It Turns Out...

...that living in a city for a year made me love being in Chicago! The jury's still out on what happens when the weather gets colder.


The biggest thing I was taught happened within the first week. At our orientation, one person's advice toward minimizing culture clash was to "accept rather than comparing."


Money feels differently to me now, too. The L here feels like taxis did in Bogota. Going out to eat is twice as expensive, but just as worth it.

Reflections

After a nice lunch of tortilla soup, strawberry juice, and a chocolate pastry with Carlee, my taxi tried to take me to a party about 10 minutes away. Sometimes in Bogota, you just can't find the address though. It's kind of weird like that. So while I wait for word from any online party-goers of any corrections to the published address, here's a little bit of looking back on ideas from last summer.

The Good Things:

• Predicted Correctly: Saw new places, High school problem-solving based curriculum, Quality discourse and friendships with colleagues, Sufficient planning time (for a change!), More confidence at times
• Felt Mislead: The number of days off
• Unanticipated Rewards: Learned the kind of travel the relaxes me best, Spanish better than expected, Successfully expanded comfort level for some new situations (including conferences), Salary bonuses, Staff treated faculty exceptionally well, I'm better at living in a city than I was during college, Little culture shock of the city/country.

The Drawbacks:

• Predicted Correctly: Less theater, Missed friends, Calendar duration, Unlevel sidewalks frequently affected my back
• Felt Mislead: Overall student attitudes, School had many ineffective policies
• Unanticipated Negatives: Poor mattress frequently affected my back, Pollution (minimal wind) on main streets, Unable to recharge my batteries during the teaching day due to discipline issues.

Ten Questions I'd Written Down During the Interview Process:

1. How long is the school year? Pretty long... it starts one week earlier and ends one week later than the Chicago suburbs. 
2. Job expectations? 5 sections of Interactive Math Program grades 9/10, supervise breaks approximately one week in four.
3. Salary? $45,000 goes far here for a lifestyle of travel, eating out, and still being able to save money. The average teacher in the local suburb of Chia earns $12,000. That must be why the largest bill here is 50 mil -- the people in our neighborhoods are the only ones commonly carrying them around.
4. Kids? Some are super nice, like anywhere else. Sweet, empathetic, and motivated. Many lack respect and discipline, but it's not a Colombia thing -- it's a part of this school's culture.
5. Insurance? Just like food and other goods can be domicilio (i.e. home delivery for very little money), so can doctors and medicine. The copay was about $13 US.
6. Feedback to students? While maintaining up-to-date Sharepoint and online grades websites, and giving rubrics for 95% of assignments, there is a consistent complaint of "I don't understand how my grade was calculated." Behavior-wise students respond very well one-on-one for the most part, and very defensively when in a pack mentality.
7. Acceptance of methods? Students routinely say they want to work in groups, but when they're given the chance they basically use it as a social structure that validates giving up on anything the least bit challenging. They also want their questions answered now, which is likely how they were raised. On both topics, many students made a lot of progress this year. Some never tried.
8. Safety? I've had zero issues. That includes walking around at night, occasionally getting taxis off the street, and carrying around the equivalent of thousands of dollars US when absolutely necessary. Several other teachers have made rather thoughtless decisions that backfired, but that is not to say they aren't good or smart people. When you live in any big city there can be theft. As the economy worsens, so does the theft.
9. Housing? I've got had a good location, rarely had any issues with hot water, and had excellent Internet service. It's a 25 minute walk from school when I go the longest (safest) route, and 5 minutes to the grocery store and gym. Two beds, two baths, a stainless steel counter in the kitchen, nice flooring, cleanly tiled bathrooms.... I have been taken care of! 
10. Medical care? I shied away from some appointments that I could have had to look at my sprained ankle in the fall and to have cleaned my teeth, but the opportunities were there. If you are given "incapacidad," you are not allowed to return to work until the end of a 1-3 day period. You cannot be docked pay with that diagnosis.

First CityWide Change Bank

This afternoon I bought a delicious cup of Oma's Italian coffee for 5,800 pesos... using 30 hundred-coins, 10 two hundred-coins, and 16 fifty-coins. It felt like an old Saturday Night Live commercial where they talked about making change any way you want it, so here it is!

Job Review

To my surprise and delight, my summative conference with our principal exceeded my expectations. It was even more warm, caring, friendly, and complimentary than I'd anticipated.

 "We loved having you here! When you get a chance now that you've got a break coming up, drop me a line to let me know what we could have done to make your first year experience even better here. Maybe there's something we should do differently, tell teachers, or have at our orientation. I know you had to do a lot just to stick it out [at this school], and I appreciate that. If there's anything I can do for you, let me know."

What I Learned from Tutoring for Tomorrow's Final Exam

I had a nice 45-minute walk this morning to tutor at noon, but when I arrived the address I was given was not there! I'm guessing that Carrera 6 was really Carrera 6A... or that there was some weird split...  Oh how the mountains can screw up a grid system in a hurry! So I took a taxi home and eventually arranged to be picked up and dropped off by the family.


Tutoring went well. It's amazing how self-aware this student was about his not paying attention in class. Finally willing to focus, he caught on to algebra, graphing, and some computation quite well. I taught him the "Make A List" study method that I started using for myself in high school, and he was quite receptive to it.


The apartment was gorgeous, with a huge brick deck overlooking Bogota to the west. On the way home the father and I discussed Colombia a bit. He made a fascinating point that a huge reason for farmers growing drugs here is really the infrastructure. There are six big cities in Colombia, and some small but reasonably well developed towns. Outside of that, there are many tiny places with unpaved roads.  One of the attractions of growing drug crops is that farmers don't have to figure out how to transport their crops elsewhere -- because people will come straight to them.


I also learned that Israeli coffee is surprisingly good!

A Nice Treat

Comparing money here is basically 2,000 Colombian Pesos to 1 U.S. Dollar. Two years ago, during my trip to Medellin the ratio was figured at 1,960:1. When I first exchanged money here, it was 1,880:1. Now it's down to 1,835:1. That means it costs me less money in COP to buy USD now than it used to cost. Who ever said you can't make more money just by sitting still? So, on the way home I treated myself to a milkshake.

It Happened One Night

They say you're gaining fluency in a language when you begin to dream in it. On June 4, one scene of a dream was a taxi driver trying to overcharge the fare, expecting 20 mil instead of the 11 mil he actually deserved. In an amazingly realistic way, my first sentence toward him came out no problem in Spanish. My next sentence stumbled a bit more. That said, I won!