Learning about learning... the beginning!

          Now that I have a clearer idea of what’s expected of me and what kind of students and teachers I’ll be working with, I’ve started to form a routine and the logistical learning curve is starting to come to an end, and the real learning can start!

Here's a typical day:
6am: wake up
645: leave my house
745/8: Enter the school! It's several buildings in one general area: the enseñanza básica (elementary school, grades 1-8) are split in two different buildings, 1-4 básica and 5-8 básica. The 1-4 media (9th-12th grade) are in another building across the street. Sometimes when I come in later around 9:30 I ring the doorbell so someone can let me in the gates.

The enseñanza básica building, 1-8th grade.

The front of the building that houses the "enseñanza media", or high school.

8-9:30: 10th grade english! each grade is split into two classes, each with about 35 students. That's a big number for any class, especially in a class where the students should be doing lots of discussion to learn a new language.
9:30-9:45: Break. The students will plug in their ipods or phones to the speakers some of the classrooms have, and reggaeton or US pop music will fill the classrooms and spill outside. Some students bring in cakes, panqueques (basically crepes, rolled around manjar), or other food to sell so they can raise money to travel as a class at the end of the school year. The teachers (myself included, haha!) go to the teacher's break room and talk over a cup of tea.
9:45-11:15: 9th grade English! It usually takes about a half hour to get the students settled: the teacher will check homework for "décimas" (decimals, points they can add to their test grades), take attendance and fill in the summary of material to be covered that day in big brown books that the government will review, and try to get the students to pay attention. So, the students really only get about an hour of teaching for what's supposed to be an hour and a half.
11:15-11:30: Another break! The students hang out and teachers converse. It's fascinating to listen to their conversations, they know who's dating who, who does their homework everyday, etc. It's weird thinking about what my teachers may have been saying about my classmates when we're not around. Teachers notice way more than I ever thought they did. :)
11:30-1: The other 10th grade English class. I really need to work on memorizing names!
1-2: Lunch! They get a whole hour for lunch here. I remember getting 20 minutes in high school!

          Sometimes a big chunk of students don't come to class. If it's raining really hard often students will stay home because their parents are worried they'll get sick. A few days ago, there was a student march against the "ley tributaria", (from what I gathered: a reform that will increase taxes on the rich to help finance education reform, which won't work because the rich avoid paying full taxes. The students want the government to be in charge of education to eliminate profit) and 2/3 of all the students were gone! I found it hilarious, because something like that would NEVER happen in the US. I've personally never heard of students skipping school to go to a protest about the education system (or any protest for that matter). In 2011, the school was shut down for about 5 months because of the "toma": students took over the school and demanded better education and classrooms.

The mural that commemorates the Toma.
"It will be the people who create a very different Chile. Toma 2011: restoration in April 2013." 

          I recognized that I was coming into this experience with virtually ZERO teaching or classroom experience, and I knew that my inexperience was going to be magnified by the fact that it’s a different education system, country, and language. Fortunately, I’m not actually teaching! I’m just learning from an experienced teacher and stepping in when she asks. I’ve learned a lot during these first two weeks, mainly about all the ways it's impossible to teach a group of 35 students English for an hour and a half. I've had many really cool conversations with the teacher I'm assisting about how integrated teaching is: you have to account for the student's family life, health, habits, and mentalities. Educating young people is SO complex and difficult, but I think it will be one of the most satisfying challenges I undertake in the future!

There and back again... a "teacher's" tale by "Atina" Carlson

Sorry-not-sorry for The Hobbit reference in the title.
Also, "Th" doesn't exist in Spanish. So my people kind of call me "atina." Which apparently sounds like the verb "atinar", which I couldn't really gather the meaning for... cue the communication mishaps. :)
          I'm writing from my room in CHILE!! Ever since coming back in mid-December from study abroad last year, I was considering coming back to Santiago sometime within the next year to visit my host family and immerse myself in the Spanish language and Latin American culture again. Typical post-study-abroad-high-longing-to-go-back type of thing. I didn't really actively think about going back until the beginning of March, when I started tentatively sending emails to Grinnell alumni in Chile and the rest of Latin America, seeing if there were any schools open to having a gringa (person from the US) with very little education experience be an intern at their school. My hopes were pretty low, and I didn't expect much to actually happen. But IT HAPPENED!! When I got the email that my internship got funding, I was in shock and couldn't believe my plan was actually going to pull through. I jumped up an down, skipped around my building, and smiled like a crazy person the rest of the day. :D teehee
          So, I'm back in Santiago, Chile for my next great adventure: being an assistant English teacher at the Colegio Raimapu in La Florida, Santiago, Chile. I'll be helping out in a classroom for high schoolers (9-12 grade US, 1-4 media in Chilean terms). I visited the school for the first time today, got a tour, met a few teachers (and of course I don't remember any of their names... I need to work on that...), and observed and helped out a tiny bit in an English class. I had some cool conversations about the school's founding (a few parents banded together during the dictatorship), some of the struggles of educating young people in Chile, and maintaining a school. I still have no idea what to expect: I have a little experience working with high schoolers through camps, and I have a tiny bit of tutoring experience with the Spanish Lab... but I have NO idea how this is actually going to play out. And I am perfectly okay with that!
          So I'm sure you're all thinking... what happened to brain-obsessed-pre-med Athena? I realized that I was extremely tentative of that plan from the beginning, and after the clinical observations, I realized that being a doctor or surgeon or researcher for the nervous system really wouldn't make me happy. Originally I wanted to pursue that as a way of remembering my mother because of her quadriplegia, but that's not the aspect of my mother I would want to highlight every single day in my work. She was passionate about exposing her kids to all different kinds of things and ensuring that we learned as much as we could about anything at all. Education has done amazing things in my life, and I owe of lot of my own "success" to the teachers and people I met through school. So, education might be what I do with the rest of my life. We'll see how this summer goes. :)
          I have mandatory blogging to do for the funding requirements, so there might some of those posts up here as well as my pensieve-like musings.
Thanks for reading, and thank a teacher today!
Athena

2 years later

          Two years have passed since my mother passed away from a spinal cord injury received in 2004. I won’t extrapolate on the pointlessness I feel of marking time; my brother Justin did that beautifully when he wrote a year after the day. And I won't go on and on about how much I love her and miss her and appreciate all she's done. That's just a given. Grief is an extremely personal journey, and I'm choosing to share part of that experience today:

          People often mark the day a parent or loved one died as the monumental life-changing moment: the gateway between one world where that person exists and the other where they don’t. I don't mark Thursday, February 2^nd, 2012 at 6:25 am as the monumental moment that changed my life. Yes, many things were different after that day. I cried a lot, couldn’t sleep very much, grades went down, I kept to my room like a hermit, and came home a few months later to the wheelchair sitting eerily empty in the middle of the living room. But some things were the same: I returned to track practice 4 days after she died, and to classes and work a week after that. I did homework, partied, did track, competed in meets, did laundry, showered, ate, and laughed like any other student at Grinnell College. I was put together to get good grades and be kind. I did all that before my mother died. Why make my mother dying change the way I lived my life for the previous 19 years? It worked for me: externally I got good grades, got into Grinnell, improved at track, and made new friends.
          But internally it clearly wasn't working. I felt completely shoved to the ground and unable to think clearly. I couldn't concentrate, it hurt to cry, I couldn't relate to people or empathize. I said some very hurtful and horrid things to myself and just ended up damaging the person my mom tried her best to raise whole.

          2^nd year in fall 2012 was different. I started talking. I started to unload everything I never talked about before onto my best friends and roommates. In December 2012, they helped me admit to myself that something was wrong in my life that needed to be processed. The system I previously held myself to wasn’t working anymore. But a body in motion stays in motion until some external forces come in and bang it around, jumble its system, and poke around at the bruises.

          So, in December 2012, I started the reconstructive processes of forgiveness, self-realization, and understanding with a counselor. By April 2013, I finally understood that I was allowed to cry without feeling weak, scream without being scared, and ask for help without feeling guilt or shame. Since then, I've put those concepts into practice and they are continually reinforcing themselves: my summer, study abroad, and start of 2014 have been truly enriching and full of life.

          I’m sure by now you’re bored of me talking about myself. I guess what I’m trying to tease out here is that my life didn’t change until I had the opportunity to change myself. Now I look back on February 2^nd, 2012 as the day that dumped all the words at my feet, December 2012 as the time I admitted they were there, and April 2013 as the time I finally decided that pouring them out to those I trust is ok. Since that day, I changed my mentality, my focus, my perceptions, my world view, my actions and reactions. These may be internal processes that don’t necessarily show themselves, but the way I feel is 180 degrees from where I was before. I still miss my mom so much it aches, but the anger and trauma and self-destructive hate are pretty much gone. I feel empowered: knowing that no matter what I’ve lived, I finally have the ability to choose how it shapes my experience. I’ve lived pain, but I experience relief.  I’ve lived loss, but I experience gains.
          I abandoned pre-med, a plan that wasn't making me happy, and am now pursuing education. I've never felt more motivated to help other people have choice and access when it comes to their future. I can empathize and smile and talk with people and learn from them in a way I never have before. I have so much energy and mental capacity to devote to work, people, track, school, and myself.
          Be open to processing everything that happens, be willing to accept events as facts but not as conditions, and grab the opportunities that alter your being. Once you recognize that facts are things that don't control you, you've created your own opportunity to change your experience. It's beyond challenging and difficult, but it's the best thing that can happen. Think about it: you have the ability to shape your own experiences! Learn, love, free yourself, be dynamic, do whatever makes you happy.
Paz, bendiciones, abrazos,
Athena
PS: Call your mother. :)

In her smile here I see the drive to always learn and experience the things right in front of us.
Love you and miss you always, Mommy.