teachers fear professional development because of its tendency to make us vulnerable and require us to see ourselves in a way in which we aren't in control. Not that I don't like what most call PD, but this time I would be experiencing the trifecta of PD fears: naive teachers, foreign country, no internet.

In Belize, teaching as profession is just starting to bloom.  As much as teachers groan about the Praxis, or student teaching, there is a method in that madness.  Teaching doesn't often get the recognition it deserves because so many confuse training with education.  And believe me, there are teachers who aren't teachers, but are trainers.  How would I respect the experience and expertise that comes with being in the trenches, but still compel them to apply my strategies?  In reviewing my lesson plan after checking in, I was reminded that Chip and Dan Heath (2008) developed a process for determining why certain ideas adhere to our psyche while others fall to the side. Their appeals, which summon simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and story-telling as the skeleton upon which ideas are held up, would guide me through making sure that my professional development would be implemented.

Overcoming a language barrier wouldn't be an issue: with my pasty white skin I cannot wash the America off, and the locals graciously accommodated me with their English.  I was actually disappointed because I was looking forward to struggling through my four years of Spanish training in college.  However, I would still need to overcome a cultural barrier.  Would I be perceived as just another white American telling a foreign country what to do?  How could I establish professional trust when teachers might not perceive themselves as professionals?  Dee Fink (2013) reminds me that creating content should be about helping students care about learning.  I would have to make my fellow teachers care about their students success not just in their class, but in other classes.  I decided since the majority of my participants were teachers who taught many subjects, I would emphasize the cross-curricular aspects of teaching.  The article I chose from Newsela.com about King Tut's tomb was perfect to highlight the crossover in math, science, history, and language arts.  I hoped these teachers would be able to help their students care about history so that they can, in turn, care about their other subjects too.

Lack of internet would be the greatest barrier to overcome.  When I learned that the Internet was spotty at best, I didn't quite know how to show them digital strategies I would rave about.  Good teaching would speak for itself, and so instead of fancy websites, I honed in on the strategies themselves, practicing low-tech but noting the high-tech equivalencies.

As I contacted my colleagues of my arrival, many were jealous because they had to start back with lesson planning, digital content construction, and advising graduates for transfer to four-year universities.  I hadn't just arrived on an island, but I had arrived in a place of readiness.  After years of presenting at state and local professional development sessions, I was grateful for the tough love my colleagues had given me over the years.  I felt the sense of professional community that Baran and Correia (2014) so adamantly assert is necessary in higher education.  Peer observation, they note, is a strong component of a learning community; at my current job, observations are embedded in the English department.  My peers have been wonderful about collaborating on even the most challenging instructional woes.  I am happy that my critical friends pushed me to become better at professional development, and hopefully the teachers in Belize can benefit.

References
Baran, E. & Correia, A. (2014). A professional development framework for online teaching. TechTrends. 58(5), 95-101.
Fink, D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2008). Made to stick: why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck. London: Arrow Books.