Small World

Yesterday was the final day of regular classes at the middle school (something that my lovely wife hates me for because she still has another week left). I still have "summer school" for another week, but whatever....

For the last day of classes we had a giant water balloon fight amongst the seventh grades between my geography students and my fellow Wisconsinite teacher Mr. Parisi. Hopefully I can get some pictures up later of all this chaos.

His team was to wear blue and my team was to wear red. Imagine my surprise when one of my students comes walking into my classroom wearing a Wisconsin Badgers t-shirt! His parents own a furniture store in San Pedro and apparently they get a lot of their stuff from Ashley Furniture (the WI-based co.) and the woman that his dad works with in Wisco sent them a bunch of Badger shirts one time.

I think he was pretty proud of the fact the he could show off the Badger colors to me on the last day of school!

- Dan

Sweetness!

Last Thursday Anah and I went to a fundraiser for the EIS pre-school. Normally such high-fluting event are not our scene, but it didn't cost that much and we were told there would be food and booze. Count us in.

Social butterflies we are.

The fundraiser was the second year the pre-school had held an auction to raise money for new playground equipment. Various parents put up goods for sale and teachers also auctioned off various services like swim lessons, cooking classes, overnight babysitting, and slumber parties at the school. A creative event.

Attendance was sparse. There are not a ton of kids in the pre-school so the community of support is relatively small, but that would play to our advantage. To my surprise there were a number of soccer-related prizes I quickly found out were up for grabs (besides the soccer camp for me and 10 friends, of course).

In the far corner of the hotel ballroom (big-time scene, people) was what was listed as the "Honduras #1 Fan" package. While I didn't think I'd even qualify to be in the top 1 million for Honduras fans I was none-the-less interested in acquiring this soccer souvenir. The fan pack consisted of a Honduras flag, ball, horn, hat, and the crem-de-la-crem... a national team jersey signed by the entire team. Danny wanty.

Going up against the moneyed elite of the school was going to be a daunting task. Luckily the first phase of the auction night was a "silent" auction, which was a bit ironic given that all of the bids were public and right in front of the items. Needless to say (I think I write that a lot and then proceed to say something... no?) I camped out by the prize pack.

With five minutes to go in the silent auction the low attendance was playing out in my favor. I had the top bid without breaking the bank when another Gringo scrawled his name on the bid sheet. I quick tagged my name another time only for the other gentleman to scribble another bid. I knew if I went higher I would certainly be outbid or, if I did win, would be in trouble for the amount I wrote.

I decided to channel my inner-Mitchell Wiersema, FedEx Global Sales Executive, and negotiate. A brief conversation convened where I was to learn the gent was not that big of a soccer fan, but his wife was pushing to buy loads of stuff (and they would throughout the night). With seconds left in the auction I convinced him to not bid anymore and in another moment of quick thinking offered him another, autograph-less jersey I was winning in exchange for withdrawing his top bid, saving me dozens of dollars in prize package costs. The night was mine!

Victory is mine!

I was now the proud owner of a bunch of Honduras junk, but one, precious autographed national team jersey. Without a doubt I wore that to school the next day and was the envy of many students.


- Dan

Caricature

This deserved a post of its own.

During Spanish Language Day one of the "Spanish Language honorees" was a local political cartoonist, Dario Banegas, who draws for the San Pedro Sula newspaper, La Prensa. According to my principal Mr. Banegas has been honored as the best cartoonist in Honduras several times.

He came to speak to the students as part of one of the class' presentations. When he was done speaking my homeroom kids convinced me that I would be the perfect subject for him to quick draw in front of the whole seventh grade. I've got a lot of good qualities that a caricaturist could capture. Great.

- Dan

More Students

Given that the school year is winding down and I'm feeling particularly bad about the fact that sooner rather than later I will have to tell my kids that I'm not coming back the blog has becoming my avenue for that guilt. Maybe I'll feel a bit better if I post a bunch of pictures from their activities....

Nope, not working.

Anyways, this past Friday the middle hosted Dia de Idioma Espanol or Spanish Language Day. The Spanish classes of each grade put together a day that would honor the heavy hitter of the Spanish language; authors, poets, political cartoonists, and other people and places of Latino importance. The middle school students have a habit of going over the top with display board visual and dressing up and Spanish Language Day was no different.

Pirates and Spanish forts in Omoa, Honduras

Honduran President Mel Zelaya

Honduran musician Guillermo Anderson

"Ugly Betty" star and Honduran, America Fererra

Jesus? I Don't really know.

- Dan

My Students

I just had to share this. Two of my students came in today during my prep period asking if they could use the room to take a few pictures for a school project. "No problem," I say. They proceed to take a number of pictures in a variety of poses for no apparent reason.

"Whatever," I say to myself indifferent to their madness and getting back to my grading.

Not too long ago, apparently pleased with their handiwork, I got this image in the e-mail:


Just in case you're not looking too closely, there are actually only two, unique students in the picture. Who knows what this is for, but still pretty hilarious!

- Dan

Earth Day

Last week the middle school had a bunch of activities set up for the kids to promote Earth Day. Students watched the Dr. Seuss movie, The Lorax, heard from Honduran about the importance of protecting the environment (it helped that he brought a snake!), and screen printed t-shirts.

Snakes make learning more fun!

Dumping out a day's worth of school trash to show the kids.

As you'll notice in the following pictures there is a funny little cartoon guy featured on the shirts. That is our Industrial Arts teacher, Mr. Kramer, who is a pretty big recycling, Earth guy. The kids get a kick out of him because he's a bit of an odd duck. Anyways... I went ahead and kinda turned him into a icon at the school by making the design for the t-shirt. He didn't mind and the kids thought it was pretty funny. The "WWMKD?" stands for "What Would Mr. Kramer Do?" and he's saying "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!"



- Dan

Wari's Wall (click to comment)

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Wiersema has never been an easy last name to pronounce.  I'm not even sure I say it right and it was probably pretty unfair for me to drop it on Anah when we got married....

But to force my students (this year and all years previous) to get it right is down right torture. While Anah (by virtue of teaching first grade) can get by on a first name basis (Ms. Anah, Ms. Tatiana... which is hard too), I've got to stick to my older-grade-teacher-formality.

I do give the kids the option of skipping the Mr. Wiersema part by going with Mr. W, but the letter "W" is a mouthful too so they don't save a lot of breath.  They can also call me "the greatest teacher living or dead," but surprisingly that hasn't caught on.

What has caught on is Mr. Wari (waaaa-reeee) which if I cared is probably less "respectful" in terms of formality that Mr. Dan.

Either way, apparently Waaaa-reeee-saaam-ma (as the whole name goes) is a brand or slang name for a machette, which are big around these parts.

Besides my "cool" nickname I've developed a odd cult following of students who create self-potraits of me during the "less exciting" parts of my class (I know! Even I can perform 24/7!). At first they were pretty disappointing, but since I started accumulating them as a collection the real artists have come out of the woodwork to grace the back wall of my classroom.

The whole beard-shaving has re-ignited the drive to capture my image.  I even have a student who does a daily drawing of my.  She labels each one "this is what I look like today." Clothes and everything.

Without further adu, "Wari's Wall":

- Dan

Classroom Wall Mural! (click here to comment)

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

I don't remember if I ever mentioned this, but earlier in the school year I asked our lovely art teacher Ms. Caitlin O'Neal if her activity period "Mural Club" would be interested in painting a world map on the open wall in my classroom.  She gladly agreed.

I've always wanted a giant world map in my room.  Those pull-down ones are nice, but mine blocks the white board when I use it so having a wall-sized map is super awesome.

After a bit of time (it was pretty much done a few months ago) it is now done!  Recently, I checked the painting for geographical accuracy (a few mistakes here and there when middle schoolers are tracing borders and coloring countries) and Caitlin put the finishing touches on the mural this past weekend with a protective laquer coat.

The colors are wonderful and it has already been a great resource to use when I'm talking about countries around the world.

My hope was always to use the giant map not only as a place to point out locations, but to attach pictures and current events to in order to show that the "world tells a million stories;" that the globe is less about location, but about places, places that have unique stories connected to them. Geography gets a bad rap from some people as being too boring, but I think that a lot of people either learned geography or teach geography as some sort of mindless memorizing of countries and capitals, but geopgraphy teachers have a responsibilty to teach the human side of the world as well.

I've kept a small file of interesting stories that I've read over the years, but anticipate adding many many more to the wall as I come across them.

Two stories highlighted in the above picture:

(Top photo) A picture from an article in "The New York Times" about the success of schools in Mali.

(Bottom photo) A picture from a photo essay in "Sports Illustrated" about the Handicapped (victims of land mines, war, accidents, etc) World Cup held in Ghana a few years ago.

Right now with only a few entries on the wall its easy to post the pictures, but in the future I'm going to have to make small "pin-points" that will lead the students to a file of stories and pictures from around the world.

If anyone ever comes across interesting global stories and pictures (they can be from the U.S. too) don't hesistate to cut them out or e-mail  them to me.

- Dan

Exciting School Visitors (click here to comment)

Nice view.

This week one of Honduras' biggest soccer teams visited my middle schoolers. Marathon is one of the two major teams in San Pedro Sula, one of the "big four" teams in the country, and the current Honduran League Champions. Following up on a campaign pledge from the middle school student council president, the team came on Thursday to play some of the students in a scrimmage and sign autographs for others.

While not exactly the same in size and scope, it was roughly the equivalent of the Pittsburgh Steelers coming to visit your local middle school. Students in the U.S. probably wouldn't bat an eye at the Major League Soccer champions coming to your school, much as the American football champions wouldn't get anyone's heart racing down here (except for maybe Jesse, who Steeler's quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is his doppelganger)

I was absolutely floored that a REAL soccer team was coming to our school. Some of the kids complained that "Marathon had already come here before" or "Marathon sucks." These criticisms coming from bitter fans of the other major Honduran teams. Given my ongoing obsession with documenting Honduran soccer there were no objections to being so close that I could get a good nostril shot of a professional soccer player.

The game was a wash. To begin with Marathon lined up against the middle schoolers head-to-head. The Honduran league champions were quickly up a half dozen goals before it was decided that maybe the teams should be mixed.

The originally line-ups were tossed out the window, along with any requirements for clothing and/or skill. As the match progressed different students took the places of the actual middle school team who most took to the field in blue jeans and lack of balance against their Honduran soccer heroes.

The local TV stations and newspapers were all there covering the event, making the day seem all the more important. The head coach was interviewed on TV, the team's president (and uncle of one of my students) made an appearance, and players were flocked to by autograph seeking students. One player, Franco, was declared the cutest by an otherwise indifferent group of girls and hunted down for photos and autographs on their arms like he was a Jonas Brother (an extremely popular, but musically talentless, pair of singers).

Despite the loss of two periods of instruction it was a pretty cool event to witness. Students are already planning how to lure the other popular teams to our school, a suggestion I laughed off forgettting for a moment the power that their parents wield. Hopefully, I'll have another soccer team to show off soon.

- Dan

Picasa Gallery of Marathon's visit here.