20150715_113854 20150715_114107 20150715_163029

Hello everyone my name is Zoe Delgado. Sorry for not posting a blog yesterday they sent us to bed early because we had to wake up early. Our group got spilt up into two groups, one went to public school and one went to a private school. I went to a public school (last picture was the public school, I’m the third from the right) and clearly everything was completely different. For one, public and private, you have to wear uniform, buy your own school supplies and take the chicken bus. What’s a chicken bus?  you might ask, well it’s a small bus that takes kids to school. It is super crazy in there! some sat down and some stood up, I stood up and wanted to be a rebel, the streets don’t have any stop lights or any signal that alerted the driver when to stop or go, instead they just honk.  We walked for about 20 minutes to the bus and to the school.  Even when we got there you could tell it was really different than most schools in the US. It was really small, crowded, and loud.  Their library was small, which is where we met our shadows for the day.  I saw that they had no AC in the classrooms, and it was really hot. They had no posters on the wall. The students had cleaning duty, instead of janitors doing the work. When the teacher was teaching Physics, none of the students really understood the work because they had to provide their own calculator, but no one had a calculator. Also there were no projectors, so students had to copy down all the notes from a textbook. The kids would pay attention to the teachers, which was pretty different than what I heard happened in the private school that the other group visited.

Hey everyone my name is Natalia Plancarte. As Zoe already mentioned, sorry for the misunderstanding yesterday but we had to wake up  at five in the morning today. It was really essential for us to get enough sleep. Yesterday was education day which meant that we were going to a high school and get a shadow from that school. The shadow took us in their class and we learned what the student was learning. Whatever they did we had to do the same which means we had to take the same notes and copy down the homework. In my case I went to a private high school and here in Nicaragua only private high school is called “colegio.” A huge difference between Nicaragua and the US is that high schools in Nicaragua are 5 years and in the US, it’s only four.  My personal experience in my shadow day was great because knowing Spanish helped me a lot in class because I understood what they were talking about. My shadow was super shy, but I kept bugging and annoying him with questions. The classes that we took were: Physics, Spanish, Economics, and a class that is similar to advisory in my school where they had to present exhibitions.  Everyone in my little group of private school shadows had a different experience – some had good experiences and others didn’t. Language barriers were the common problem that people had because it was so hard to communicate, which made that experience even harder.

Overall, although we all had different experiences, we learned how different it is here compared to the US, and we learned why the teachers in the US can act more strict, and we feel more grateful that they care so much about us and won’t talk over us.  Some of the differences we saw were that students stayed in the same room all day and the teachers moved.  Also, we saw teachers just teaching and even if the kids didn’t get it, they just kept teaching.  We also saw that in the private school the teachers didn’t seem to care as much as in the public schools here, which was surprising for some of us. Private and public seemed completely different based on the 2 schools we saw.  It really looked like the public school kids knew that if they didn’t try hard, they wouldn’t get anywhere, but the private school kids seemed to act like they would inherit their parents’ businesses even if they didn’t work hard.