Campamento 3.0: Day 2

Gary, I hope you're reading this. The theme for today was "community". As I do often in my math classes, I decided to divide the class into groups of 3 to talk about their community, it's leaders, the responsibilities of the members of the community, how to improve the community etc. So I had the students count off by sixes and I then pointed out where each group would meet and told the students to move to those areas...no one moved. Silence. And then the students just started talking to their neighbors about the community. So I asked a student what was his number and he had no idea. I asked another student and she had no idea.  

It was then that it dawned on me that they had never worked in groups like I wanted them to. Or at least they hadn't been divided into groups like that. You know I've been doing this long enough you would think that I could've anticipated this development -- especially after claiming yesterday that I have been dominicanized -- but I guess not. These little differences in the educational experiences of gringos and Dominicanos keep on popping up when I least expect them to. The teachers just don't put kids in groups here to learn. It's as simple as that. On the other hand maybe I just don't speak Spanish all that well.

In any event, I'm not easily deterred from my plans so we counted off again and I worked harder to explain what I wanted the kids to do and it all worked out. We even did some pair shares and some wait time work; pretty advanced stuff but manageable once I learned that I needed to be precise and explicit in explaining what I wanted to happen. Again, after teaching for 22 years you would think that I would already know this.

Here's what one group wrote about community:

Students working on their journals:

Doña Yolanda talking with the campers about community organizing: