Orientation

We had our first day of orientation today. The school is beautiful - the overhead picture does it no justice. It also has a security guard at the front. It was sunny and just a little breezy this morning, when (after some introductions) we got to explore the school. They made it into a scavenger hunt, splitting us up into groups with a few student teachers and a few new teachers (they hire people from overseas as well, and they have the same orientation the first year that student teachers do). It was good that we were split up, since we student teachers are a mite clique-y still.

It started raining.. no, monsooning, when we were in the computer lab learning about Lincoln's system (as far as I know, my username and password still don't work) and continued until we went home about 4 hours later. It let up for maybe half an hour. In the meantime, we ate an amazing lunch that was more like a dinner - I guess that makes sense here, though, given the culture - and were .. lectured? spoken to? well, presented to at the least.. about culture shock and differences between Costa Rican culture and American culture. At least my usual punctuality won't be a surprise at school... normally they arrive half an hour later than planned, at least, but that's only for social gatherings.

I meet my mentor (in person, we already spoke a bit on the phone) tomorrow. I'm trying really hard to reserve judgment until I've seen her in action, but I'm somewhat disappointed that she apparently uses a LOT of extrinsic reinforcers (i.e. candy) and doesn't like to "get messy" in class; she says a lot more learning happens when the kids are busy and directed all the time. Really, I'm sure that's true, but I'm sort of worried she'll yell/be controlling more than I'm normally comfortable with. Last semester's student teachers said she yells a lot... hopefully it's not as bad as I'm fearing. She also seems really nice.. it's sort of weird. I'll decide what I really think of her later. For now, I'll just look forward to teaching a lesson on fairy tales the first day - she said she wants to do some in-depth work with fairy tales, and I'll be reading one per day for the whole semester, as far as I know. We'll be doing comparative literature :-D - that's the sort of thing I hope we do a lot of!