Pupatating People

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls.
When she finds a pearl of great price, she goes and sells all that she has and buys it.

The very hungry caterpillar is dead. The second graders killed her on Tuesday. They also abruptly ended one of Mrs. Frizzle and the magic school bus’ famed field trips. I’m not sure if they salvaged the bus or if it went to the junkyard, but Mrs. Frizzle’s students surely went home disappointed.

When books die everyone loses. Killing a book by cutting it up for an art project turns an educational tool, a tool which has the power to overcome poverty through knowledge, into trash can filler. But, for some reason, a teacher here didn’t see it that way. I don’t know what she saw. Maybe she saw me having the kids write books and cut out images from magazines for the pictures. Maybe she was trying to use some of the materials sent creatively in her class. Or maybe she saw stacks upon stacks of books written in a language she does not understand and could not imagine how to integrate into her classes other than removing the part that confused her – the words. I really don’t know. At this point, I’m not even asking why. I didn’t come to Agua Caliente to look backward, but to look forward, to look toward the future for these kids.

Ever since my very hungry friend failed to pupatate I’ve thought a great deal about the teachers here, their education, motivation, and classroom preparation. I’ve thought about the kids, their smiles and joy, what an education can mean for them, how the school here can be for them the story of metamorphosis that they cut to pieces. The problem, it seems, that always interrupts my dreams for their future is the past. The past is never quite behind us, it formed us and continues to push us forward.

An explanation: when I witness the ancient, and often torturous, pedagogical practices of our teachers (one example being the 4th graders writing every twentieth number from 0 to 1,000,000 so they “could know they existed”) and I try to remind myself that this is how the teachers were taught too. And, at the elementary school that they attended, where teachers are known to attend class drunk, not show up regularly, and do other worse things to students, the education we provide is an improvement. For our teachers, showing up every day and “teaching” is a stark improvement on what their past told taught them was a teacher. The past forms are present.

For 12 years during the Salvadoran civil war people were “disappeared”. Really, since the Spanish showed up until today the very lives of native people/poor people have been seen as disposable. Just last summer, when two environmentalists “disappeared” because they spoke out against the Canadian cyanide-leach gold mining outfit Pacific Rim, the government blamed it on gangs. For centuries the people here have been trained to think that everything, even their lives, is disposable. This is why the streets are filled with trash, why they don’t see the beauty of the landscape, why 3:00 pm always means sometime around 3:40, and why a teacher thought it a good idea to dismember the very hungry caterpillar.

Fatima, a future English teacher and friend from Agua Caliente, has been observing my classes lately. This embarrasses me. I am not trained to teach ESL or elementary kids and my daily preparation is less than it should be (but heck, I’ve got 7 preps ranging from first grade to adults, what can you expect?!?!). When I ask Fatima why she wants to watch me, she says it’s because I use all the techniques she’s learning about in school. I can’t tell you what these are in English, let alone in Spanish. My class often just happens – like the other day when my planned 10 minute demonstration of the game “Go Fish” turned into the kids teaching each other how to play the game, with them forming teams to reinforce the newly learned question and response to the kids who hadn’t memorized it yet. They taught each other; Fatima and I sat and watched. I had no clue this would happen, but I did not fear letting it happen. I’m glad she witnessed it because this approach to learning is nowhere to be found in Agua Caliente. But I’m also glad she witnessed it because she knew my lesson plan was different. She watched a teacher demonstrating the courage to be different, tolerance of the failures and frustrations that lead to learning, the decisiveness to make the decision to adapt a lesson on the fly, the humility to acknowledge that the students knew how to learn the material better than I did, love of the process – of making it happen and appreciating it when it does, the self-security to allow the students to venture into the educational unknown, and a teacher who braved the wilderness of patience with engaged student discovery. In seeing all of these she saw my utter joy in watching it all unfold. This was a gem of a lesson to observe and I’m well aware that most days my classes don’t even come close to resembling it.

Paulo Feire writes in Teachers As Cultural Workers, that these qualities: humility, lovingness, courage, tolerance, decisiveness, security, the tension between patient and impatience, and the joy of living are necessary, on top of solid pedagogy, for a teacher to be progressively democratic. I don’t know about “progressively democratic,” but I’d say those are the qualities a teacher needs to succeed in educating his students. I’d even say those are simply the qualities that a person needs to succeed in being human.

Am I angry that those books, so generously donated by my friends in Kent, were destroyed? Yes. But even more so I moved to compassion for how the Salvadoran people view themselves and the world around them. Training these teachers to be effective in their classrooms involves more than showing them some best practices, it involves lifting their self-worth and self-value above what they’ve been trained to allow for themselves. Before they can employ all the qualities listed by Freire, they first need to be able to acknowledge that some things are not disposable. Some things have an innate value that nothing can take away. Until they come to realize that they are that thing, that they are the pearl of great price, the education will lack. This is a slow process, to be sure, but the most important of processes. While I can guarantee you that before this happens you can train for and run a marathon, I can also guarantee you that only through educating the Salvadoran people will we see the reign of God – a world community free from the suffering of indignity and worthlessness – fully manifest itself in the present.