Trevor: Saturday, June 9, 2007

The infamous truck

Child Friendly?

The Dep-Ed's mission statement

Our first week at the Mapa School comes to a close, and it’s certainly been an interesting one. Waking up at 5:30 each day, sometimes with a gecko hanging to the wall next to your bed, is something I’ve never experienced.

Steve and I talked to Wilvin and Jennebeth about possibly doing a project with the speech and language classes. We talked about their general curricula for the year, and asked whether they have target goals for the year, as far as concrete topics that the students must know to go on to the next grade. Mapa does loosely follow the public school curriculum, but the teachers often are too busy to coordinate their lessons year-to-year. It’s also difficult because there’s a fairly high rate of turnover among teachers. It’s often difficult for teachers to ascertain whether students do not know certain material from the previous year because they do not remember it or because they were simply not taught it.

So Steve and I realized that there is definitely a need for a set curriculum for each grade that can be passed down from teacher-to-teacher each year. His area of expertise is math, and I’ll be looking at English. We’re going to go to the public and private schools in the area and consult the teachers there. We’ll examine their curricula and the activities that they use. Resources may be somewhat more limited at Mapa, but for the most part, we’ll shoot for the same targets as the other schools. We’ll also consult the staff at the school as well as Diane and Tom. We hope to create a system whereby the students will be required to know a set of topics in order to progress to the next grade. Having such a set of topics, perhaps with suggestions of example activities to reinforce the material, will ensure that the school stays consistent year-to-year. The teachers will still have the individual freedom to teach the topics in whatever way they see fit, but will now have a rough outline to teach with.

Hopefully the project with Jennebeth and Wilvin will also work. We’ll most likely take short stories and put the students together in groups. Then they’ll use the short story for a number of short activities which will reinforce what is learned during the week. We anticipate having these book report activities each Friday. For example, the students will be asked to read part of the story aloud, focusing on pronunciation, or they will diagram the sentences of a certain paragraph. Hopefully on Monday or Tuesday of next week we’ll be able to choose the stories for the project.

On Thursday afternoon, we went with Jesse and Maraphe, two of Tom and Diane’s employees, to distribute school supplies for Family to Family’s school sponsorship program. Family to Family gives schools supplies to 31 of the 58 elementary schools on the island. The program covers about 900 students. A student may be unable to attend school because he or she comes from a family that cannot afford to pay for school supplies. We rode to the schools in Tom and Diane’s rickety truck on some really bumpy roads. Riding in the back and sitting on a bench was definitely an adventure. There were times when we stopped suddenly that I had to hold on for dear life to avoid being thrown around.

At one of the schools, I noticed a sign that said “a child friendly room.” It made me wonder whether there are “child unfriendly” rooms as well. I also took a picture of the Department of Education’s mission statement. It reads as follows: “To provide a quality basic education that is equitably accessible to all to lay the foundation for life-long learning and service for the common good.”

We’re down at Tom and Diane’s house for the weekend, and hopefully we can make some progress on our idea about the math and English curricula for the Mapa School.