The Places You Will Be From

Back when I was in high school, a little band from Minneapolis, Semisonic, had a bit of radio success with a little tune called "Closing Time," a meandering and nostalgic alt-rock song about a bar at the end of the night.  During the chorus they sing

"every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end"

As excited as I am about the amazing opportunities coming in my move to Campinas, Brazil, in a few short weeks, it doesn't make the ending of my amazing experience in Colombia any easier.  Five years in one place is a long time.  Living in Cali now ties living in Eau Claire in longevity for places I've called home in my adult life; if leaving "EC" was a difficult transition, this has been downright heart-wrenching.

I've made a life and home here in Cali and this city, this country, my school, and all the people along the way will be a special part of my life.  As they say, "Colombia es pasión" and I've been feeling a lot of it lately...

First up, graduation of my second group here.
It was a very bittersweet day; I may have cried six a few times this day.

Congratulations, Class of 2012!!!

I am definitely going to miss a lot of these guys.

Science Department "despedida" (farewell) party.
I've been fortunate to work with so many talented and intelligent
colleagues over the years.  

One of the best 11th grade Pre-AP Biology classes I have ever had.
On the last day of classes they threw a little surprise goodbye party.
(The placement of the tree in this picture may have been a
mistake in hindsight...)

Two of my favorite ladies at work; it makes me
physically ill to think about not seeing Juliana
and Moraima every day and to work on another
show together. 

And of course I can't forget my ninth graders this year...

...they're just so...

...special.  (Which is why I love them, obviously!)

The pictures projected at the Ceremonia de reconocimiento
(Recognition Ceremony) for my five-year anniversary.

My five-year pin.
I took a picture so when it inevitably gets lost I will remember that I had it. 

Parting gift: A personalized ceramic chiva bus. 

Chiva-bus picture with the man who hired me over five years ago on a
frigid February day in Waterloo, Iowa.

Oh, and there was that time my former students
threw a "despedida" for me...at a bar.
Reason # I-don't-know thousand why I will miss this place...

Also, in the same song, Semisonic sings "time for you to out to the places you will be from."  This means two things to me: Brazil is waiting and, although I am not Colombian, you can bet if they make it to the World Cup in 2014 in Brazil, I'll be cheering proudly!

Hasta luego, Colombia...te extrañaré.
Siempre estás en mi corazón.

Its A Bird, Its A Plane!

No, Its Basuraman!
This week my Pre-AP Biology students finished launching their school-wide recycle-awareness campaign aimed at getting people to think about where they dispose of their paper waste.  This project has been nearly all student-driven and executed; after assigning various roles and leadership, they conducted their own update meetings, sent status emails to the group, and set and maintained their own due dates.  Other than some occasional red-tape cutting and suggestionary interjections, they carried this entire project.

What began as a critical look at our school's own recycle system after a visit to a local eco-community, the class held a panel interview with the high school principal and head of maintenance ultimately deciding that the system did not necessarily need to be changed, just educate people to how it true should function.

Thus was borne the Basuraman campaign.  Making a surprise first appearance during a lunch period calling out to the entire cafeteria from the balcony above to "be super like me" and recycle, to anticipatory "Basuraman says..." announcements in the daily memo, to finally presenting a propaganda video at three separate assemblies, the campaign was successful in its initiation.  In the end we have the support of the administration, giant "Basuraman posters around campus, and teachers have posted specialized signs on or near paper recycle bins in their classrooms asking people to "Think...Recycle."

Basuraman asks students and teachers to "THINK" at a Primary assembly.

But will people remember to "think" after the current school year ends?  Like all superheroes, Basuraman has a weakness too, only his will be time.

Grease is the Word

Four years ago I dipped my toes into directing with a little show that played homage to Elvis called "All Shook Up!" This year we went back to the poodle skirt era with "Grease."  

Though it takes place at a high school, the stage version of the show is a bit risqué for high school; the movie starring Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta has its moments as well.  Our staging combines the two with some songs not found in the film as well as added dialogue to fill some story gaps.

Though this show wasn't my preferred choice, I am very excited about having a fantastic cast of hilarious and dedicated actors to work with.  I also got to design the promotional posters for the show (at right) as well as the cast t-shirts.

The six show run has been nearly flawless and this cast rolls with all the punches like pros.  The last curtain goes up tomorrow and I'm sure a few tears will be shed during the closing of "We Go Together."

Sandy meets the Pink Ladies...and Patty Simcox.

Coach Calhoun "primes" the crowd at the pep rally.

The Pink Ladies have a "Sneaky Pete" at Frenchy's sleep-over.

Danny tries to win Sandy back at the diner.

The gang consider their options at the diner.

Viola reacts to Frenchy's "trouble in tinting class."

Principal McGee getting the American Bandstand dance contest started.

Danny & Sandy strike a pose.

Rizzo & Kinickie have a fight about her potential "bun in the oven."

"You're The One That I Want"

The cast takes a bow.

Shoo Fly!

What to do when you are heading to jungle and normal insect repellent won't cut it with the super-powered mosquitoes?  Make your own!  When I went to the Amazon several years ago, the following recipe was recommended, and, while not the best cologne, is quite effective.  While it does contain some suspect ingredients, it contains no DDT or other known carcinogenic substances.

Since I will be heading off to the tropical forests of the Caribbean, south of Santa Marta to hike Ciudad Perdida, and several friends are heading down to Leticia, we gathered after school one day to concoct our repellent in my science lab.

INGREDIENTS:

• 250 mL alcohol
• 250 mL "menticol"
• 6 camphor tablets
• 1 oz. 10% "Eurax"
• 2 Tbsp citronella essence
• 3 Tbsp Johnson's baby oil
• Nopikex soap

WHAT TO DO:
Other than crushing the camphor tablets and breaking the soap into smaller chunks, the basic idea is just to combine all the ingredients together.  The originally recipe calls for the use of a blender but I don't think anyone would be willing to drink juice out an appliance that at one point created this mess!

Using mortar and pestle to crush the camphor tablets. 

Mixing, mixing, mixing...

The finished product...before it got rebottled.

*No one had a camera so I used my computer's camera, thus the low-quality and backwards images.

Moving Forward

My entire adult life I have been fortunate enough to have been making forward progress; I mean this both professionally and geographically.  Beginning with my first quasi-adult move to enter college from the Twin Cities to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to my first actual job on the opposite side of the same state in the town of Manitowoc on the shores of Lake Michigan, to Cali, Colombia where the exploits of this blog have been played out, I have found a way to also move toward the rising sun.  That trend will continue, it seems...

While this may not be late-breaking news, I have signed a contract to leave the amazing country of Colombia and further my experience as a teacher and of Latin America in another school in another country.  In July I will be moving to the city of Campinas, Brazil, for what will end up being a combination position of various life science-based courses and probably a Master's degree program.

While I still have about four months left to explore and enjoy a country that I will hold forever dear to me, allow me to share a little bit of information about my new home.  Campinas (say: cahm-PEE-nahs) is located in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, about a ninety minute drive from one of the world's largest cities, São Paulo itself.  While the aforementioned metropolis has about 11 million people - if the surrounding suburbs are included this number doubles - Campinas has a modest 1.5 million.

My future campus.

The school I will be teaching at is similar to the one I have been at, except that the origins of my new place of employment are and continue to be linked to foreign corporations, such as 3M, the company that founded the school.  São Paulo is a financial and corporate force in the world economy and therefore the proximity Campinas has to it is residual in many ways.  I look forward to living and working in a smaller large city with a large professional population with a fair amount of cultural offerings.

Campinas means "meadows" or "plains" in Portuguese, a new language I will have to learn.  That being said, there are many coffee, cotton, and sugarcane plantations around the city, also contributing to the economy.  (After living in Cali and Colombia, I am used to the burning 'cane fields and coffee has become a staple part of my diet. This will be a welcome part of the transition!)  

Because this is Brazil, Campinas has not one, but two professional soccer teams, and three stadiums.  I'm not sure what the plans are of yet for the World Cup in 2014, but a game or two in Campinas at the early stages may not be entirely out of the question!

The climate is pleasant year-round with a slight change in seasons, something comparable to a Midwestern spring/fall to summer.  To put it simply, even the wealthy homes do not have central heating.  Along with several picturesque parks and trails, there is also an extensive public transportation system, two malls, several theatres for the performing arts, and a plethora of reputable universities, ensuring that the nightlife is also on par with larger more metropolitan locales.

A lot of this information I was able to ascertain from my coincidental visit last spring for an educators' conference.  One thing I learned from Wikipedia is that "Campinas was the third city in the world to adopt the technology of the telephone in 1883, after Chicago and Rio de Janeiro."  Who knew?!?!

I look forward to this new change and to find out more things about Brazil and Campinas.

A Mother's Earth

In the era of global warming, environmental awareness, sustainable practices, and recycling, teaching ecology takes on a whole new form.  It is hard to argue against the fact that education is paramount in affecting awareness and change.  This year I had the unique opportunity to take my class of Pre-AP Biology students, all 11th graders, to a self-sustaining eco-community located about half an hour outside of Cali.  While many of the ideas and ways of life implimented in this community - which includes about forty families and is governed entirely by women - are a little unrealistic for a contemporary lifestyle, I feel it is important for my students to see how thinking "outside the box" can, indeed, work.

Nashira, named after an indigenous goddess of abundance, uses solar energy for many of its power needs, including all the cooking.  All of the buildings have been constructed using recycled materials to create the "cement" and composting sheds have been set up throughout the commun for equal access for all the individual gardens set up in each family plot.  Each family is assigned and responsible for the opperation of one aspect that the entire community benfits from, for example the raising and collecting of hen and chicken eggs, the maintainence of the compost sheds, organizing the recycled and waste materials in the materials building, to name a few.

One the most ingenious aspects of the community is the main communal bathroom, called a baño seco or "dry bathroom" as it is flushless and requires no traditional plumbing.  This is not your average hole in the ground toilet, however!  The toilet bowl is separated into two sections, for number one and number two, respectively.  After doing number two, all that is needed is a scoop of dirt from the handy dirt container located next to the trash can.  This goes into a recepticle apart from the urine and can be used as fertilizer, along with the toilet paper that is disgarded here as well.

My students had a great day and seemed to be really inspired by human ingenuity.  After taking a guided tour of the community, doing two different workshops on waste disposal and making new paper out of recycled paper, and having a delicious sancocho lunch cooked by solar power, we were all justifiably exhausted but also ready to bring some of these ideas back to school and to Cali. All in all, it was successful trip!

My Pre AP Biology class.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Waste management workshop

Recycled paper-making workshop

 
 

Trivial Pursuit (Part II)

A little over a month ago, I took the ICFES, Colombia's version of the SAT.  This morning the results were posted online.  While the scoring is complex with many subscores and sub-subscores and socres that are essentially dependant on how the rest of the testing population fared, I feel pleased with my results.

There are 1000 "puestos" or spots and everyone is ranked into one of those.  I ended in Puesto 683 which is about 31.7%.  Not too bad when the majority of my competition has native fluency in Spanish and is not ten years out of graduating from high school.

Of the individual subject scores, I got a 91.7 in English language - its a joke - and my next highest was a 58.9 in Biology, thankfully.  Now, in order to apply to most Colombian universities, I am told, any score over 50 is considered acceptable.  My Chemistry and Math scores were also in this acceptable range.  I knew nothing of Philosophy and it showed with a score of 12.7, however, the one I'm most proud of is the "lenguaje" section, which is dealing with the Spanish language, but in a Language Arts context; I got a 45.3.  Not to bad for someone who didn't know a lick of Spanish less that four years ago!

Get Your Hair Did

The Colombian mullet is a thing of beauty.  A lot of styles have come and gone during my time here but one of the main-stays has been the mullet, or the Colombian version of one.  Less redneck hill-billy and slightly more stylized with a dash of hipster, it is, love it or hate it, truly a coif to behold.

Which makes the follow student quote so amazing.  While working on lab activity, he stopped me, shaking his head slowly from side to side and said:

"Look at what I can do with my mullets!"

Yes, mullets.  With an "s" as in "more than one."  I've never heard a Colombian use the term mullet so that was awesomely humorous in and of itself.  The plural and the head shaking were icing on the funny cake.

Trivial Pursuit (Part I)

I’ve been hearing the exasperated question “why?!?” a lot lately.  This isn’t completely undeserved either; it’s actually fairly legitimate.  On Sunday I voluntarily sat in a desk for about eight hours and took an exam that has no barring on my future.  


The ICFES is the Colombian equivalent to the SAT, except that is covers eight subjects – math, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, language arts (Spanish), social studies, and English (as a foreign language) – and is given in two parts, each four and a half hours in length.  The other major difference between this standardized test and its US counterpart is that every Colombian high school graduate must take the exam to receive a diploma of graduation and, those wishing to attend university in the country depend heavily on the score they receive.  So, you know, no pressure.

So, why did I put myself through it?  I’d say it was equal parts wanting to test my own Spanish comprehension after living here for four years, wanting a first-hand point of view of what is expected (according to the Colombian Ministry of Education) of my biology students, and because it was cheap at about US$20.  Nevertheless, it was a fascinating cultural experience as well.


The test is only given twice a year, with most people taking it at the close of their last year of school.   When you register, you are asked to put your address with the hope that you will be given a testing site nearby.  My colleague, Rita, and I both said we “lived” at the school in the hopes that we would be testing together and at one of the universities that sprout like weeds around our own school’s campus.  No such luck; we were both placed at separate sites on the other side of the city.


Upon arriving at the Universidad Libre in the west side of Cali just after 6am on a drizzly Sunday morning, I joined the already growing number of students lining up down the street, leading away from the front doors of the fortressed university building.  Because every graduate must take this test, there were people arriving from all kinds of schools, neighborhoods, socioeconomic backgrounds; some arrived my bus, some by taxi, and others drove themselves.  It struck me that this may be one of the only times in most city-dwelling Colombian’s lives that they are forced to intermingle with others from vastly different backgrounds, in this still very caste-like divided society.


The doors opened at 7am and everyone filed into the building and were directed to the wing and floor we were each assigned to.  Outside room 408 I was met by a nice old professor-like gentlemen in a worn sweater and jeans who asked to see my identification and match my name with the list outside the door.  With his glasses on the tip of his nose, he triple-checked that I was indeed who I said I was, smiled, and told me to sit in desk #16. 


As I entered the room, which at this point had only one other test-taker in it, I oriented myself to the numbering on the desks.  I saw desk 11, and 12, and then 13.  Taking a glance further down the row I saw it.  One desk that was older, smaller, and more decrepit than the rest.  Even though my gut told me I would be squeezing into this miniature joke of a writing surface, I still continued to count. 


Once the room was filled, the gentleman proctor from the door, Mr. Rojas, began distributing the exams, each personalized with our names and codes, pre-sealed in their own plastic-wrapped packages.  For the next four and a half hours Mr. Rojas, wandered in and out of the room, chatting with other proctors from across the halls, occasionally peaking his head into the room and sighing heavily as he plopped down in the one comfortable-looking chair at the head of the classroom.

Oye, ¿Esta prueba de ingles es de 'fill in
the blanks' o es de 'spot the mistake'?

During the lunch break I met up with six students from my school and we headed to grab something to eat and discuss the first half of the exam.  I was pleasantly surprised that the questions I didn’t “get” were ones they too found perplexing.  The test has been the subject of many a harsh critique over the years, ranging from poorly written questions to conspiracy theories regarding test questions that are too advanced as a way of assuring low scores so that the government has an excuse not to pay educators in poorer schools more money.


One of the most controversial sections, English language, has received some of the worst criticism.  I’ve heard horror stories about questions such as “Which of the following would you find in a park?” with the choices being between a man, a tree, a trashcan, and a dog.  Unsurprisingly, very bilingual graduates from my school were scoring in the 80th percentile.  At lunch we were all anxious to see how this year’s exam would play out.


Other than a couple oddly worded passages, I thought the entire section was well done, although the girl next to me would probably opine otherwise, as she clearly came from a school with no English program and therefore filled in none of her answer sheet, another universal flaw in the exam for schools with no English teachers or funding yet with national expectations.


The only question that I may actually have gotten wrong was in a section with a series of signs where the tester was asked to determine where these signs would be found.  One sign said “No running.”  The choices were: a zoo, a park, and on a bus.  I chose “a zoo” because it doesn’t seem possible to really run on a bus, nor seem like that would be a problem.  I’ve seen plenty of people running at a zoo, although I could see a sign condemning this behavior here much more than on a moving vehicle.  Later in the evening, Rita confirmed this sentiment, however, at school this week, the students had a different point of view: the school busses list not running as one of the many rules.  Context will get you every time.

From the ICFES website, the girl on
the left seems to be having an easier
time managing her exam than some
in my testing room.

Another strange thing about this exam is its form.  Think about being lost on some rural country road or stuck in the middle of big city in rush hour traffic with some giant road atlas map spread out over your lap and steering wheel, momentarily blocking out the windshield.  The exam “booklet” is like that.  You must somehow manipulate this massively awkward poster-sized paper monstrosity with origami master skills in a desk with a foldable writing surface the size of a notebook.  (Or, in my case, half that size.) Why they can't print separate pages and throw a couple staples in it while they're busy shrink-wrapping them is beyond me and most of the people I have spoken to.  


Other than the philosophy and Spanish language arts sections, which I pretty much gave up on not for lack of literal translation but interpretive translation, I felt pretty good about the exam.  For not studying at all, I felt pretty good about things I retained from my own university physics, math, and chemistry days.  Multiple-choice also helps a great deal, and, as a teacher, writing tests gave me an edge in weeding out potential wrong answers.


Time will tell, however, if I could apply to a Colombian university.  Truth be told, I’m mostly looking forward to seeing the score from the biology section, however, a part of me – the competitive part - would love to outscore at least one of our graduating seniors in the overall score.  Going for the B-C-B-C-B-C strategy on two sections probably won’t let that come to fruition though. 


We’ll all find out in May, I guess…

Les Poissons, Les Poissons

After months of preparations, seemingly endless Saturday rehearsals, paint and glitter-filled lungs, fights with lighting and sound technicians, and a few tears...the show went on!  Here are a few shots from our extremely successful production of "The Little Mermaid."

Ariel wants to be "Part of Your World"

Ariel's Mersisters and Flounder

Welcome to life "Under the Sea"

"...the seaweed is always greener, in somebody else's lake..."

"Poor Unfortunate Souls"

Triton, Ariel, and Flounder

Chef Louis and "Les Poissons"

"She's got legs you idiot!"

Sebastian and Flounder try to get Eric to "Kiss the Girl"

Scuttle's entourage

The Maids and Ariel

"...they come flocking to my cauldron crying 'spells Ursula please..."

Sebastian the court composer!

The best production team "under the sea"!!!