Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Class Interruptions

Class cancellations and interruptions are part of the daily life of every teacher in Nicaragua. This situation might be slightly different if you are working in a private school but because I only work in public schools, I couldn’t tell you from personal experience.

First of all, there are A LOT of holidays in Nicaragua. This is the number one cause of class cancellations. Then you do have class scheduled normally, you have people from brigades/campaigns coming in and out of the class to make announcements or give lectures, classes being cut short because of staff meetings, etc.
In one of my schools, the principal decided to give half of our class time each week to a group of university psychology students so that they can work with my students to fulfill their internship/clinical requirements. This means, that for the past two months, we have been trying to teach the students the entrepreneurship material in one hour instead of two each week.


Today was another great example. I woke up to a text message from one of the teachers I work with saying that class was going to be cancelled today (Wednesday) because the school was going to celebrate Father’s Day, which was on Monday. To most of us from the U.S. this would not make any sense, but in Nicaragua it makes perfect sense. On the bright side, my teacher is kind enough to let me know these things before I show up at school to save me the trip. I also have some more time to take care of some very important things today, like updating this blog. 

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