Carnivale

On Friday morning, the students at Isla Bonita prepared for the carnival before the parents arrived. The carnival took place outside and each class set up a table. The tables had things like posters, student work, music, and some of the students had individual presentations. While the parents were arriving, the math teacher came up to me and asked me to make a poster for the class that I have been teaching. I was disappointed because my class was the only class that was disorganized and didn’t have a table set up. This past week, I got the impression that two of the standard IV teachers are extremely lazy and apathetic as to what happens in the classroom. They weren’t involved in any of the lessons that I taught the boys and they didn’t help me with any of the planning.

After all of the parents sat down, the principal spoke. She made an important announcement about parents that haven’t paid their dues. Apparently, the school still needs 18, 000 dollars to be paid, and the teachers weren’t going to get their full checks. The teachers told us that all of the children that attend Isla Bonita are well off and middle class. I was confused when I heard that parents weren’t paying their dues. Maybe some parents don’t believe that an education is important, and they just think school is something for their children to do during the day. Part of me thinks that some the teachers treat school like daycare. For example, the teachers here let the students watch crazy rated R movies. The students said they are always working on projects. The teachers probably just assign projects, so they don’t have to spend a lot of time actually teaching.

In each class, three students received awards for achieving the highest averages this past semester. I put up a picture of Reuben after he was given his award. Reuben had the highest average for my class the past two semesters. On Saturday I ran into one of my student’s parents and talked to them for a while. They told me that their son was crying all day on Friday after he was given his report card. The student’s average went down ten points and his parents were upset that the teachers didn’t let the parents know that Rome was struggling in the classroom. Rome’s parents are going to the school after Easter break to ask his teachers to let them know what he is having trouble with.

Friday night a bunch of us went out to eat and then wondered around town. Natalie, Anna, and I sang karaoke…more like screamed.