Belize Doctoral Internship Summary Video

I put together this short video to show my overall experiences in Belize- food, people, schools, kids, geography and culture.

Sea Turtle!

Look at this cute little turtle! I wish I could have gotten closer.

Commuting

Most residents of San Pedro get around one of three ways:
-bikes
- golf carts
- walking
Kids get to school these three ways as well- you'll find no school buses here. Some arrive via the water taxi from another island or the mainland. That's a hefty commute from Belize City of over 1 hour each way. The first ride in the water taxi was nauseating, and I could not understand how the man across from me could sleep through the constant bumps and waves. But I nodded off during my third trip. You can get used to anything I guess.

Recurring Thoughts During My Trip

1. During the ten days I spent on Ambergris Caye, I did not fully understand how to pronounce its name. Not until I got home and looked at this wonderful web site. Not sure why it was so difficult for me.

http://ambergriscaye.com/pages/town/island.html

2. Currency exchange: 2 Belize = 1 U.S.- No, wait, it's 1 U.S. = 2 Belize. CRAP! Which is it? They accept both kinds of currency and you never know what you'll get in change, so there was a lot of trust that the Belizean folks were honestly doing the math correctly.

3. Where are we? We walked the same path back and forth over and over to get to the schools, the beach, the restaurants, main drag, etc. Our accomodations were on the middle street and one street in each direction was on the water. So the island is 3 blocks wide? We never got to the length-wise end of the island, but where is it anyway? According to the above web site, the island is a mile wide in some places. Really? I saw such a small part it seems, but while there I felt like I had seen it all.

4. Where is the Belizean music? I traveled to Mexico and heard clearly Mexican music everywhere. I saw street musicians and felt the rhythm of the culture. In San Pedro, I heard American music. 70s and 80s music especially. At lunch, we heard Jimmy Buffet; at a school function, it was 1970s folk and pop. I saw no street performers or authentic "Belizean" music that I can recall. Even the island's main web site (listed above) has Madonna playing in the background. I found that strange.

One classmate put it well- it seems that the people of this island were on the way to somewhere else but just stayed in San Pedro when they arrived. So the mix of people is quite diverse. There is no majority or minority. It is a cultural blend, so it was impossible to get a true vibe of what this place was all about.

5. Oh my god that child is going to get hurt!! One VERY big difference between America and San Pedro is the level of safety precautions for kids. We saw: -toddlers riding bikes alone with no shoes and definitely no helmets

- parents carrying newborn babies with one arm while riding a bike

- very small kids riding on golf carts with no seat belts or restraints of any kind
- children playing in the ocean with no supervision

- 2, 3, 4 year olds riding on the bar in front of the bike seat while the adult rides the bike (ALL OF THE TIME)

- bare feet- not just on the beach but on the dirt roads, in the street, everywhere. But as the signs in the restaurants say, "no shirt, no shoes, no problem!"

Golf Cart!

We walked constantly this week. Back and forth on the beach, the dirt roads, the scary streets filled with wreckless golf cart and taxi drivers. On our final visit to the Isla Bonita school for a farewell celebration, we were happy beyond words to get a surprise golf cart ride from Teacher Hector. Just look at the smiles!

Overall Reflections

Successes:

Our plan to facilitate dialog among principals went as I hoped. They saw each other’s faces, learned about their backgrounds a bit and heard about how they have similar struggles despite serving different populations. We did not help them set up a way to communicate as a group at that time, but Dr. Catapano did get everyone’s emails to hopefully attempt that-though one principal had to pull out a slip from his wallet to write down his email address since he did not know it. That wasn’t a very hopeful sign! The workshop we led for teachers on Thinking Maps went better than I expected. Teachers were not overwhelmed and came up with creative ideas for how to use them for regular and differentiated instruction.

LaChawn’s workshop on formative assessment was a perfect lead into our topic and we were able to reference each other’s strategies throughout both workshops. We purchased small prizes for participation, which likely helped motivate the teachers to be more engaged. It felt good to give them these basic supplies that we saw were lacking in many classrooms.

Challenges:

I function best personally when I operate within a schedule. My challenge was going with the flow of the seemingly constant changes in the Belize culture. One principal said, “We were going to start our dinner at 5:30, but that’s ‘Belize’ time so there is no telling when it will actually be.” A soccer game was supposedly canceled according to what someone heard but then we heard it did happen. Meetings with the ministry officials were not solidified until very last minute. That was uncomfortable but forced me to relax and go with it.

But in schools, there was a great deal of down time where students were waiting for something to happen. For example, in the high school, the bells are not automated and so kids have to wait for someone to manually ring the bell for class changes and they are frequently not rung when classes are supposed to end. Teachers were not using this extra time for additional instruction but simply sat and waited for that bell with no telling how long it would take.

My biggest challenge in this visit was hearing about and observing how many teachers handle students with special needs in their classrooms. That is, they are often simply ignored. One child with a significant vision limitation was eager to participate in one second grade (Infant 2) classroom but was ignored, and her though she had workbooks, they were upside down and clearly without any larger font than normal. The teacher did not even acknowledge her presence. This behavior was confirmed by the ministry official as what teachers do since they are not trained with how to teach these kids. Still, it seemed wrong to me to ignore students even if the teachers do not know best ways to “teach” them.

Takeaways:

Teacher training does not a good teacher make. Providing opportunities for professional growth with collegial support is a big aspect of improvement awareness of instructional needs and practices. That happens when leadership promotes and provides those times and builds it into the culture.

Diving In

To be honest, I did not want to make this Trip to Belize. I would miss my baby, my husband, miss work and class time. But I went, saw so much that I could never learn about any other way and I survived. I did miss my family terribly, but I survived and so did they. This entry is about how not wanting to do something can prevent amazing discoveries.

I went to Mexico this past December with my husband David and baby girl. David bought snorkeling equipment and was in the water for hours a day. Every day he would return to the room like a little boy excited to share what he saw in the water during his excursions. To me, the water was just a little too cool, and I wasn't that interested to make that physical sacrafice. "A squid! I saw a squid today!" He was so stunned and excited to share his discovery, but I could only think about how scary that would be to have a squid under my dangling legs.

For the trip to Belize, I took David's snorkeling gear in hopes of saving a few bucks on our planned excursion and hoped also I would have fun seeing sea life in warm, turquoise water. It was very cool to see a shark and rays and giant fish and even the sea turtle. But it was hard. The fins were heavy, my mask leaked and I had a killer headache all day after. I felt uncoordinated and out of control. Still, I lugged this stuff all the way down there and told myself that I would snorkel again later in the week just off the dock near the hotel.

Every day, though, I was tired and dreaded feeling out of control and exhausted with another try at snorkeling. Not until my last day in Belize did I make the decision to give it another go. This time I would skip the fins and hope to see some things to take some pictures of to finish that roll on the underwater camera. I got in hesitantly but soon realized the reason David did this every day in Mexico. Without a life jacket and fins, I was free to swim around confidently. I saw hundreds of fish under me that you could not at all see from above the water. It was beautiful and I wanted to see more. I did not spend long in the water because my buddies were on the dock waiting for me. But how I wished I had done this more during the week. My worries that kept me from thinking this would be worthwhile vanished as soon as I looked beneath the water's surface this time around.

Summary point: I need to dive in to what scares me and makes me uncomfortable. I just don't know what is lurking under the surface that could bring true beauty in my life.