From vacation to education

It's late Monday night in San Jose, and I'm typing this despite not being able to access the wi-fi in our apartotel.  What's an apartotel you ask? Well, it's a cross between an apartment and a hotel!  In actuality, it's a collection of little houses walled in on the same property.  We have three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, outdoor laundry, and a garage for five of us.  The other four girls have a similar setup.  I haven't seen the boys' or the professors' digs yet, but I'm sure they're awesome too.  We will be here for the remainder of the trip, so it's nice to have a "home" to settle into.  Anyway, just know that it's Monday night despite when you might be reading this.

Sunday was our beach day.  We drove from Playa Grande to Playa Danta in the community of Las Catalinas.  All of the beaches in Costa Rica are public beaches, though many developers buy up beachfront land and deny access to locals.  Las Catalinas is different. They maintain the beach community in a sustainable way, minimizing their footprint and allowing public access for free.  At Playa Danta, we enjoyed a relaxing, fun day.  We swam in the ocean, walked on the beach, collected hermit crabs with Daniella (Sylvia's daughter), and tried paddle boarding.  Paddle boarding was easier than I thought it would be, though the waves and choppy Pacific provided quite the challenging first try.  We had a delicious lunch, and I tried my first Imperial Michelada.  It's beer poured over lime and citrus juice in a salt-rimmed glass.  It was quite refreshing with my Chifrijo, a Costa Rican dish of rice, beans, pico de gallo, guacamole, and pork.  We hung around the beach a bit longer, enough time to explore the rocks and see all sorts of life in the tide pools.  We returned to Playa Grande for an AMAZING Pacific sunset (seriously, wait until you see these pictures) and dinner at our hotel, Rip Jack Inn.  Exhausted, we headed to bed to be rested for the first day of school visits in the morning.

The first school we visited was La Paz Community School.  It is a private school that was started by 6 American expats who had a vision of how to fill a need in Guanacaste.  If there are any Lakewood people reading this, you all would have LOVED this place!  As Brian, one of the founders/administrators was giving us the overview of the school, I finally had to ask, "Do you have a background in Montessori!?"  Though he didn't, so many aspects of the school aligned with the goals and visions of the school where I currently work.  The students partake in morning meetings, the curriculum is tied to themes, students engage in project-based learning, and community building is a high priority.  They value peace and "are built on the pillars of self, family, community, and world."  I know my Montessori training isn't officially until next week, but I'm sure this place had Montessori written all over it.  Except that it didn't. I got to sit in on a 9th grade math class taught in English, though some classes are taught in Spanish in this dual-language immersion program.  They were factoring quadratics, and it was awesome to see that kids are kids and math is math in this vastly different, yet not-so-different setting. 

Next, we headed back to Playa Grande and visited a one-room school where the principal is also the teacher.  Yes, THE teacher for grades 1-6.  There is also a kindergarten teacher for half the day, a special education teacher that comes once a week, and two English teachers that rotate around schools in the region.  The teacher is able to manage the school's 23 students in small grade-level groups by connecting the varying curriculum to a central theme.  The Ministry of Education also convenes multi-grade teachers like her weekly for training and professional development.  Additionally, there is a parent-run board of directors that fundraises and otherwise supports the needs of the school.

After having seen such starkly different schools, we needed to process.  La Paz has resources, small classes, invested students, supportive parents, lots of space, and many teachers.  Escuela de Playa Grande has no resources, TINY "classes", invested students, supportive parents, little space, and few teachers.  We discussed our observations over a final lunch at Rip Jack, and then loaded onto the bus for a long haul back to San Jose.  There was sleeping, laughing, picture-taking, and talking on the 5 hour ride.  Upon arriving to the apartotel, we group-grocery shopped for breakfast food and then ventured out for dinner.  

We are visiting more schools and the Ministry of Education the rest of this week, and I can't wait to keep learning about education here.  As is expected, there are many differences on the surface.  However, as we begin to dig deeper, I think we will find that there are more similarities than we expected.