The (dis)Organization

For those of you who are teachers, the next post may read like a nightmare. I write this mostly for you, but also to give everyone an idea about the way the school is run. Stepping back, it strikes me as fairly interesting, though it is quite frustrating when surrounded by it.

As none of the other volunteers have taught in Ecuador before, we have no way of knowing what you are about to read is common here or whether this school is, to put it kindly, informal. This post is not a complaint -- all of us are enjoying are time here and I would highly recommend for anyone to volunteer here.

As with much of life in Ecuador, the Katitawa School functions on reaction as much as planning. Unfortunately, that does not serve the kids well. Classes here begin and end on Ecuadoran time, which means they start when everyone gets together and end when the kids' attention span dictates they can no longer retain information.

When I arrived, the schedule was (and still is, for that matter) is broken down into a block of 90 minutes, followed by a half-hour for snack and play, followed by a 2-1/4 hour block, then lunch for 45 minutes. The afternoon consists of a 90-minute block and a 45-minute block. I use the word block even though the schedule dictates each of those should be a single class.

We changed this, at least for the volunteers' purposes, into eight 45-minute (or so) periods. We still teach the same subjects in the same proportions, but no volunteers are required to come up with 2 hours, 15 minutes worth of English or music lessons for children whose attention spans are equal to that of the ferret. The school administrator is completely unconcerned with what we do as long as the kids are being taught something, which is part of the problem, but at least we are not meeting resistance.

As I mentioned a couple of posts earlier, discipline is a fairly foreign concept. Students (most between the ages of 6 and 9) are allowed by the full-time teachers to wander around the classroom and it is not uncommon for a student to walk out of class without the teacher commenting on it.