Como transformar el cacao en chocolate

(How to transform cocoa into chocolate)

Por el blogger invitado Toni Medina (copyright, 2023) (El autor desea agradecer al Instituto Bíblica Misionero Ecuatoriano (IBME) por su continuo apoyo.)

Arbol cacao (cocoa tree)

Vaina de cacao: la pulpa blanca y dulce rodea los granos (cocoa pod: white sweet pulp surrounds the beans)

Secado de granos de cacao (cocoa drying)
Santo Domingo de Onzole, Eloy Alfara, Esmereldas, Ecuador

¡Haz clic en las imágenes para ampliarlas! (Click on the pictures to enlarge!)

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1. Los granos de cacao se secan durante 3 a 4 días al aire libre bajo el sol. Los granos de cacao se retiran directamente de las vainas, los granos los guardamos durante las noches debido a las lluvias y así no dañar el proceso de secado.

2. Una vez haya culminado el proceso de secado, llevamos los granos de cacao a tostar entre 7 a 10 minutos, hasta que las cascaras empiezan a separarse del grano.

3. Luego de forma manual separamos las cascarillas de los granos, las cascarillas se la pueden utilizar para preparar refrescos o te.

4. Luego, molemos los granos utilizando un molinoartesanal casero, luego de eso las personas de Santo Domingo de Onzole, transformamos dicha pasta de chocolate en bola o barras con las cuales realizamos el “chocolate” una bebida típica de la zona 

5. Para hacerlo comestible, a dicha pasta le agregamos algo de leche y azúcar entre otros productos, para obtener en delicioso chocolate en barra o pasta dulce.

Inglés

1. The cocoa beans are dried for 3 to 4 days in the open air under the sun. Then the cocoa beans are removed directly from the pods, and we store the beans overnight due to the rains, so as not to damage the drying process .

2. Once the drying process is complete, we roast the cocoa beans for 7 to 10 minutes, until the shells begin to separate from the bean.

3. Then we manually separate the husks from the grains. The husks can be used to prepare soft drinks or tea.

4. Then, we grind the grains using a homemade artisanal mill, after which the people of Santo Domingo de Onzole transform the chocolate paste into balls or bars with which we make “Chocolate”, a typical drink of the area.

5. To make it edible, we add some milk and sugar to the paste, among other products, to obtain a delicious chocolate bar or sweet paste.

Further #uptheonzole: Seeing children.

Carlos will say that every experience for visitors to Santo Domingo de Onzole is different, and every “re-entry” experience is different.  By re-entry, he (and I) refer to re-entry into our daily lives, which are so different from our time in Santo Domingo de Onzole. For me, this re-entry has made first think about the kids.

To set some context of why it feels like re-entry:  this week, the power went out three times, stretching twice from evening until the next afternoon, and one time until the next evening. We ate and played and read and talked by candlelight.  There’s no running water.  These aren’t really enormous hardships, honestly, but to have no access to phone or internet is somewhat jarring, at least to me. I’m so accustomed to communicating with people in personal and work relationships, interacting with information, and fooling around on social media, that my life is very different when I’m “off the grid”.

I do different things when I’m #upthonzole. I spent my afternoons and evenings this year playing with kids, looking through microscopes, dancing, taking goofy pictures, drawing, doing physics, chemistry, and biology, talking about teaching and professional development, and reading books.

From that starting point, this blog can go in many different directions. My personal re-entry has come in through my experience with the kids. I’m going to try to write shorter blogs this time, and more.  I want to talk about the kids in general, and then look at some of them more deeply over time. I’ll start with some of the younger kids I played with–the children.  But over time I’d like to talk about some of the older kids, like Alex, who seems to have become even smarter and more charismatic then when I wrote about him last year. Or Tori, who never had time to ask enough questions in class and finally took me up on the offer to come and ask any question he liked outside of class.  (All names except Alex are pseudonyms).

With the exception of Alex and a few other kids, last summer seemed like just a fog of cute and fun kids.  Reflecting on the trip tonight, I realize that fog cleared into individuals this year–kids as diverse as kids here–kids with assets and needs.  Jaile, who I remembered last year as a friendly kid who liked to ride on my shoulders, became more complex this year, as I learned about his learning struggles. Bayan, who I had only remembered as Alex’s younger brother, was around a lot this year, and I became aware of his quiet resolve and steely concentration.  Joseph, I learned, has incredible rhythm and can basically drum on anything and dance to anything.

The girls too, like Saira and Mainne, became more unique and I recognized them as people who I knew last year, but hadn’t seen as clearly.  And especially Suzana.  Since I visited her father’s farm and ate lunch and dinner at her house, I got to interact with Suzana in different settings than other kids.  Suzana has a mild physical disability, one that I barely noticed last year because of her skill in working around it.  This year, I think I noticed it less, as I saw how much more there was to her.

So this is just the start.  The fog of cuteness is lifting to reveal individuals who are growing and developing like kids do everywhere, in a context that shapes them and that they are shaping. I’m going to try to write about some of them.  I’ll start with Jaile.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Santo Domingo de Onzole community, visit the Onzole River Project homepage.  To learn more about the group I went with, visit the homepage of Teachers2Teachers-Global

“To Study is to the Wick as to Learn is to the Candle:” Teaching and Teacher Education in Santo Domingo de Onzole. Part 2 in a series.

The context and characters 

I continue to process my thoughts about my trip to Santo Domingo de Onzole on the banks of the Onzole River in Esmereldas Province, Ecuador. This story is about Robi and his middle school life science students, particularly a boy named Ariel, but it’s also about the microscopes I brought down and about questions about studying, learning, and science.  Alex, as always, is involved.

Robi was Patricia, the principal’s, wife.  He was Dannys’ son—Dannys taught in another town but came to the PD sessions and to school that week. She and Patricia were vigorous and enthusiastic educational leaders and advocates.  I’ll write about observing Patricia’s class and more about her and Dannys soon.  Robi was a little different.  He was a friendly guy, who sometimes seemed a little stressed, but generally seemed like the kind of guy a woman in town would want to raise kids with.  He also owned a farm, which he went to after work, so he couldn’t attend the PD sessions.  Robi taught life science to 7^th and 8^th graders.  The first day, I didn’t get to observe his class, but I observed him Wednesday in two different classes and taught in his class on Thursday and Friday.  Keep in mind that all of my interactions were mediated by Lucia’s and in some cases Carlos’ interpretation.  As always, I trust them to check me on any inaccuracies, but I’m grateful to them both.  This is as much their story as mine.

Evaluation day

The first day we observed Robi’s 7^th and 8^th grade classes.  We started in the 8^th grade.  Lucia explained that Robi said today was an “evaluation” day and not a day of students’ learning.  Robi called a kid to the front of the room, to stand by Robi in front of the class, and told the student to begin. The student began talking about the six domains of life, reciting what they were and general details of their characteristics, with the exception of distinguishing archaebacteria and bacteria.  Biologists classify the groups into three domains, the archaebacteria, bacteria, and eukaryotes, creating a higher level classification than the five kingdoms that we learned as students.  Actually Archaea’s characteristics and its evolutionary relationship with the other domains is interesting and you might like to read about it. Then another kid came to front of the room and basically said the same thing about the domains.  At first I didn’t exactly know what was going on, but Lucia explained that the kids were repeating the same things.  Some kids stumbled over it, but by and large they recited the material accurately and pretty much verbatim from the text.  They seem to have studied what Robi wanted them to study.  I guess this is “recitation”, but I’ve never really seen it before, except in the way some teachers in the US sometimes have students give group presentations of recall of text.

That was pretty much it.  Robi seemed taciturn and even a little robotic in his approach.  He didn’t smile much.  There was little interaction.  It was a test of recall, just not on paper.  Robi gave a little summary at the end basically saying the same stuff the students had said. There was no power that day, so the horn was mercifully quiet at the end of the period, replaced by the twangy thump of a drum.

“To study is to the wick as to learn is to the candle”

Robi changed to his 7^th grade class for the next period and we went with him.  This class was different.  Robi had asked the kids to bring in seeds.  Some brought corn, others brought rice and beans, and some brought orange or tangerine seeds.  Robi began a lecture, with questions for students, about the differences between monocots and dicots.  He seemed more relaxed than in the other class.  His personality was part of his teaching in this class.  He explained, referring to the textbook, that monocots had one cotyledon, the first leaves to emerge from the seed, while dicots had two.  He then asked students about the seeds they brought in.  “Was corn a monocot or dicot?” “Monocot!”.  Corn grows along the Onzole, but I didn’t see any in Santo Domingo “How about beans?”  “Dicot!”  “What about chocolate?”  “Dicot!”   Oranges and tangerines were also classified as dicots.

The kids seemed to know these plants; in some cases they were wrong, and in some cases Robi told them, but it was a more interactive and dynamic atmosphere than the previous class.  Roni then moved on to talk about xylem and phloem and how different kinds of sap moved through them inside the plant.  This seemed like it was supposed to be more of a direct lecture, where he talked and they listened.

At the end, Robi began talking about students studying.  He told students that they had to study in order to learn.  I had heard a lot of this same motivational type of speech from Aron in his Research Methods class.  Robi emphasized, “Doubt and you will study.  Study and you will learn.”  I was really excited when I heard about doubt.  It seems like a negative word, especially when talking about learning.  But in Robi’s articulation, it is a call to motivate oneself.  You don’t understand something?  Study it and you will learn more.

Robi then went to the white board and drew a candle.  “To Study is to the Wick as to Learn is to the Candle” he told them.  The wick he, said, needed to be inflamed for the candle to work.  Robi seemed to take this seriously.  Shortly, the drum twanged and thumped again.

I liked Robi’s analogy, but I was wondering what learning meant to Robi and the students.  Later I began to think about what studying meant and even what doubt meant to them, and to me. In what I saw in Robi’s class, it seemed to mean that students were able to recall the text that was the Ecuadoran curriculum.  But why was it important for students to learn the difference between monocots and dicots?  I’ve spend quite a while Googling to try to remember the details.  Students seemed to know that coffee sprouted in two sprouts, but what did this knowledge of monocots and dicots do for them in general, or even in working with the cacao?  It didn’t make much difference to me when I did genetics research on corn in my 20’s—I was separating corn embryos from the endosperm (which nurtures the embryo) in the kernel to prepare and isolate chromosome karyotypes.  And why was it important to recall the domains of life?  I ask myself these kinds of questions when thinking about our biology teaching in the States, particularly in the middle grades.  I’ll return to this question about what learning might mean in the science classroom in Santo Domingo and beyond.

The next day:  S: ¿Que sabes? / Q: ¿Qué quieres saber? /A: ¿Que has aprendido?

I planned for this trip based on my experience in Santa Avelina, working with Becky, Hans, Arthur, & Carmen (see my earlier post about Santa Avelina).  We had brought some ideas about planning there, and we had been able to work with the teachers on planning their lessons using some simple planning heuristics and tools.  Lucia and I brought some of these ideas to the professional development meetings.  One of these was Wiggins & McTigue’s (2005) backwards planning, another was the well-known science planning tool “The 5E’s” developed by Roger Bybee and colleagues at the Biological Science Curriculum Study, and a third was the equally widely known “K/W/L” strategy (See chapter 9 in the link) (S/Q/A in Spanish). The professional development is another story, but the KWL seemed to catch on with the teachers in particular and I ended up using it in teaching Robi’s class.

We visited Robi’s 8^th grade again the next day, and he asked me to teach a lesson using the microscopes.   Since Robi, like Aron, was not able to come to the PD sessions, I decide to use an SQA strategy to model it for him and to see how it went with the kids.  I began by asking kids what they know about plants and animals.  I consider this to be a good starting question because we all know they’re different, but most of us haven’t thought about their most basic similarities and differences.  If most people are lucky they remember something about plants having chlorophyll and that’s why they’re green, and something or other about a cell wall.

Plants and animals are both multicellular organisms.  Most animals move from place to place, and most plants don’t.  Plants make their own food and animals move around to eat food.  That’s it basically.  Starting from there can lead to a lot of greater exploration.  But not understanding this can lead to ongoing confusion in the form of “my teacher said this…”. For example, when I was working on my teaching degree, one of my classmates (not a science teacher), taught a lesson on classification and asked students to classify different organisms as plants, animals, and insects.  Doesn’t it kind of seem like insects aren’t animals?  This is a common mistake.  I wondered how the students in Santo Domingo would articulate their ideas about plants and animals to drive their own questions, considering that they have a lot of daily experience with both:  cacao, bananas, plantains, oranges, flowers, fish, snakes, iguanas, insects, chickens, cows, cats, and dogs, and many more multicellular organisms overwhelm the Onzole.  How might we use the microscopes to investigate these things?

I wrote an objective on the board: “Students will be able to describe differences between plants and animals.”  Again, Robi had not been at the PD sessions, so a part of this was modeling the idea that a clear objective was important and might be useful to communicate to the students, (as long as one doesn’t thwart students’ exploration by telling too much).  Lucia and I led a whole class discussion about the “Know” column and students wrote down what the class generated.  One example of a students’ paper can be seen on the right.

In the right column we wrote that plants and animals are both living things and reproduce.  Students vaguely stated that they are different.  Some responses were unusual, like the pretty clear comment that plants have, or are, red, when one would expect they’d say green.  This might make sense in Santo Domingo, where there is an abundance of red flowering plants, and the cacao bush has red pods.  Students noted that plants do not move, although it’s written oddly on this paper.  Unusual spelling and construction was uncommon and perplexes even my most literate Spanish-speaking friends and colleagues.  This isn’t uncommon in the States either at this age, and as in the States, some papers were incompletely filled.  I’m not sure if this matters for the overall participation of those who didn’t write much, but it does highlight some of the academic diversity in the class. Ariel commented that plants had vertebrae, and clarified that he meant a backbone.  I noticed that Robi was recording the entire thing on his phone.

We moved on to what the students wanted to know (¿Qué quieres saber?).  I was a little distracted by wondering whether the questions would lend themselves to any work with the microscope.  As I usually do, I was scanning the Knows and Want to Knows as they came up to see how I could leverage something.  Some of the students’ questions were vague, hard to explore, and hard to read on some papers.  For example, in the second column in the sample, you can see “¿Porque sirue?” (sic), “How do they work?” Students also asked why plants can’t move and “¿Como se ve raiz?” (“How the root looks?”).  This last one seemed like it had potential, and I thought Ariel’s statement about vertebrae might be interesting too.  I didn’t direct students to one question in particular, but I had a feeling if they went out looking at plants and animals, they would learn something productive about their local flora and fauna just in the schoolyard.

We released the students with the microscopes after showing them how to use them.  Students immediately went out and began looking around.  They found plants, but most only looked at the leaves.  They found ants, as Aron’s students did, and this led to some excitement.  The details of the ants can be seen clearly with these scopes.  I realized that this class had talked about vascular tissue, so I ran around town looking for some plants near water to see if I could find some clear examples of xylem.  I even asked Carlos if we could get some celery.  He asked Patricia but sadly, no.  I did pull up a plant in which you could see the xylem, and I showed it to Robi and a few students under the microscope.

We gathered students back to the room and talked about what they now knew.  Students noted that the ants have hair and that roots have “layers”—they meant that there are different parts at the top and the bottom of the root.  These both would be productive for further classes if I had time.  I asked the students about Ariel’s statement, “Do ants have a backbone?”  Ariel was particularly engaged.  He said they were hard on the outside, and he thought he didn’t really see a backbone in a close look at a dead ant.  I introduced the idea that insects have their skeleton on the outside to support their body, unlike us and other vertebrates.  The horn was back today unfortunately, jarring us on to the next class.

Ariel stood out like Alex did.  He had an atypical background, which I read about in Carlos’ newsletter.  Carlos writes:

Ariel arrived in Santo Domingo about a year and a half ago from a city in the south of Ecuador called Machala, not too far from the border with Peru. He had lived there all his life with his mother and his grand-mother after his father, originally from Santo Domingo, decided to leave and head back to the village.

I don’t know if this change, or other aspects of Ariel’s natural curiosity and intelligence led him to be so involved in the class, but he was also involved in the class I taught the next day and again displayed thoughtful ideas and reasoning.

¡Buena(s) tarde(s)!

I’ve learned that people in Santo Domingo drop their s’s at the end of words.  People would greet you with “¡Buena!”.  I expect this is unusual, and the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Mexican people I’ve tried to say hello to in this form look at me funny before they respond with “¡Hola!”.  That afternoon was quiet around the guesthouse.  There tended to be a downtime in the afternoon, before the town erupted into cooking, soccer, bingo, and jump-rope.  Alex and I were in the guesthouse and a few of the other visiting team members were around.  Alex and I were looking through the microscopes.  I had found some red onion and had been trying to get good images of cells in water and salt water as I would do at home, but it was a little challenging and even more so trying to help someone else see what I could see.

I thought Alex needed something more dramatic.  There was a butterfly caught in the screen and a small tear at the top of the screen that I could fit my hand into.  I tried to catch the butterfly and then tried to fish it out with my backscratcher. Alex saw what I was doing and came over to help.  He stood on a chair and reached his smaller arm down to where he could almost touch the butterfly.  There was a smaller rip in the bottom and (sorry Carlos), and Alex tore it a little wider and force the butterfly up so he could catch it by the wings and pull it out.  

I struggled in Santo Domingo with wanting students to see things but not wanting to cavalierly kill animals.  How could Alex see the butterfly?  I ran through some scenarios in my mind.  Maybe I could hold it while he looked?  No it would move too much.  Without saying a word to me, Alex took it to the table where he trapped its wings between two stacks of books.  We began looking at the butterfly now through several lenses.

I can’t remember the wide ranging science conversation that resulted, but we looked closely at the wings and tried to watch its proboscis come out when we offered up a piece of papaya.  I was astonished by Alex’s ingenuity in capturing and securing the butterfly.  Alex loved science and math, but he especially loved biology.  I felt a kinship.  I imagine this is not uncommon for people working with Alex.  He has an extraordinary ability to connect with people.  Chadd, the director of T2T, had visited Santo Domingo before.  When I mentioned Alex, Chadd remembered him well.  “Wow!  He must be a teenager by now!”  Alex had been engaging outsiders for a while.  Carlos said Alex was always at the guesthouse when Carlos was in town.

“But Profe!  We have another hour!”

“¡Buena Dia!” I tried to say the next morning.  I was back in Robi’s 8^th grade class, but Robi wasn’t there.  Lucia was busy with something else, so Carlos began interpreting for me, which I think he enjoyed.  He has the same knack for teaching and intuition about scientific phenomenon as Lucia does.  She came in after about 15 minutes.

On the spot, with Robi not there, I decided to do The Owls and The Snakes with the students.  This is a real scientific question about an unusual ecological relationship that ecologists have studied.  It matches with general expectations about what students should understand about the variety of ways that organisms interact, both as predator and prey and in various symbiotic relationships.  We had done this with the teachers in the professional development (another story) and it was fun and productive, plus Carlos and Lucia both knew what I was doing.  People who know me are groaning.  I do this ALL THE TIME and I’ve written at least two articles and a book about it.  I’ll explain it to others as we go.

Again I had written an objective.  Even though I wasn’t modeling for Robi that day, I was still doing what I do and what I ask my student teachers to do.  I want students to know what to expect in class each day.  “Students will be able to explain an unusual ecological relationship.”  I told the students I was going to tell them about a pattern that biologists had observed and we that we were going to try to explain it:

Some owls in the Eastern United States bring live blind snakes to their nests, but all other species they bring back are delivered dead.  How can we explain the relationship between the owls and the snakes?

First, I had students do a “think-pair-share” where they talked with each other and came up with hypotheses.  I told them that a hypothesis is a “proposed explanation”.  How might we explain this, even before we had much data?  I gave them just a few minutes and we started to construct a list.  Most of the responses were those I usually hear when I do this with students (of a variety of ages), with other adults, and with student teachers and practicing teachers in professional development.  Students suggested:

• The owls may use the snakes so that the babies can eat them when they hatch
• The owls are giving the snakes a place to live
• The snakes wrap themselves around the eggs to protect them
• (And maybe to warm them?)
• The snakes are for the babies to practice hunting when they hatch.

We spent some time talking about how we might reject one or another of these hypotheses. Students struggled a little with this part, but we ended up having a lively discussion about a number of things.  How could snakes warm eggs if they were cold-blooded?  Would they really be able to wrap themselves around the eggs if they were so small?  The whole discussion seemed to have gone by quickly and taken up much of the forty-minute period.  I was anticipating the blaring, discomforting horn.

I always expect that people will want to know the “right” answer.  So before the horn, I pretended class was over.  “Okay, that’s it!  Great job, you guys came up with a lot of good possible explanations!” I said, and pretended to walk out.  I thought they were going to ask me for the answer.  Instead, students remained in their seats and seemed surprised, “But Profe! they cried, “We have another hour!”  Lucia informed me that this was a double period.  Obviously I didn’t understand the schedule (who did?).  I regrouped and continued where I logically usually would.  I was pleased that the students still seemed into it.

I told the students they would have some time now to work in small groups to come up with a way to study this phenomenon and reject or support one or more hypotheses.  I gave them about 15 minutes and each group then presented their research ideas.  I recorded all of the presentations.  This post is getting a little long and I want to finish strong, so I won’t go into detail on these presentations, but but here’s a screenshot. I’ll send full videos to anyone who wants to see them.

Basically, the students came up with some reasonable observations that they could make to determine if the owls and snakes were behaving in ways consistent with various hypotheses.  I gave other students an opportunity to ask questions or challenge the designs in the presentations and some did, particularly Ariel.  Most of the groups didn’t propose anything experimental, but as my colleagues and I point out elsewhere, the particular details of an experimental “Scientific Method” is not necessarily an obvious way to proceed in this case.  The authors did, but the students likely wouldn’t have known how to conduct an experiment in this case, especially if it didn’t seem obvious or necessary.

After the presentations students wanted to know the right answer.  Who wouldn’t?  I gave students pieces of evidence that the scientists had collected:  The insects the snakes eat when they’re living in their regular habitat (they burrow underground and in ants’ nests) were also found in the owls nests; the baby birds grow faster and leave the nest sooner.  In their paper, the scientists conclude that the owls benefit by the snakes keeping parasites from retarding the babies’ growth, but the snakes are neither benefited nor harmed because they get the same food they eat when they’re on the ground.  This is referred to as a “commensalistic” relationship.  I like students to question the author’s conclusions.  That’s just good scientific practice, so I asked the students what they thought. One student noted that there wasn’t any data showing if the snakes lived better when they were in the nests than when they were on the ground.  Maybe the snakes did benefit?

At the end of the class, before we could be interrupted by the standard assault on our ears, we asked the students to “take out a piece of paper” and write down at least one important thing that they had learned in class that day.  As we’ll see in the conclusion, the interpretation of “piece of paper” took on special meaning in Santo Domingo.

“Today we learned the gift of companionship and to realize hypotheses”

The students took the request for a “piece of paper” quite literally.  They tore pieces from their books, even taking tiny pieces from blank pages.  Some reached over and tore off a piece of someone else’s piece.  Some of the pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle as you can see in one of these pictures. That night, Lucia and I looked through them.  As I generally suggest my student teachers do, I made piles of similar responses.  I usually have one pile for students who seemed to understand what we were doing and gave me the responses that I generally anticipated.  An example of this is Jabes who wrote, “The snakes that the owls carry to the nest are for the sake of the chicks to benefit from the snakes.”  Jabes understood the ecological concept that one organism might benefit from its association with another.  I usually have another pile for students who I might assess as either not being engaged in the lesson, not understanding the point, or not being able to express themselves well.  Kristel’s response, “Because the snakes are venomous,” falls into this category.

The last category is something that’s left fairly open.  It’s for ideas that I either don’t understand or find particularly unusual.  I invite my student teachers to think about what this category might be for them, in the particular context of the question they ask.  Additionally, one could use a different number of groupings.  There’s no rules to analyzing students’ responses; it’s just important to try to interpret their meaning, as they intend it.  I usually find that three groups gives me a good representation of the diversity of ideas and reasoning.

I placed Ariel’s response in the center of the second picture:

“Today we learned the gift of companionship and to realize hypotheses.”

Lucia and I were impressed with this and it confirmed our sense of Ariel’s relative sophistication. To me, this was a very important thing that one might learn from the activity and a higher-level objective that I aspire for students to realize.  We didn’t just learn some “knowledge;” we learned how to do some science, and how to work together in doing so.

Conclusion:  “To study is to the wick as to learn is to the candle”

Reflecting back to the views of studying and learning that I had heard from Aron and Robi, I want to promote our work in our class as a new way of interpreting Robi’s ideas.  Based on what I saw in their teaching, I believe that Aron and Robi wanted students to “doubt” their existing knowledge of science concepts, to study those concepts, and to learn them, i.e., acquire the given information in the curriculum (the text).

I’m not quite sure why there’s such an emphasis on the acquisition of book knowledge in Santo Domingo.  Few people go on to college and science at the higher level is not necessarily relevant to most of the residents.  In part, it may be something new, stimulated by the Onzole River Project, which seeks to create opportunities for students through more rigorous education.  There is some evidence that more students are pursuing higher education and are prepared to do so.  I think there may also be considerable status in the community for people who do well in school earn a high school diploma.  Carlos can always tell you more.

Returning to the terms “doubt,” “study,” and “learn,” I would argue that they also apply to our work in these last two class sessions.  Students doubted what they knew in the animals and plants class by reviewing their current knowledge and asking new questions, expressing doubt in their current understanding.  And although I asked the question and raised the doubt myself in The Owls and The Snakes, students “studied” the problem by constructing hypotheses about the relationship.  In the plants and animals class, they studied the schoolyard and the plants and animals they found.  And they learned too—in the plants and animals class they learned some things about insects and about root structure—conceptual knowledge that they might have been taught in a book, but did not know they didn’t understand well until they “studied” it.  In The Owls and The Snakes, most of them learned the possibilities of ecological relationships and maybe some details about the diversity of organisms.  If I could hope for a student to have learned something from my work in Santo Domingo it would be something that I can’t articulate as well as this:

“Today we learned the gift of companionship and to realize hypotheses.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Can we see atoms through your microscopes?”: Teaching and Teacher Education in Santo Domingo de Onzole, Esmereldas Province, Ecuador. Part 1 in a series.

The context

A few weeks ago, I returned from a trip to rural Ecuador supported by Teachers2Teachers-Global (t2t-G) and the Onzole River Project.  We visited a small town called Santo Domingo de Onzole on the banks if the Onzole River in Esmereldas Province.  The people of Santo Domingo, and much of Esmereldas Province, descend from escaped African slaves who arrived there several hundred years ago.  Some of them traveled up the rivers as far as they could, to live in places accessible only by canoe.
The purposes of the trip were to learn about the people of Santo Domingo and their culture, to observe and teach in classrooms in the school, Gaston Figueroa, and to lead professional development workshops for the teachers.  We had no contact with the outside world, except in emergencies.  This was challenging for me, but it gave me lots of time to think and take notes, to read, to teach, and to talk to amazing people, both on the trip with me and in the town.  It has also meant that it has taken some time for me to process the experience.  I have posted pictures, but haven’t really figured out how to write about it until now.  It was a little overwhelming coming from Santo Domingo back home and it took a while to process everything.  The longer I wait, however, the more my memory fades.  I have some notes, but a lot I didn’t realize I should write down until later.  So these stories will by their nature be only narratives:  my recollections and interpretations of what happened.

I only realized how to approach writing about this when Gemma and I went to the Olive Lounge in Takoma Park for dinner and I told her the entire story of my experience with one teacher and his students.  I’m going to write this blog as a set of stories, starting with my teaching and professional development experiences and working outwards to other experiences and observations.

Santo Domingo is rural.  You need to take a motorized canoe to get there and it has no roads.  The men farm, mostly cacao (chocolate bean pods) as a cash crop, but also bananas, plantains, limes, papayas, and oranges.  Most of the women are busy during the day with children, with preparing meals, and washing clothes.  Both men and women are teachers.  The community, as Carlos says, is poor in opportunities, but not in other ways.  There’s little drug or alcohol use, nor malnutrition.  I didn’t see anyone homeless.  The people seemed happy and the children, exuberant.  My one regret is that we didn’t get to see them play and dance the Marimba, a central activity of the community

School started at 7:30, although time was loose with starting and ending times of all classes.  Class changes were marked by a VERY loud blaring siren, except the day we had no power, when they were marked by a much less loud drum.  Classes were forty minutes, but sometimes they were double periods.  The schedule seemed very unstable—I saw teachers constantly checking their schedule to see what they had next.  There was a long recess and school ended around 1:30. Some of the older kids then went to work on the farms.  Others played jump rope, bingo, or soccer.  Oh and others played soccer.  Lots of soccer.

The characters

This first story is about Aron, a high school science teacher, and his chemistry students.  The other characters in the story are me, Lucia, a talented interpreter and educator with t2t, Carlos, the director of the Onzole River Project, and Alex, a uniquely bright and motivated sixteen-year-old.  (I will write an entire story about Alex). I’ll ask Carlos and Lucia to correct me in the comments for anything that I’ve gotten wrong.

I’ve changed the Aron’s name but not Alex’s.  People on the trip with me will know who Aron is, of course, but because I didn’t ask his permission to use his name or image, I think it’s fair to exclude those.  Hey may be on the internet someday soon and he can decide what and how he wants to post.  Additionally, some of what I write about Aron may sound like I’m focusing on the deficits in his teaching.  I am not, but I don’t think it’s fair to use his name even if it sounds like I am. I have spent some time deciding what to call him.  His real name is an Old Testament name, so I chose a more culturally appropriate form of the biblical Aaron, which should be read as “Ah-Rone”.  I toyed with the idea of giving him my name.  But I decided this would be problematic if the students called both of us Profe Daniel (Don-yell).

One of the reasons I wanted to give Aron my name is to emphasize my empathy with him.  Aron is 24 or 25.  He has a high school diploma from Gaston Figueroa. In Santo Domingo, without my privileged education, I could be Aron.  I’m not concerned about using Alex’s name and image.  There will be a story of his curiosity, his drive, and his personality.  I think he would feel proud.  I may translate that story and send it to him.

In general, students were well-behaved and enthusiastic, especially the high school kids.  Many were outgoing and talkative and might have impressed me as much as Alex if I knew them better.  Some behaved how we imagine teenagers in the States, sleepy and disinterested. Some of the girls, even in the 10^th grade, were pregnant, some had babies with them, and some were nursing in class.

There will be a lot of high school-level science in this story.  If that doesn’t interest you, I suggest getting the gist from the section titles and the last couple of paragraphs of each section.

What is an atom?

On our first day in the classroom, Tuesday, Lucia and I visited Aron’s 11^th grade biology class, his “research methods” class (which was a mixture of motivational speeches and diverse research methods) and his 11^th grade chemistry class.  Kindergarten is first grade in Ecuador so these would have been sophomores in the States, and the students ranged in age from 16-22.  Aron teaches research methods to 9^th graders and biology, chemistry, and physics to both the 10^th and 11^th graders.  The students take all three subjects every year of high school, but each class doesn’t meet every day.  The 11^th graders also take Anatomy with the principal, Patricia, the protagonist in a future story. I taught these same 11^th graders in Aron’s physics class and I taught Aron’s 9^th graders (Alex’s class) chemistry.

In Aron’s chemistry class on the first day, he began by telling students he was in pages 25-26 of the book and he read to them about atomic weight.  He told them that a number of atoms create an element.  He reminded them that atoms were made up of smaller particles, and that atoms were almost invisible.  Then he read to them about how to calculate percent composition by using the relevant atomic weights.  Next he led the students through an example on the board.  He said they would calculate the percentage of each element that was in H₂O, which everyone knew was water.  He told them to look at the periodic table where they would find the relative masses of hydrogen and oxygen.  How many grams does a hydrogen atom weigh, he asked?  The students reported that it weighed 1.79 grams, which Aron confirmed.

This was a minor mistake, and Lucia pointed out that they just read it wrong, but it’s 1.079, which is basically 1.  Neither Aron nor the students noticed this, which suggests they probably didn’t understand what gave hydrogen its mass.  More troubling, however, was that Aron was communicating to students that an atom of hydrogen weighed 1.079 grams.  This would be a very heavy atom.  A paper clip weights a gram or two.  Atoms are measured in atomic mass units (amu).  On the periodic table, the atomic masses are given as grams per mole, a mole being a very large quantity of atoms that can actually be measured.  It is a conversion that keeps the masses of all elements relative to each other, but allows chemists to do calculations with real visible quantities of matter.

The class gave the mass of oxygen as 15.99 grams.  Using these numbers, they calculated the percent of hydrogen as 18.28%.  Aron told the students that they must have gotten it wrong, because water has two atoms of hydrogen and only one of oxygen.  I was unsure if he was testing them or not at first.  The students argued with him.  “Profe!” they said, “Oxygen is much heavier than hydrogen.”  Aron considered their argument and disagreed with them briefly.  Then he seemed to realize his error and he told them.  “You’re right.  I was wrong.  Sometimes you’ll be wrong and sometimes I’ll be wrong.”

I was concerned with the way the content was covered.  There were some mistakes, like the incorrect atomic weight of hydrogen, and larger problems, like the idea that atoms make up elements. (An atom is a unit of matter.  An element is a kind of atom.  You could have one, or two, or 6.02 X 10²³ atoms or more in a piece of an element).  But what concerned me the most was the lack of a clear sense of the magnitude of an atom.  At the time, I didn’t know if there were any way to deal with this, and I didn’t know if I would have any opportunities.  Aron had sheepishly told me and Lucia that he wouldn’t be able to make the professional development sessions because he had soccer practice for an upcoming tournament.  He did say, however, that he would come to discuss content in the evenings.  He was concerned about physics in particular, but in general, he didn’t feel like he knew the content in “practice” but only the theory.  He didn’t come to talk content that night, but he came the next two nights.

I was pleased to see the students readily assert themselves and the way Aron dealt with it.  In many ways I saw Aron, and another teacher I observed, say very profound things to students about learning, about being wrong, and about becoming better educated people.  Despite some of the problems I saw with both content and pedagogy in the science classes, I saw the attention to these ideas relatively more frequently than I see in the States.

“Can we see atoms through your microscopes?”

The next morning, Wednesday, Aron surprised me by asking me if I wanted to teach his physics class about four minutes before class began.  That’s another story.  This one is about the size of the atom.

I had brought a set of field microscopes/magnifiers with me to donate to the school and hoped I would have a chance to use them with the students.  I actually have a set of Foldscopes coming to me in August, but I couldn’t get them in time.  Foldscopes are small paper microscopes, referred to as “origami microscopes” because they can be folded up origami style and carried around in a pocket.  They only cost about 50 cents.  They lens is made with a liquid polymer, and they have the power of a compound light microscope.

The microscopes I brought had a 5X magnifying glass, a 10X, and a 55X dissecting scope.  These magnifications play an important role in the story.  The smallest things I was able to see were nematodes (microscopic worms), but with the Foldscopes, which I will hopefully be able to deliver Santo Domingo soon, students will be able to see bacteria.

After lunch Aron again approached me and asked me to teach his 10^th grade chemistry class (Alex’s class).  Word had spread about my microscopes, and Aron wanted to know if we could use them in his class.  The class was studying the atom.  Lucia translated: “Can we see atoms through your microscopes?”

I was excited to teach. I have not taught K-12 students in over a decade and I’ve made many claims about teaching in the interim that I wanted to try in practice in Santo Domingo.  I was anxious though.  I wanted to let the students use the microscopes, but I had to find a way to explain to both Aron and his students why we couldn’t see them.  I consider myself a “scientific realist” and I believe atoms are real entities, but they are very abstract to most people, and they are much smaller than anyone can really compare concretely to anything they are familiar with.  I also knew from the day before that neither Aron nor his students really understood their magnitude.

You teachers know that once you have enough experience you can gather yourself on a few minutes’ notice; sometimes things flop and sometimes they go great.  Of course, that also happens with lessons you’ve planned carefully or done for years.  A lot depends on the students, the time of day, your own attention to what’s going on, etc.

I had an idea in the moment.  I told Aron I would teach a lesson about atoms and the microscopes.  I explained it a little and told him we should do it together.  As it turned out, he was more comfortable watching me until the end, which we pulled out the scopes.

I told the students we were going to talk about atoms for a while and then use the microscopes.  I began by asking the students what they knew about atoms.  One girl, nursing her baby, said that they made up all matter.  I didn’t catch her name, but she turned out to be one of the brightest and most outgoing students through the class.

In the morning’s physics lesson it took a while for students to understand that air resistance was due to matter in the air, so I wanted to see if students understood the classic question “Is air matter?”.  I asked, “Are there atoms in this desk?”  Students confirmed that the desk was matter and yes, there are atoms in it.  “Are there atoms in this bottle of water?”  Yes, students confirmed this as well.  “What about here?” (I waved my hands through the air).  There was some uncertainty in the room, but one student said that there was oxygen, so yes, there was matter.  Others agreed, so I asked if there was anything that didn’t contain atoms?  Someone said “light” and we came to agreement that light, and energy in general, did not contain atoms.

I should point out that this discourse was mediated by Lucia’s interpretation.  She’s very good, but I had little way of know how many or which of the students really understood.  This isn’t uncommon, even teaching in our native language.  I find it useful to have some kind of individual assessment, like a short “exit ticket” at the end of class to gauge individual understanding and plan for the next class.  I did it in this class, but in the moment, I was simply trying to get a general sense of the students’ prior knowledge and introduce our lesson on the magnitude of the atom.

I brought out the microscopes and gave a brief introduction to the lenses pointing to the 5X, 10X, and 55X as I explained their power.  I asked the students, “If I were looking at an object through the 5X lens, how much smaller would it be than it appeared?”  I asked the same about the 10X lens.  Students had no difficulty understanding the magnification factors.  Now I asked, “If I wanted to see atoms, how much do you think I would have to magnify them?”  Students said I’d have to magnify them 100 times.  “More,” I said.  “One thousand times.”  “More.”

I went to the white board and wrote the number “1”.  I told the students that I was going to begin writing zeros and I wanted them to stop me when they thought I had written enough.  Atoms are generally described to have an “atomic radius” around one angstrom (1/10¹⁰ of a meter).  I started writing.  Students tried to stop me after about 6 zeros, and then again after 9, until I finally stopped with 10 zeros.  The students didn’t appear particularly flabbergasted, but this number is pretty hard to fathom.  Or maybe they just really wanted me to pull out the scopes.

So I did.  I showed them how to use the magnifying glasses and then showed them how to hold the microscope up against a piece of lined paper and use the focusing dial to bring the lines into focus.  I went to the front of the room and began catching ants.  Aron came over to help me and we started delivering live ants to the students.  We only had seven scopes so the students gathered around and shared.  The ants look pretty cool, and the students had never seen the smaller ones with this much detail.  (There are huge bullet ants in the jungle, but it’s not wise to get too cozy with them).  It was exciting.  There was a buzz in the room.  We were off of the atom, but students learned to use the scopes and got to see the ants’ eyes, their body segments, antennae, and the hairs on their legs.

To end class, I asked students to take out a piece of paper and write down one interesting thing they had learned in the class.  Lucia and I were able to flip through them quickly.  Most students wrote about atoms making up all matter, or not being in energy, or being incredibly small.  A few students wrote some things about ants.  Unfortunately, I gave the exit tickets to Aron, so I don’t have any to post here.  But Aron was not attending the professional development sessions, so I wanted to model this simple assessment technique for him.

Later that evening…  

The guesthouse was buzzing with kids.  Alex was there:  charming, bright, andenthusiastic, bantering with Carlos and anyone else.  I don’t remember how it started, but I had been thinking that I hadn’t been able to use scientific notation that day.  I started to show Alex how to do some simple problems, which he caught onto very quickly, remembering exponents.  I explained about the size of the atom, and how this was a way to express it without writing out so many zeroes.

…The next night

Aron didn’t teach chemistry on Thursday night, but he came by and wanted to talk about chemistry and his class the next day. He wanted help to teach molecular formula calculations.  A molecular formula is basically a multiple of an empirical formula.  For example, formaldehyde (CH₂O) a carcinogenic component of smog has the same empirical formula (CH₂O) as glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆).  They have different molecular formulas.  You don’t want to mix them up…

I started to review the calculations with Aron, but I realized that the book problems used the concept of the mole to do the conversions.  Had he taught the mole? I asked Aron.  He said that they had discussed it but not really.  I asked him if they had done conversions between moles and atoms and grams.  He said that they had not.

I was now fully aware of the ongoing problems with the magnitude of the atom.  The mole is hard to understand, harder still if you are doing problems with it without knowing what it is.  I asked Aron if he or the students understood scientific notation.  He said he didn’t really, so he hadn’t been over it with the students.  I knew that in order to understand the magnitude of the atom, and the language that the book and Aron wanted to use, we needed to back up to scientific notation.  I went over it with Aron in the same way I had with Alex and he understood.  We agreed that the class tomorrow should be about scientific notation.  I told Aron that it would be best if we taught it together.

Scientific notation

I can’t remember if Aron said I’d be starting the class or if I just started it on Friday morning.  Lucia wrote an objective on the board.  It was something like, “Students will be able to convert between scientific notation and decimals”.  I introduced the concept the same way that I had with Alex and Aron.  I began by showing examples of how to convert regular numbers to scientific notation. For example, 100 is written as 1 X 10² in scientific notation, because it is 1 X 100.  6200 is 6.2 X 10³ because it is 6.2 X 1000.  You basically take the first digit and figure out how many decimal spaces would come after it to write the notation. The students were receptive and managed problems pretty well as I put them on the board and we worked through them together.  I then made a list of problems, and told the students they could work on them in groups.  Aron and I went around the room helping students.  Some students grasped the conversion quickly, and I had them start helping other students.  Some students moved decimal points the wrong way in making their conversion—a common mistake, and others had problems figuring out what to do with examples like 6.2 X 10³; they would write 62000 by just tacking three zeros on the end.  All seemed engaged in trying to figure it out.  Once we had seen that most students had done the problems, we went over them together as a class.

Next I taught them how to do conversions in the other direction.  For example 1 X 10² means a 1 with 2 zeroes after it:  100.  6.2 X 10³ equals 6200.  This one is a little more difficult because you can’t just add zeroes, but have to realize that you are moving the decimal point three spaces to the right.  I showed students how you could count the movement of the decimal places to correspond to the exponent.  Again, we gave them some problems and had them do them in groups.  I added a bonus problem.  1 X 10⁰ and promised that there would be a prize to anyone who got that right.

Again the students got right to work, and the activity was similar to the first.  Aron and I went around helping, and the students who got it quickly helped others.  Some students tried to show me the bonus answer.  I would have loved to hear how they were reasoning to get that answer, but the room was too loud and chaotic with the students working on the problems and Lucia interpreting everything for me.  One of the girls who had understood the problems easily showed me that she had gotten the bonus.  Again, I would have loved to hear her reasoning, but in my excitement that she had gotten it right, I leaped to the front of the room where I had stashed some University of Maryland banners to give away.  Suddenly, many other students appeared to be getting the bonus correct!  Excited I started handing out banners until I realized that the first girl had understood it and her affirmed answer spread around the classroom like a flash flood.

I didn’t have enough banners.  I gave them to the people who came to me with the bonus first and encouraged everyone to share.  Some students and I went outside to take pictures and then back into the classroom to take pictures with Aron and other students who hadn’t come out. The loud horn blared and the class came to an end.  I felt pretty good about how things had gone.  As the students gathered up their stuff and we all started to leave, I looked up to see all the Marlyand banners stuck to the walls of the classroom.  No one kept the for themselves alone, but left them to share.

Successes, concerns, and hopes

I’ve been working on this post for over a week now, and it’s just my first. I hope that I can continue to make these posts—posts that make meaningful connections for me and for people who think like me.  I personally felt gratified that I was able to jump in and teach again, but to be fair, the students are what make a classroom work.  If we create opportunities for them to engage in meaningful, challenging, and exploratory learning, most students will help us enact the kinds of teaching we want to do.

I was pleased that Aron came to get help from me while I was there, but apparently he had done the same with the last science guy who came.  While I was working with him, I felt like Aron wasn’t particularly friendly.  I began to realize that he was in an overwhelming situation.  With little formal background in science, he was expected to follow the Ecuadoran curriculum.  Patricia told me that teachers in Santo Domingo had options to teach the parts of the curriculum that they wanted, but I didn’t know how Aron could make those kinds of choices with such little background.  I began to feel sorry for Aron, and wished I could help him in a more sustainable way.

This theme of sustainability popped up for me time and again.  I wondered how much impact I could have just coming down for a week.  Patricia is a well-educated person, a strong leader, and a thoughtful teacher.  Her mother-in-law teaches in a nearby town and has an advanced degree in teaching.  In a rural place, like Santo Domingo, I think that the most meaningful thing I could do would be to organize and educate local teacher educators.  These would be people who could lead professional development in the towns, bringing pedagogical ideas and content to teachers throughout the year.  To borrow from an analogy that Lucia has used for other purposes, I think of teachers in their classrooms as being alone on a canoe in the middle of the Onzole, without power. When others come along, they can help with the canoe in ways that the lone canoeist may not have thought of.  Local leaders like Patricia need support to learn how to gather the teachers around each other’s canoes.  Teachers need to be part of communities in which they can plan, look at evidence of student learning, and make curricular and instructional choices.  These communities cannot form with visitors a couple of weeks a year.  I hope for a sustainable plan to support the educational opportunities for teachers and students along the Onzole.

The Cauldron

Here is an activity my students in my Perspectives in Science class did.  I think they did an amazing job, and so I’m adding this in as a blog post.  It’s too long for Facebook, but it won’t take you long to read.  Check it out.  Special thanks to Charlie Demma, Alicia Bitler, and my students.

Students play the roles of Aristotle, Plato, and Democritus observing a phenomenon in which a boiling “cauldron” is then topped with a transparent “lid”.  They prepare for and engage in philosophical dialogue and then ice is added.  The dialogue continues after that.  The setup looks a little like this but with a glass plate instead of Saran Wrap.

Directions:

• Understand your character by rereading parts of [the text] or finding other material on the web.
• How would your character explain the phenomena?  Prepare an opening statement in order to make an argument supporting a particular explanation from your character’s point of view.
• What would your opponents say?  How will you respond?

Here’s the resulting dialogue recorded live after the opening statements:

Plato—Aristotle says [in his opening statement] water is becoming a more perfect form, but it returns to another form.  Why is it not just a corruption from the senses?

Aristotle—I don’t think its returning to another form.

Plato —It is returning because it became water again.

Aristotle —Oh, okay.  Water becoming warmer or colder isn’t what makes it more perfect.  Its tendency to change makes it into a more perfect form.  Hot water isn’t better than cold water.  If water was warm and was being cooled; everything is always working toward a more perfect form.  

Democritus—Plato—you say corruption of our senses is dictated by creator.  I disagree.  Creators are created by atoms.  How can atoms cause change in other atoms?

Plato —The Creator is not causing these change.  We live in the Creator’s shadow.  The Creator doesn’t make things happen.  It’s we who degrade it.

Aristotle —Plato, if change is always decay or destruction, how would you explain our being, as we as humans have evolved into a more perfect species?

Plato —I’m sorry.  No we haven’t.  We are meant to be like the Creator who is perfect, and he tried to create us and this world in his image and his vision and our ability to sense and interact is what makes it not what he initially intended.  And his inaction is due to the fact that this a dream of the Creator’s.

Democritus —But how can the Creator create more perfect dream of us without something solid, an atom basically, that makes us humans.  You can’t come into existence from something that didn’t exist.

Plato -Where are there atoms?

Democritus —The first atoms.  Where did they come from?

 Plato —from the Creator

 Democritus —They came out of empty space.

 Plato —As time marches on and as the world decays more it indicates there was a time before where everything was perfect. 

 Democritus –As we die, our bodies releases atoms back to empty space and recreates them into something else….

 Plato —Well as we die we are returned to the earth and the elemental earth that holds onto our bodies is no longer held by the earth that makes up our bodies it combines with the earth beneath us.

 [Ice is added on top, and the scholars observe again]

 Plato —Two objects are changing.  More with the one on the top, you can see clearly its decay as it was falling apart and becoming less of the form that it should have been.

 Democritus —As the atoms of the water left the cauldron they interacted with the plate and the atoms of the plate interacted with the ice.  The random nature could be seen in the differences in time it took for pieces of ice to melt.

 Aristotle —Ice wanted to become something more beautiful at the end. Its main purpose was to become more beautiful by becoming free and flowing as water.  It’s clearly beauty because it was done in such an organized way.  

 

 

 

Teaching and Teacher Education in Santa Avelina, Quiché, Guatemala

A shorter version of this post can be found on the Teachers2Teachers-International Blog:  https://t2t-i.org/the-s-in-stem/

In this report, I describe my visit Willam M. Botnan School in Aldea Santa Avelina, in Quiche, Guatemala with Teachers2Teachers International. William M. Botnan has 137 students total in the primary grades. There are sixty students in the pre-primary grades. There are two other schools that are pre-primary/primary in Santa Avelina. There is one other that is just pre-primary. The primarily language in Santa Avelina is Ixil (ee—sheel), a Mayan language. Most people learn Spanish by the time they reach first grade. A few people can speak a little English.

February 6, 2017

Morning

The team in Santa Avelina made some
advance decisions over dinner in
Chichicastenango that were helpful in
constructing an organized and efficient
workshop. The workshop provided
professional development to help teachers
plan lessons that foreground students’
mathematical and scientific reasoning. The
morning sessions were organized around the
metaphor of a coin, where one side of the coin
represents “students thinking and talking” and
the other emphasizes “the teacher listening to
the students’ thinking”. Arthur set the tone for the day by introducing the metaphor.

The teachers were split into two groups, upper elementary and lower elementary teachers. Becky and I took the upper elementary group for the first session, with Carmen interpreting. Arthur and Hans took the other group and then we switched. The overall outline for our part of the morning session was written on the white board:

Today we will:

• Participate in a [model] lesson where the 
students think and speak while the teacher 
listens [and responds].
• Discuss the thinking that we heard in the lesson.
• Begin planning our lessons.

The primary goal was to model a science lesson that
emphasized students’ exploration of a scientific question before the teacher (or ideally, the students) explained the correct answer. We emphasized this approach of “exploration proceeding explanation” throughout the morning and afternoon sessions and routinely connected it to the “two-sides-of-a-coin” metaphor. Students reason (explore and explain) while the teacher listens and guides them if and when necessary. Secondary goals included introducing the Think-Pair-Share strategy, which can create equitable opportunities in a whole-class discussion, and introducing two planning tools: The 5E’s Lesson Plan template (Bybee et al., 2006) and a “Backwards Design” tool (Wiggins & 
McTigue, 2005). The 5E’s is a science lesson-planning model that emphasizes “exploration proceeding explanation,” while the Backwards Design tool we created is a more general tool that is useful for aligning objectives, activities, and assessment.

The science question for the model lesson needed to be difficult enough to challenge the teachers as they took on the role of the student—as such it did not directly connect to their curriculum. It is worth reconsidering this for the future. It may be possible to accomplish the same ends while modeling a lesson that teachers could realistically use in their classrooms. It would be useful to have information about the teachers’ curriculum prior to planning the sessions and having materials translated.

We used a question developed by a middle school teacher and described and published as part of a collection of case studies of elementary students’ scientific inquiry (Hammer & van Zee, 2006). I swung a bead on the end of a piece of string (I bought the materials in Chichicastenango). and asked, “If I were to swing this bead back-and-forth like this, and cut it when it reaches its highest point, just when it is about to come back down, what will happen to the bead?”

In our early team discussion about Santa Avelina, I had been told to expect a very reserved, polite group who would sit down and talk quietly. My personal style is to move about the room, usually bubbling with enthusiasm. In most cases I can’t help myself, because I get excited. But in this case, I was restrained, and we sat together at a set of desks discussing the pendulum question. (A nice feature of William N. Botnan is that the desks are all whiteboards.)

People were certainly very polite, but not
particularly more reserved then most teachers I have worked with in this kind of setting. We did a quick think-pair-share to get them started and to model the approach, and the ideas began flowing rapidly. Maria suggested that since the bead was at its “highest point”, and “about to head back in the other direction”, it would fly back in the direction it came from on an angle (the red dashed line on the diagram). I asked people about Maria’s idea. I reminded the teachers that in science, we make progress by disagreeing with ideas, and arguing for or against explanations and predictions. In everyday life, I said, we might think of arguing as negative. We don’t really enjoy
 hearing two brothers arguing over who has to do a chore, for
example. But arguing in science has a purpose of bringing us to
greater understanding.

On the diagram to the right you can see the developing predictions. You can see the string and bead stretched out along the brown/black line. Domingo disagreed with Maria. The bead has it’s own strength (force) and momentum, he asserted, and so it would fly off in the direction it was heading (the black dashed line). Juan, the computer teacher, disagreed with both of them. He drew the green line to show that the bead was moving in both directions. He then pointed out that just went the bead was ready to come back down it did not have any force acting on it except gravity, and so it would fall straight down. The discussion and argument proceeded in much the same way it does when I do this with pre-service and in-service teachers in the states, and in my experience in other countries. The teachers readily drew on their experience of being on a swing. They questioned exactly when the string is cut, and as usual, there was discussion about how ideal conditions are presumed in physics. We discussed the ways in which the idealization of physics has to be reconciled with phenomena in the natural world, which occur under the influence of complicating variables. From there, I gave each pair of students a bead on a string, to “try out” different ideas they had and come up with revised explanations. I even told them I had more beads and more string if they wanted to try other things. Ultimately, we came back together and discussed our newest ideas.

I’ll pause in my description of the workshop here to explain a little more about why I ask science questions in professional development with teachers. First, I want to model for teachers how they can engage students in interesting scientific questions, create opportunities for students to reason scientifically, and move, through instruction that foregrounds students’ ideas, toward students’ deep understanding of central concepts in science. In this case, the central concepts are conceptual (i.e., force, momentum, speed), epistemological (scientific prediction involves reconciling personal experience with physical laws), and practical (students must propose and argue for and against predictions). Second…it’s fun. It reminds us that science is about exploration, discovery, excitement, and understanding. It’s PE (physical education) for the mind. Finally, if we expect science teachers to push their students to reason, we must provide them opportunities to push themselves. This helps them not only to understand how their students might respond to instruction that promotes scientific reasoning but also to identify and empathize with the feelings of pursuing an explanation for a phenomenon for which you do not know the answer.

As usual, I did not volunteer the “correct” answer. And as usual, at the end of our investigation, someone asked me for the “correct” answer. I’ve worked very hard at answering this question. My first response is that a physicist would say that under these idealized condition, when the bead is just about to come back down, it has no velocity and no momentum, and the only force acting on it is gravity. Thus, Juan represents the physicists, who would say that the bead would drop straight down. I demonstrate what one of my former students once showed me. If you imagine that the bead is swinging very slightly, the “highest point” is one in which the bead is moving quite slowly. You could, then, consider the bead to not be swinging at all. In this case, the “highest point” is when it is still…suspended from the hand and pointed toward the floor. At this “highest point”, where will the bead go?

In a class with students, I might not reveal the correct answer. If were continuing to work on this problem, I might send them home to think about it, or give them a writing

assignment. In workshops with teachers, however, I don’t want to frustrate them, as we might not get a chance to return to the question. I carefully explained that in this case, physicists would argue that Juan was correct. At its “highest point” the bead has no momentum, no velocity, and would fall straight down under the influence of gravity. I always feel a certain satisfaction when people ask for the right answer. To me it means that I let them reason, as I want them to let their students. I did not just tell them, with authority, what they should think. I also raised the question of what the right answer is. Is the right answer what would happen to the bead? Or is the right answer that students can apply concepts of force, momentum, velocity, and gravity in their pursuit of an explanation. And when is the right answer important? Do students have to know the right answer at the end of class? Or could they have time to reconsider it, review the arguments, try out new things, and question their own understanding?

I do like it when people ask the “right answer” question. It gratifies me that I have not pushed them towards it, because that is not my goal. And I’m not convinced that the right answer (in this case, what happens to the bead…) really is important for science learning.

It’s important not to disregard the gender dynamics in Santa Avelina. Domingo and Juan led the conversation, with contributions from Juan Castro and Maria. However, it was clear that Domingo was “the one who knows”, and so it was a learning experience for all of us that Domingo’s response did not match with the canon of physical kinematics. Domingo did not seem upset. He strikes me as a person of great curiosity, who is not afraid to be wrong.

The “bead-on-a-string” conversation was quite productive with this group, and I always have to force myself not to artificially cut off productive work. Once we had discussed the “physicists’ answer”, I introduced the NGSS (2013) scientific and engineering practices, and we discussed which of these we had pursued in the “bead-on-a-string”. We were able to check off most of them.

Science and Engineering Practices (Inquiry)

(US Next Generation Science Standards)

1. Asking questions (for science) and defining problems (for engineering)
2. Developing and using models
3. Planning and carrying out investigations
4. Analyzing and interpreting data
5. Using mathematics and computational thinking
6. Constructing explanations (for science) and designing solutions (for engineering)
7. Engaging in argument from evidence
8. Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information

Finally, we introduced the tools that we thought the teachers might use in planning science lessons. We introduced Bybee et al.’s (2006) “5E’s”, which the El Paredon teachers had helped us modify2. I had prepared a 5E’s outline of the lesson I had intended to use with the teachers, (which for the upper elementary teachers was “The Owls and Snakes problem”—Levin, Hammer, Elby, & Coffey, 2012). I emphasized that

Lesson Plan (Middle School)

Objective: Students will make hypotheses about a biological relationship and analyze data to come to conclusions. “The ‘5E’s’ Lesson Planning Model”.  The 5E’s is not a “Magic Lesson Plan Format”. It might not apply to all lessons, and we should not treat it as a linear guide. Evaluation (assessment), for example, is something that should be ongoing, responsive, and formative in that students’ thinking feeds back into what the teacher decides to do. The intention of the 5E’s–its spirit–is that the teacher considers the opportunities for students to reason (the flip side of the coin) before the phenomenon is explained (the head of the coin). In theory, it is the students who explain the phenomenon. In practice, the teacher often participates in the explanation. This seems fair and pragmatic in a school system context. There are some things that the teacher must authoritatively tell the students if they expect they will be judged on the students’ understanding of the canon. Additionally, we shouldn’t necessarily expect that students “discover” all knowledge on their own, when the history of science tells us that scientific knowledge and theory have been developed and refined over time. Aristotle knew less about the variety of chemical elements than today’s eighth grade student in Santa Avelina does.

The 5E’s, while not a “Magic Lesson Plan Format,” is a useful structure within which a teacher could construct a good science lesson plan. For the Santa Avelina teachers, we wanted to emphasize that students should be doing the reasoning, and teachers should help them use their reasoning to understand scientific knowledge and practice. I often recall the first lesson that one of my pre-service teacher students demonstrated in our first science methods class. “Mary” had a background in archaeology and earth/space

In the discussion afterward, I suggested to Mary that she could “flip it”. Why couldn’t the students explore the soil characteristics before they were told what the soil types were? My knowledge of the literature on constructivist learning theory, and my experience as a learner, teacher, and parent convince me that experiences anchor students’ science learning. “Exploring before explaining” is a pedagogical implication of constructivist learning theory.

Back in Santa Avelina, with about 15 minutes left in our time, we introduced the Backwards Design Tool We also gave the teachers a blank version of the 5E’s. We had hoped to give them planning time in the morning, but it was clear that they would need more time in the afternoon.

Soon it was time to switch and work with
the lower elementary teachers. Rather than
describe again in detail how this same
approach worked with the lower elementary
teachers, I’ll summarize. The lower
elementary teachers, predictably, were not as
comfortable with the science as the upper
elementary teachers, and struggled a little
more to come to a sensible consensus
response to the bead on the string question.
They did, however, participate as readily as
the first group in listening and responding to
each other’s ideas, identifying scientific practices, and beginning to work with the lesson planning tools. I gave them another model 5E’s lesson plan—in this case focused around the question, “If I drop this book and this piece of paper at the same time, which will fall first and why?” (see Hammer & van Zee, 2006)4. We had a little more time with these because the arguments about the bead on the string did not go on long, but still we knew we needed more time to work with this group on lesson planning.

Afternoon

Becky and I briefly discussed the
afternoon plan over lunch. We met with
both groups and concentrated on helping
them plan a lesson using the Backwards
Design tool. Becky came up with some
clever ideas: She had Carmen write out
our afternoon “lesson plan” in the format
of the tool we wanted the teachers to fill
out. She also came up with a list, which
identified important questions someone
could ask about each of the parts of the
lesson plan. We introduced the agenda to
the teachers and gave them around twenty
minutes to work on it, either alone or in pairs. We then went around to the circle and each teachers described their lesson plan. We gave feedback and asked them to give each other feedback, using the list of questions to guide what they asked. I won’t go into too much detail on each conversation, because a lot of what we discussed comes out in the classroom observations and my analysis; I was very surprised and excited to hear that each teacher planned to teach the lesson they constructed in class the next day.

February 7, 2017 Classroom observations and post-observation discussion with teachers

Grade 2:

Juana Priscilla
Today, I visited five classes. First, I visited Juana Priscilla’s 2nd grade class. There were 20 students: 9 boys and 11 girls. When I arrived, the students were still working on a language lesson. The class was organizing words on the board in alphabetical order. Juana Priscilla asked students to come up to the board to determine where the words fit, and then asked other students if they agreed or not with each other’s choices. She also asked students to explain why they placed words in the order they did. For example, she asked students, “Which comes first, ‘libra’ or ‘lapiz’.” When one boy said “lapis” she asked him to explain why. He said “lapis” comes first “because of the a.”

After about 15 minutes, Juana Priscilla told the students that they next day they would be doing the same thing, but with their own names. Then she had everyone get up and stretch, to take a break, after which she said that they were going to switch to science.

Here is the lesson plan that Juana Priscilla wrote in the workshop the day before. In discussion, it became clear that she wanted students to know the parts of the human body; specifically, she wanted to begin talking about the skeletal system.

To begin, she asked the students if they remembered what they had done in last week’s science lesson, and they replied that they had talked about the parts of the human body. She played a quick game where she touched different parts of the body and asked students to say what they were. The students were very responsive to Juana Priscilla and there was a lot of smiling and friendly rapport.

Next, Juana Priscilla used the analogy of building a house to
introduce students to the skeletal system. She told them that
her father wanted to build a house. What materials did he need? Students mentioned concrete, wood, and steel. One boy, apparently anticipating the analogy, said that the steel was like the bones of our body. Juana Priscilla asked if other students agreed with his idea and most students nodded or said they agreed. Juana Priscilla asked why the house needed steel, and the same boy said that the steel helps to hold the house up, like our bones do for our body. For me, this was one of the most important moments of the visit. Juana Priscilla had taken seriously our idea of having students do the reasoning while the teacher listens (the two-sides-of-the-coin). By doing so, she had seen first-hand how a student’s idea can drive the lesson. This is the essence of “responsive science teaching” (Robertson, Scherr, & Hammer, 2016), where students’ scientific ideas are foregrounded and may even serve to drive the direction of the class.

As much as any teacher we saw, Juana Priscilla directly put the ideas of the previous day’s workshop into practice. Right before I had to leave to go to the next class, she transitioned the class to begin talking about the different bones in the body. She put the students in pairs and asked them to discuss which of the bones in our body are long and which are short. We had to go, but it was clear that she was using the Think-Pair-Share strategy that we had taught the previous day. It will be interesting to follow-up with Juana Priscilla in particular, to see if her appropriation of these new pedagogies is sustained after we are gone.

Juana Priscilla introduced a minor content error in the lesson. The error is so minor, and might seem so insignificant, that it is hardly worth mentioning. However, the introduction of minor content errors, delivered with the teachers’ authority, was a fairly consistent theme throughout the day. I will document each one and note why I think it is important. In this case, in one point of the lesson, Juana Priscilla asked the students “Do all animals have bones?” The students replied that yes, all animals have bones, and Juana Priscilla affirmed their response. In fact, only a small fraction of animals on earth have bones. I mentioned this because one of the reasons that we define things in science is so that we can establish precision in communicating with one another. An animal is any organism that is composed of multiple cells and consumes other organisms for food. Therefore things we might not consider animals colloquially, such as worms or insects, do qualify as animals in a system of scientific classification. This in not an uncommon mistake among elementary teachers, but I consider it an important point; if children are to learn about animals, teachers should understand and use the classification scheme that scientists use. This not only gives students the “correct” answer, but it helps to establish the importance of terminology as a tool for communicating effectively and with precision.

My observations guided my conversations with the teachers in our afternoon sessions. I shared with Juana Priscilla’s my positive assessment of her pedagogical approach and the classroom climate, and I drew her attention to the minor content error.

Grade 4: Maria

Next, I visited Maria’s 4th grade class. There were 20 students, 10 boys and 10 girls. I arrived just when the class was switching to science. Maria told the students that they were going to talk about the bones in their face. Like Juana Priscilla, Maria used the lesson that she had designed the day before in the workshop. In fact, all five teachers I

observed used the lesson they designed. All of the lessons incorporated the idea of “explore-before- explain,” but as I will explain, some did so more effectively than others.

It was initially unclear to me what Maria meant by “the bones in the face”, and as it turned out, she meant the teeth. This is another content error. Bones and teeth differ in both structure and function. In our conference afterwards, I initially decided not to bring this up with Maria. The entire group was meeting together, and I didn’t want to embarrass her. However, after I gave her my feedback, she asked me if there was anything else I thought she could do better. I brought up the confusion of bones and teeth, and as it turned out, most

of the other people in the group also thought that bones were teeth. My confidence wavered, and we looked it up. As I expected, bones and teeth differ in both structure and function. Again, this may seem like a minor point, but understanding the relation between structure and function is an important aspect of science that cuts across scientific disciplines such as biology and physics (NRC, 2013). Thus discussing the differences between bones and teeth, rather than simply treating them as the same, could be a productive way for students to understand and appreciate this important relationship.

Maria made efforts to tap students’ prior knowledge, and as a result, it was clear that students knew quite a bit about teeth. She asked them about when they got their first teeth, when they lost their “milk” teeth, and what would happen if they did not have teeth. She explained why they were called milk teeth5, and emphasized the importance of dental hygiene. She had students count their teeth. Most found that they had 28 teeth, and Maria explained that most adults have 32.

I found it particularly interesting when Maria asked the students why the “pre-molars” are called pre-molars. I was very excited about this at the time; I thought that she was attempting to integrate some literacy into the students’ understanding of the names of the teeth. That is, if the students understood that the pre-molars are teeth that come in before the molars, they would have an example of how the prefix “pre” is used. Understanding this prefix could be useful to them in their developing Spanish language proficiency. When I asked Maria in the conference afterwards why she had asked that question, however, she responded that she wanted the students to know the names of the teeth. Either she didn’t understand my question, or she was not really trying to integrate understanding of the prefix. I believe it’s the former. During this discussion Maria did not ask the students why the incisors are called the incisors nor why the molars are called molars. I think she recognized the value of drawing their attention to the prefix.

After this discussion, Maria had the students open the book, copy the picture of the mouth in the book, and label the teeth by their names. I was unimpressed with this activity. I realize that it is part of the curriculum, and Maria has very little training or support to think about how to do something differently. However, the activity used a large amount of instructional time that could have been spent more productively. For example, Maria could have had students look at pictures of bones and teeth and compare and contrast their structures and functions, perhaps with a Venn Diagram. This approach would not only draw students’ attention to the structure/function relationship, but would give them an opportunity to identify the particular structures of both tissues.

Grade 1: Magdalena

After a break, I visited Magdalena’s 1st grade class. There were 20 students: 11 boys and 9 girls. This was a very active, very noisy class, but it was warm and friendly and the children were on task. Everyone was smiling and laughing throughout the lesson, and Magdalena is warm and encouraging with the students. The lesson was about the parts of the body, and Magdalena first had all the students stand up to sing a song that they had learned about “Aunt Monica”.

I didn’t ask Carmen to translate the song entirely, but it basically has lines like, “My Aunt Monica, she has shoulders, and when she turns around she goes like this”…(and everyone shimmies their shoulders). Magdalena began the song and in the beginning, she took the lead with the singing. Over time, however, she would stop singing to let the students take the lead. (I have video evidence of this). This “fading” of support helped students to independently identify the body parts without Magdalena’s support.

After the song, Magdalena asked the students a few questions to extend their understanding of the body parts and their Spanish terms. She asked, for example, “Why are they called “ears” and not “ear”? One student said, “because they’re big” and another said, “because there are two of them.”

I found Magdalena to be the most pedagogically sophisticated of all the teachers I observed, although Juana Priscilla and Domingo were both also very strong. For the next activity, Magdalena gave the students cutouts of pieces of a drawing of a boy and told them they needed to put the pieces together to make the picture of the boy. She also gave them labels with the Spanish terms for the body parts, which they were expected to glue on next to each body part. The students were in groups of about five. Magdalena had cut out the pieces, but only very roughly. She handed out scissors and had the students cut out the pieces carefully around the outlines of each shape.

My first thought was that this was a waste of instructional time. I thought she could have made better use of the time if she had cut the pieces out completely before hand. I decided, however, that since this was a first grade class, Magdalena probably wanted to give the students practice in using the scissors. Young children often have difficulty with fine motor skills, and this seemed like a good choice to help them develop these skills. It turned out, however, that Magdalena was making a much more sophisticated pedagogical choice. Carmen pointed out to me that while the children were cutting, Magdalena went around to each child individually, held up the names of the body parts and asked the child to say the word and identify the part on their own body. Thus she managed to engage the whole class actively in group work while creating time for her to work one-on-one with each student. I was very impressed; I would consider this sophisticated pedagogical decision making if I saw it in the States.

I was already very impressed with Magdalena’s class
when Carmen interpreted a conversation Magdalena was
having with one boy. The boy came up to her and asked her what one of the terms meant. Instead of telling him, she directed him to ask one of his classmates. After Carmen pointed this out to me, I watched as the same boy came up to ask Magdalena about a different term. Again she told him to ask his classmates. She did the same when another student came up to her. After a while, no more students came up to ask her, and we could hear the students discussing among themselves which label went where. Magdalena was the one teacher I had difficulty offering critical constructive comments in the conference in the afternoon. Pedagogically, it was one of the most impressive primary classes I’ve ever seen. By the end of this class, I’m certain that Magdalena could tell me what progress each of her students had made in identifying the Spanish terms for the body parts.

Grade 6: Domingo

Next I visited Domingo’s 6th grade class. There were 17 students in the class, 8 boys and 9 girls. I was very excited to see this class for several reasons. First, my expertise is in science education in the middle and secondary grades, so I felt more comfortable observing a lesson at this level. Second, I know that Domingo had put a lot of effort into this lesson and was anxious for me to see it. In the planning session on the previous day he had asked me if I had ideas for how to go about teaching “The Scientific Method.” I don’t think I did a very good job helping him with this. I am personally uncomfortable with the reification of the particular series of steps taught in schools as “The” scientific method. In reality, scientific work follows a variety of methods, only some of which have the hypethetico-deductive character of the method that is traditionally taught in schools (Tang, Coffey, Elby, & Levin, 2009). I also felt a little put-on-the-spot to come up with something that Domingo could do with the materials he had available. I was asked the same question in El Paredon, and I think I
handled it poorly there. With Domingo, I launched into a
long response based on how Becky and I had responded in
El Paredon. First, I explained that the key to this particular
method was to have some sort of comparison, where the
variable that is being tested can be compared to a condition
in which the variable is absent (i.e., a “control” group).
(This is often referred to as the “Control of Variables”
strategy, or “CVS”). I then described how Domingo could
have students grow different groups of plants, and ask
questions about what factors affect plant growth. For
example, students could ask how the amount of water
influences plant growth. They could grow groups of plants
under different daily watering conditions (i.e., no water, .25L water, .5L water, etc.) and measure the growth of the plants. This kind of experiment is likely familiar to most readers of this report. It’s “The Scientific Method” taught in schools, and it is usually the kind of thing that people think of when they think of science fair projects. Despite my own discomfort with the dominance of this particular method in schools, I thought that my suggestion might help Domingo come up with some ideas, and I particularly wanted to emphasize the importance of the CVS strategy, so he wasn’t just teaching students a set of steps. I judged from the look on Domingo’s face that he was dubious about my suggestion. He and Juan (the computer teacher) huddled together during the planning time, and they came up with another plan that Domingo taught and that I recorded in its entirety.

Domingo began the class explaining to the students that we all have questions, and that questions are important in science. He asked the students what kinds of questions they had. I was so engrossed in video recording that I didn’t take very good notes in this class, but it was clear that Domingo valued his students’ ideas and was taking all questions, even if some of them did not sound like science questions. His intention, which he had told me the previous day, was to let students explore a particular phenomenon and then demonstrate to them how their exploration fit into the steps of the scientific method that he ultimately wanted them to know. As the class went through each part, he recorded it on the white board.

Domingo then told the students that he had a question he wanted the class to explore. He asked the students what they thought would happen if he placed an egg in “sweet” water (emphasizing that by “sweet” he did not mean that it had sugar added, but merely that it was pure, with nothing added). Students came up with several ideas. Some said it would sink, and some said it would float. One boy said that he thought the egg would explode. Rather than dismiss the idea as ridiculous, or ignore it, Domingo, said, “Okay” and wrote the idea down with the others. He told the class that everyone had different ideas and there were no wrong answers when you are saying what you think. Again, as with Juana Priscilla, this was a sophisticated “responsive” pedagogical move. First, perhaps the boy was joking, and trying to draw attention to himself by saying something ridiculous to get a laugh. By taking the idea seriously, Domingo diffused any possibility that the boy would benefit from negative attention and thereby disrupt the class. Second, it’s possible that the boy really thought this was a plausible idea; Domingo didn’t really know if the boy was serious or joking. (He said it with a perfectly straight face). Ultimately, Domingo’s acceptance of the idea demonstrated that his classroom was one in which students’ ideas were valued.

Domingo then asked students what they thought would happen if he placed the egg in salt water. Students offered similar responses. Some said it would float and some said it would sink. Again, someone came up with an unusual idea (although I can’t remember exactly what it is—you’ll have to watch the video), and again Domingo accepted it as plausible. With this list of what the students thought would happen in salt water and sweet water, Domingo told the students that what they had come up with were referred to as “hypotheses”.

It was time to see what happened. First Domingo placed the egg in sweet water asked the students what they observed. The students noted that the egg sank. He returned to the board and crossed out the hypotheses that could be eliminated: the egg did not float, and it did not explode. In doing so, Domingo made a visual statement about the nature of science that distinguishes it from mathematics: In science, we make progress not by “proving” certain things to be true, but by showing that alternative possibilities are untrue. He didn’t discuss this with the students, but I mentioned to him in the post-observation conference that this was a powerful display of the nature of science.

Next Domingo began to add salt to the water, stirring it slowly as he did so. The egg continued to remain at the bottom of the beaker, and I got a little nervous for him. He kept adding salt and continued to stir it, but the egg remained firmly at the bottom of the beaker. (I think he could have used a little less water in his beaker so that the salt concentration would have increased more quickly). I thought about asking him if he wanted me to go get more salt, and I was getting more and more anxious. Domingo stayed very calm, however, continuing to ask the students what they saw. “Is it floating now?” No, they said, it was not floating. He sent a boy off to get more salt, and continued to add salt when the boy returned with it. Soon, the egg floated to the top of the beaker. Again, Domingo returned to the board and asked the students which hypotheses they could eliminate. Together, the class crossed out everything except for the hypothesis that said that the egg would float in salt water. From there, Domingo wrote “conclusions” on the board and told the class that what they had found out about the egg (that it floats in salt water and sinks in salt water) were their conclusions. He asked the students why they thought this had happened. One student said it was because of gravity. There were some other ideas, but again, my notes were limited so I am mostly relating what I remember. Domingo then explained to students that this comparison demonstrated the concept of density. Because the egg was more dense than the sweet water, it floated. Because it was less dense then salt water, it floated. Above where he had written “conclusions”, Domingo wrote “analysis” and recorded the density explanation in that space.

I was very impressed with this lesson, although I had some constructive feedback for Domingo. Like the other teachers in Santa Avelina, Domingo has an easy, friendly, warm presence in the classroom. Students obviously feel comfortable sharing their ideas, and he is thoughtful about how he responds. This demonstration of the scientific method did not follow the typical control-of-variables strategy, although the comparison between salt and sweet water did allow for a comparison that could lead to conclusions. Frankly, I like what Domingo did better than what I had suggested to him. I certainly like it better than the typical “science fair” type of approach.

As with some of the other teachers, there were a couple of minor content errors. First, Domingo presented a conclusion as what happened. This is usually what we refer to as the “results”, “data”, “or findings”. A conclusion is the explanation itself. In our conclusion we explain why our results turned out the way that they did. Domingo did have the students discuss why they thought this happened, and he referred to this as the “analysis,” but I would like to see him accurately represent the explanatory nature of a conclusion. Domingo and I had discussed this when he planned his lesson, and I brought it to his attention again in the post-observation conference.

Looking back now, there are a couple of other things I should have mentioned in our discussion. First, there is a tendency to treat a hypothesis simply as a prediction, i.e., what will happen? In reality, a hypothesis is a proposed explanation. When someone offers a hypothesis, they don’t only say what they think will happen, but they say why they think it will happen. That is, they justify their prediction. What Domingo had students do was really just predict what would happen. I should mention that both the treatment of a hypothesis as merely a prediction, and the treatment of a conclusion as merely results are common errors among both middle and high school teachers in the States (as I pointed out with Juana Priscilla’s error about animals). Thus, I’m not identifying the Santa Avelina teachers as having any greater content weaknesses than teachers in the States. However, I think we should be ambitious and help these teachers to develop content expertise that is as strong as the best teachers in the States.

A second thing I should have mentioned in my conference with Domingo is that he could have had the students do the egg comparison, rather than doing it as a demonstration. Honestly, it seems obvious to me now, but I’m only thinking of it as I write this on the plane. He could have the students do it in pairs, and he could practice beforehand to make sure he told them what proportion of salt and water to use. I think it’s likely that Domingo either didn’t think of this or was nervous to try it. It complicates things considerably to have students do this themselves. A teacher has to consider that the results might not come out as expected for all the groups, and he would have to have enough experience with that to know what to do in that case.

Grade 5: Juan Castro

The final class I observed was Juan Castro’s 5th grade class. There were 18 students in the class, 7 boys and 11 girls. This was probably the weakest of the lessons I observed. The lesson was about the main parts of the cell, and Juan Castro read about the cell membrane, nucleus, and cytoplasm out of the book. After he read each section, he then had the students read each section. All the students read at the same time, at different rates, and the effect was just a loud babble of 18 voices reading asynchronously. I’m not convinced that it was a productive use of instructional time. From what I have heard, this is Juan Castro’s general approach to teaching.

After this, Juan Castro brought out an egg. He cracked the egg into a beaker and told the students that the egg was a model that represented a cell. Since the students had read about the three main parts, he asked them which part the various parts of the egg represented (i.e., the shell, yolk, and the amniotic fluid). Unfortunately, he provided no wait time, and did not let the students answer. Instead he asked the question as though it were rhetorical, and then quickly answered it himself. Thus, in contrast to some of the other teachers, Juan Castro did not foreground the students’ reasoning. I believe that what he took away from our training was that he should do some sort of demonstration with the students, which is how he assimilated our idea of “explore-before-explain”. He failed to let the students explore, however.

Teaching the parts of the cell in a meaningful way is not easy. I personally believe that is pointless to just have students look at pictures in the book and identify the structures. Who among us remembers the names of the cell structures that we learned in middle or high school? For me personally, these structures only became meaningful and important as I advanced in my study of biology. I believe, as I described in Maria’s class, that the study of the cell allows for an opportunity for students to appreciate the crucial relationship between structure and function. I published a short paper that describes how I approach teaching cell structure and function to make it more meaningful (Levin, 2010). Juan Castro did begin an effort to connect the cell structures to their functions, explaining to students, for example, that the nucleus contains the hereditary information. However, that does not really demonstrate the close relationship between structure and function. A better example is the cell membrane, in which the particular organization of the structure allows for the function of regulating what can enter and exit the cell.

Next, Juan Castro moved on to introducing the difference between plant and animal cells. Again, he read from the book, explaining to the students that the plant cell was square and the animal cell was round. He mentioned that there was one other difference, but did not say what it was. A girl asked him why the plant and animal cell was different. This is an excellent question, which gets at the nature of differences between animals and plants and emphasizes the structure/function relationship. Unfortunately, Juan Castro simply reiterated that they were different, i.e., the plant cell was square and the animal cell was round, and there was one other difference6.

I was becoming concerned about what I was going to say in my conference with Juan Castro. I wanted to make sure I could say something positive about each teacher’s lesson, and in this case it seemed that was going to be challenging. Juan Castro did something very productive at the end of the lesson, however. He returned to the egg demonstration, pointed to each part of the egg, and asked the students which part of the cell each part represented. This was a very useful assessment approach. Students were easily able to identify the analogy of the shell to the cell membrane and the yolk to the nucleus, but struggled to identify the analogy to the cytoplasm. Thus, at the end of the lesson, Juan Castro had a good assessment of what the students understood about the names of the different structures. It’s not clear why the students struggled more with the cytoplasm. It could be because it’s a more unusual term then the other two, or because it’s difficult to understand exactly what it is from the picture in the book. I’m not claiming that the students developed any real robust understanding of the cell from this lesson, only that pedagogically, Juan Castro appears to have appreciated the aspect of the Backward Design approach that calls for assessing students’ progress in meeting the lesson objective.

Post-observation Conference

After a wonderful lunch, we had about 45 minutes with each group to discuss our observations. I’ve indicated much of the specific feedback that I gave above. The teachers expressed gratitude for the feedback. Both Domingo and Juan Castro admitted to being very nervous. Both said that they were doing something they had never tried before. We joked that Santa Avelina should concentrate on doing “egg science”. Eggs are plentiful in Santa Avelina and they had already worked their way into two lessons. There are many opportunities to connect the local context in Santa Avelina to science lessons, but this was not a primary focus of this visit. In my next report, I’ll discuss how relating science to the local context became the primary focus in the El Paredon visit.

References

Bybee, R. W., Taylor, J. A., Gardner, A., Van Scotter, P., Powell, J. C., Westbrook, A., &

Landes, N. (2006). The BSCS 5E instructional model: Origins and effectiveness. Colorado Springs, Co: BSCS, 5, 88-98.

Hammer, D., & van Zee, E. (2006). Seeing the science in children’s thinking: Case studies of student inquiry in physical science. Heinemann Educational Books.

Levin, D.M. (2010). The invented cell: Supporting students’ reasoning about structure, function, and mechanism. The Science Teacher, 77(9), 64-65

Levin, D.M., Hammer, D., Elby, A., and Coffey, J. (2012). Becoming a responsive science teacher: Focusing on student thinking in secondary science. ArlingtonVA: NSTA Press

National Research Council. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press

Robertson, A.D., Scherr, R.E., and Hammer, D. (Eds) (2016) Responsive Teaching in Science. London: Routledge

Tang, X., Coffey, J., Elby, A., & Levin, D.M. (2009). Scientific inquiry and scientific method: Tensions in teaching and learning. Science Education 94(1): 29-47

Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. ASCD.

 

Science Teaching and Teacher Education in Southwest China

On Sunday, July 5, Li Qin, Rachel, and I returned to Chongqing from Chengdu with a big week
ahead:  a full-day professional development on Monday and then two hour classes Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  I’ve posted some pictures of the massive Chengdu train station already, but here are a couple of other features of the train stations that I captured. The guys on the left are playing Xiangqi–Chinese Chess.  At the base of the stairs.  Between two escalators.  In a train station.  No one else seemed to notice them.  I guess you get used to things if they’re common where you live.  Like restroom signs pointing at walls or toward nowhere in particular.

It really is almost always beautiful to ride into a sunset anywhere I guess, but I came to appreciate riding into the mountains around Chongqing at sunset. 

Monday was a full-day talk, lunch, and workshop at Huaxin Primary School in Jiangbei.  Jiangbei is a district of the Chongqing municipality, like Beibei.  It is the district north of the Jialing River where it runs into the Yangtze–across the Jianling from the Chongqing Peninsula (Jianbei means “River North”).  Beibei is further to the north along the Jialing.  (Beibei means “North Rock” and a “Bei” is a particular kind of rock that sticks out of the river–there is a “bei” in Beibei but I didn’t see it).  Kitty came to pick me up in a taxi with her mom, Little Walnut, and LW’s massive stroller.  Fortunately I got to sit in the front seet.  It was about an hour to get to Jiangbei from the University, and of course there was traffic, so we were late, and the students were calling to check on us.

When we finally rolled into Jianbei, the taxi just dropped us off on the street in an area that looked like Tyson’s Corner,  We got the stroller, Grandma, and the walnut unraveled and proceeded to hike our way through a back alley where people were cooking rice and meat, under some laundry hanging down from an apartment, and up and down some stairs, until we arrived at a gleaming new, huge school with a security gate.  The school was about 8 stories, and it had a full-sized, semi-enclosed athletic field.

We rushed to the third floor to get Grandma and Che Tau settled into a day-care center and then rushed to the fifth floor where the group of teacher leaders, students, and about 100 primary school science teaching specialists were waiting for me to give a sweaty talk and for Kitty to translate breathlessly.

The morning was interesting.  As usual, there were a lot of questions, and as usual, since they were teachers, they were a bit of a tough audience.  But I’m used to it.  We recorded the group inquiring into moon phenomena, and that has led to some interesting stuff Kitty and I have begun working on about linguistic resources in learning science and the mechanisms by which particular language resources serve particular kinds of proficiencies in science learning.  I’m not telling you any more.  You’ll have to come to the conference talk.

But lunchtime was crazy.  In case I didn’t mention it, it was hot and humid, it felt like we were rushing everywhere, and I was sweating through my shirt.  Kitty and I had been talking about the afternoon workshop, but we needed to translate some materials quickly during lunchtime and have copies made.  We had discussed in the morning that we would work on some things during lunch and have Rachel do the translation.  But after the talk, Kitty vanished (I think she was anxious to get back to the baby), and I was whisked away to follow people out to lunch.  Rachel told me that she was supposed to go with me, and the other students weren’t invited.  I figured we were going to meet up with Kitty at lunch and do our work.  But it turned out that Rachel was being sent with me to translate.  I thought we were going to have a casual lunch with the teacher leaders who organized the day, but it turned out to be with the principal of Huaxin, the vice principal, and a number of other people who were apparently education officials in in the district.

Poor Rachel–I don’t think either of us realized this was going to happen.  Rachel’s English is good, but not as good as Kitty’s; there were a lot of dignified people, and as usual I was peppering Rachel with questions about language and culture.  We sat at a big round table with an enormous Lazy Susan on a slow constantly-rotating speed.  As usual there was amazing food and too much of it:  pork, duck, vegetables, noodles, soup, shrimp….  We were served watermelon juice and there was a big toast where everyone stood up and clinked watermelon glasses.  Thanks to Rachel, I was able to have an interesting conversation at that meal with the principal, who had studied in Singapore, and the vice principal, who had some training at Towson, where I got my teaching degree.

But the real excitement was the toasting!  The way it seems to work is that throughout the lunch, each person stands up and goes around the table and toasts everyone else individually with watermelon juice.  The first time someone came to me, I didn’t realize I should be standing; Rachel told me.  The next time, I neglected to fully stand up; I was kind of in a half-stand-half-sit position, bent over like an old man.  Soon I go the gist though.  People seemed to really be having fun with it.  One guy latched onto the Chinese name that Mike and Robin gave me and came over to toast “Wendao.”  Eventually I made my own round, with a glass of watermelon juice and Rachel in tow to translate.  I realized that if you like a particular dish, like the twice-cooked pork, for example, you can time your revolution of the table to match the rotation of the Lazy Susan and eat pork all the way around.

But I did promise that this post was about Science Teaching and Teacher Education in China.  That afternoon, after lunch, we structured a workshop such that teachers could look at their own lessons through the lens of US science education reform–in the form of Next Generation Science Standards core ideas, cross-cutting concepts, and scientific practices.  Chinese science educators are very interested in what goes on in U.S. science education; they took on this charge seriously, and I think they found it useful.  Based on the evaluations and my sense during the workshop and other meetings, I think the most powerful thing for the elementary science teachers I worked with was the realization that they are already creating very productive science learning environments for their students, at least based on the recommendations of NGSS in the US (and on my interpretations of NGSS).

I realized that my expertise is primarily in secondary and middle school science teaching in the U.S., although I have done some work in primary, yet everyone I was talking to in China was in primary science education.  In China, at least in urban schools, primary school science teachers are specialists, and most have a background in science.  VIdeos and transcripts of classrooms that I saw generally showed the kinds of interactions that I would associate with the most dynamic middle and high school science classrooms that I have seen at home.  (Although Kitty cautions me that I’ve mostly seen classrooms of the best teachers).  Still, I was impressed at what I was seeing, and I told the teachers so.

It wasn’t until later in the week that I learned that science in high schools can take place in classes of up to 100 students and it is always lecture.  One teacher told me that she did no laboratory activities of any kind in her high school science classes, and the kind of engagement in scientific practices that we envision in U.S. high schools would not overlap at all with high school Chinese science teaching.

It seems that high school is like a pre-college in China more than it is here.  Public school is only compulsory in China through grade 9, and public high schools charge tuition (although it is apparently affordable for most people).  These kinds of things really surprised me about China–in many ways it seems less socialist than the U.S.–people have to pay for health insurance–there is not universal health care.  Apparently the Chinese government’s answer to things that don’t seem very socialist is (and has always been), that “We are in the early stages of socialism”.  Or so I have heard.

To become a teacher, a person usually completes an undergraduate degree that gets them certified, but these programs can be very competitive.  For example, one student I know really wanted to be an English teacher, but only people with the highest test scores get into those programs, so she settled on becoming a biology teacher.  However, even with a degree, it’s not so easy to get a job, which is why many of the students I met were working on their masters degrees.  Even though they were doing research-based masters degrees, it is expected that the masters degree will help them to get a teaching job.

The professional development is handled at the level of the district, as it is with us, but the teacher leaders appear to have a lot more autonomy.  These teacher leaders were the people who came to every talk, workshop, or class I did.  They seem to be the people in China who are most like me; people trying to soak up every good thing they can about science teaching.  These pictures are from the last day of my class later that week, but a bunch of the people in them are teacher leaders who had been at the Huaxin talk and workshop on Monday.

That day at Huaxin was really interesting and exciting, but it was the most stressful and exhausting day of my whole trip.  I was talking or leading a workshop for six hours.  I realized that my colleague DJK and I almost signed a contract to do that in Beijing for 10 days, and one day in Chongqing had just about killed me.  So glad we didn’t do that DJK!

After the workshop, we got a nice surprise.  The teacher leaders had gotten us a private car and we were whisked back to Beibei in style, just in time to plan for class the next day.  I just realized….Che Tau did not cry the entire day!

Deep History

Most of the people in China identify as Han Chinese. This is an ethnicity that binds people together with common history, language, and culture. There are regional and religious differences among the Han, and they are a minority in the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, but the Han identity seems strong and meaningful among the people I met and the places I visited. There are almost one and a half billion people in Mainland China, and 90% of them are Han. Everyone is Han Chinese.

I spoke with the principal at Huaxin Primary School in Jiangbei, Chongqing on Monday after we returned from Chengdu. They had a big lunch for me and other educational leaders during the talk/workshop that we did there. Remind me to tell you about that lunch. It was quite a scene, man.  I asked the principal about ethnic minorities in the school. She told me that there were occasionally Thai or Malaysian students, or students with Western parents—expats or temporary workers, but even they were a very small fraction. Minority groups in China, such as Tibetans, Mongols, and Tatars, are mostly in their ancestral regions, and so there are very few in parts of Southwest China I visited and at Huaxin Primary School.

The Han trace their ancestry from the Huaxia people who lived along the Yellow River.The name comes from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 BCE), a relatively long-lasting dynasty in Chinese history, and one under which art and music developed abundantly and there was significant expansion of influence.

After the fall of the dynasty, this native population began to be referred to as “the people of Han” to separate them from steppe nomads. They generally have ruled China since the Han dynasty, as areas of China underwent “sinicization”. You like that? I just learned that word doing some background research for this blog. It’s the process by which other cultures are assimilated into Han Chinese state, society, culture, and language.

Really the only period in which another people ruled all of China was during the time of the Mongols. The Mongol ruler Kublai Khan founded the Yuan Dynasty in 1271, which is about the time Marco Polo purportedly visited him. The Mongols ruled all of China from 1279-1368. Incidentally, Marco Polo described visiting Chengdu on his travels.

That last morning in Chengdu, Rachel, Li Qin and I visited the Wuhou Shrine, the Temple of the Marquis Wuhou, (武侯祠 ). It is a set of temples, statues, and gardens dedicated t Liu Bei (161-223),Emperor of the Kingdom of Shu in the Three Kingdoms period, and Zhuge Liang (181-234), prime minister of the kingdom. It was supposedly begun around 1,800 years ago when Liu Bei’s mausoleum was first built in 223 AD. The modern site mostly dates from the early Ming dynasty (17^th century).

I don’t feel like I have the same kind of deep history as my Chinese friends. If you are Chinese and you live in China you have
this deep, shared identity that is connected also to the land. It must be like belonging to one large family that has continued to inhabit the same homestead. I was surprised to learn from my young Chinese friends that most of them don’t know anything about their families beyond their grandparents. Maybe this is just because they’re young and they don’t have that yearning yet to “Know Where I Come From”. Or maybe they do know where they come from. They come from China. They come from the Han. Maybe if you Know Where You Come From it’s not as important to find out more.

It’s surprising because the Chinese people I met also have a deep reverence for, and a deep connection to their grandparents. Kitty’s mother lives with her family and takes care of Xiǎo hétáo (Little Walnut) when Kitty needs to work. Kitty was also close to her grandparents, and I discovered that her English name doesn’t only derive from her love of Hello Kitty. Apparently, her grandfather called her Xiǎo māo (little cat—kitty), playing off of her name Xiaowei (which Rachel claims means “little special one” – Kitty scoffed at that and I can’t find easy translational confirmation for it. Wei has many possible meanings, and it could mean gorgeous. Don’t miss my post on Chinese language!)

I should add that after the Wuhou Shrine Rachel, Li Qin, and I went to the loveliest place for lunch, which we all decided was our favorite so far. After that we took the train back to Beibei. The next morning was my talk and workshop at Huaxin, and we had to get moving bright and early for the hour long taxi ride to Jiangbei.

 

Men and Women

Now that I’m back, I’m going to spend some time commenting on things I observed, along with continuing to chronicle the trip.  Today’s post is mostly about my observations of men and women in China.

My impression is that there is considerable equality among men and women in China, although of course men and women generally behave differently.  I saw both men and women in all occupations–as professors, teachers, policemen, as guides, in retail, and selling fruit on the street.  When I gave my talk and led a workshop for practicing elementary science teachers (yes, they specialize) at Huaxin Primary School in Jiangbei, Chongqing, I though I might detect a difference in how the male and female teachers interacted socially.  We had a discussion about moon phenomena (e.g., what causes the phases, how do you get an eclipse, etc.) and the first person to share his ideas was a man, who stood up and gave a long soliloguy about everything he knew about the moon.  Most of the women who shared (at least at that talk) gave more limited responses and made space for other people to talk.  I asked Kitty later if she thought this was representative of a difference in the way men and women participate in groups.  “No,” she said, “He just talks too much.”

I didn’t encounter many female taxi drivers, and it was rare to see a woman in a group like the one below from early morning in Beibei.

I posted this picture in my post on tea and coffee.  These guys were always hanging out in groups on side streets in Beibei, Chongqing, Jiangbei, and Chengdu.  I’m not a dumb guy, but it never crossed my mind to wonder why they were hanging out there.  Finally, on my last day, and with Rachel’s help, I figured out that they were motorcycle-taxis.  They wait there until someone comes looking for a fare.  There are also little red three-wheeled taxis too.  I did not see one woman driving any of the three types of taxis, but I did see many women on little scooters (especially in Chengdu) and occasionally driving motorcycles.  Kitty and the students never took the motorcycles or the little red taxis–only the official yellow ones in Chongqing and green ones in Chengdu.  I asked Rachel why not.  “Too dangerous,” she said.  I think the people I hung out with are stable enough financially to afford to ride in the respectable taxis, because I saw many people riding on the back of these motorcycle taxis–often with two people piled on back and usually, when it was raining, carrying an umbrella.

I snapped a shot of this scene when we were driving through the “countryside” (kind of like Silver Spring) on our way to the Golden Knife Gorge this past Friday.  I saw this many times, but it was often difficult to capture a shot.  There are actually two women on the back of this motorcycle, clinging on tight and carrying the umbrella.

In general, men and women have very particular styles of dress.  Men dress comfortably, loosely, with patterned button-down shirts and jeans or shorts, or with t-shirts, invariably stamped with English lettering or an English phrase or endorsement (“Just Do It!”).  Virtually no one, neither men nor women, wears Chinese characters on their clothing unless they are wearing a uniform.  I had great difficulty finding t-shirts with Chinese symbols or sayings for me and Noah.  I found a few on Jinli Street, some more in downtown Chengdu, and a few at the airport in Beijing.  But it was incredibly rare to see a Chinese person wearing one.  I guess I want Chinese lettering on my clothing because it’s exotic.  To Chinese people in Southwest China, it’s English that’s exotic.  But still–we wear shirts with English lettering here all the time.  It’s surprising considering that there is great reverence for the Chinese language, and you see Chinese sayings on buildings and around the cities.  Like this one I saw on a building on our way to the hotel in Chengdu (translated by Rachel):  “Honesty weighs heavier than the mountain Tai and harvest can only be garnered through hard efforts.”

Women dress in a lot of different styles, but a very common thing (at least in the summer in Southwest China) is to wear short (very) skirts with high-heeled wedges like these.  You’ll see a young woman, in a short skirt and wedges, holding a parasol, and riding side-saddle on one of those motorcycle taxis, weaving its way in and out of traffic in Beibei, presumably on her way to work or class.

People exercise a lot outdoors, especially older people, and especially in the early morning.  You can see some of this in my earlier post “The People”.  On our last day in Jinli, I took a walk in the early morning back through the enormous park that connected Jinli to the Wuhou Shrine and watched people walking, playing badminton and ping pong, doing Tai Chi, Kung Fu, and Qi Gong, massaging themselves around the head and neck, and dancing.  You would see people of both sexes doing these things, and with dancing, you’d see men and women dancing together and women and women dancing together.  I didn’t see men dancing together.  Here’s a picture from when Kitty and I went looking for an open coffee shop in Beibei last Wednesday.  (We couldn’t find one that opened before 11 and ended up back in Kitty’s office–hear more complaining about this in my post on tea and coffee).

You also are very likely to see women walking together on the street holding hands or with arms linked, but not men.  (Although I did capture this picture to the right–must’ve been something pretty
special, or heavy, in that case).  It’s very sweet, and in a little book I got that’s all about understanding cultural differences in China, the authors claim that people do this often when they are standing in lines in crowds, or pushing to get on a train.  Pushing to get on a train is a real thing–pushing is in general–Since I’ve been home I’ve had to force myself to say the obligatory “excuse me” if I need to move past someone.  God forbid my body should brush against theirs!  That warrants a profound apology.  In China, it’s just about getting to the front.  Maybe the linked arms thing is effective for not losing your family in one of these scrums, but I saw women doing it all the time, even just when walking around campus.

In general, in the States, women don’t look at me on the street.  Sometimes they look up and catch my eye and smile, but I rarely get ogled.  (Once I was at a conference in San Diego and my roommate was a very good looking, tall, well-built young man–I’m not saying who he is, some of you might know him–and I felt like women were staring at me as we walked to and from conference sessions and our hotel.)  In China, everyone was ogling me, men and women.  I saw very few Westerners in Chongqing and Chengdu, so I’m guessing it was the novelty of me and not my inherent attractiveness that made this happen.  I can see how it could be uncomfortable–I know it is uncomfortable for women when they get ogled by men on the streets in the States, and when we were in Israel, the Ethiopian students felt like they were constantly being looked at.  And then of course if you have anything that marks you as different (a disability, being very tall or short, thin or heavy) people look at you.  I was a little uncomfortable at first, but I started to embrace it.  I got in the habit of just staring back at people, or smiling, or even saying “Nihau!”.  Kids were the most brazen of course.  When we were in the train station in Chengdu, this little boy was staring at me and pointing me out to his father.  He got his father’s attention and mine at the same time.  We all three looked at each other–there was a brief uncomfortable pause, and then we all started laughing.  It was my favorite ogling moment of the trip.

Another time, at the Wuhou Shrine, a boy, about 11-years-old or so, was staring at me.  He nervously approached me and said, “Hello.”  I asked him if he spoke English.  “A little,” he said; he was learning in school.  I wanted to try out my Chinese on someone easy, so I said, “Hen gaoxing tsien dao ni” (pleased to meet you).  He stared at me blankly.  I tried again.  Nothing.  I tried out the tones Li Qin had taught me:  “Hen(down-up sound); gao(high tone); xing(downward tone)….”  Still nothing.  Finally Rachel stepped in and said EXACTLY WHAT I HAD SAID!! Or at least it sounded the same to me.  A look of recognition came over his face and he said something in Chinese–then he went running back to his parents who looked pretty proud at their son’s English skills and bravery.  I would have been proud too.

While Chinese women looked at me on the street, few ever smiled, and I’m pretty confident I was just getting the “exotic foreigner look.”  I did get legitimately hit on in the Beijing airport though!  Woohoo!  I was buying a Kashmir scarf for Gemma (I know it is summertime–don’t judge me–she can wear it in the winter) and chatting with the saleswomen.  One of them took her finger and dragged it across the hair on my arm–I thought that was pretty brazen–not only for a woman in China, but anywhere!  She said something to the other woman in Chinese that I didn’t catch and then the other woman said, “shinga,” which happens to be one of the few words I know in Chinese–sexy.  I told them I knew that word.  They didn’t seem at all embarrassed, just smiled and handed me my change.

Last thing about men and women.  I was complaining to Rachel that I hadn’t had any good strong tea (see my earlier post on tea and coffee).  It was usually either just hot water, or hot water with a tiny little bit of bitter green tea, or if we were lucky, some light chrysanthemum tea or (at hot pot in Chongqing) a lovely light lemon-flavored tea.  But mostly just hot water.  I was trying to describe strong tea to Rachel, like strong black tea in England.  “Oh yes,” she knew what I was talking about.  “No, very few people drink that–only old men.”

Okay, at least I know where I fit into Chinese society.  Thanks Rachel.  Here’s the old man with Li Qin and Rachel at the Wuhou Shrine.

Nightlife on Jinli Street

Jinli Street is part of the Wuhou district, one of about nine districts in Chengdu.  It is right next to  the Temple of the Marquis Wuhou, (or 武侯祠 – Wǔ hóu cí – Wuhou Shrine, which is what my Chinese friends call it) where we were going the next morning.  Jinli Street has been around at least since the Qin Dynasty (221 BC – 206 BC), although it appears in most ways like a modern tourist destination, which is what it became when it was opened to the public in 2004.  You can still see a lot of the old art and architecture, ponds, parks, streams, and waterfalls, although it is layered over with shops, restaurants, and food stalls.

I’ve been trying to think about what places in my home it best approximates, but then I realized there really isn’t any one place that fits, and certainly not in DC.  In fact, if I start thinking more nationally and internationally I think I can come up with a better description.  It’s kind of like a mixture between Jerusalem’s Old City and Broadway Street in Nashville, but with a large dose of Chinese culture and history, and some nature.

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Jinli is a real tourist destination–for Chinese people.  I saw some Westerners, but mostly it is a cool place for Chinese people to taste and experience their culture and music mixed with Western culture and music in a way that goes beyond the mundane everyday mixing of English language t-shirts and public media.  It’s the one place where I saw Buddhist monk walking around as tourists–cell phones at the ready to capture the exotic.

Jinli has that Nashville thing where every little spot has really good music every night.  I saw this guy below at two different places on two different nights.  He played original folk music, finger picking and singing in English with no discernible accent.  The young woman in the picture from my last post was also playing both nights I was there.

Saturday night I let Li Qin and Rachel go to dinner without me and I went to check out the nightlife later.  I wandered around for a while, but I was feeling kind of uncertain, because I didn’t have many yuan, and I knew I’d have to leave the Jinli neighborhood to find a bank that would take my Western check card.  None of the bars in Jinli wanted anything to do with my foreign plastic.

I did have enough for a few beers though, so I wandered into this bar, mostly because I saw this guy and heard him singing old-time country music.

They gave me a table right by the stage, and beers were about 20 yuan, so I knew I could just sit there for a while and drink some beer.  The singer smiled at me when I walked in, so I felt comfortable chatting with him in-between his songs.  He had been in Chengdu for about five years, teaching English.  Since I’m so interested in the language, I asked him if he spoke Chinese.  “Nope,” he grinned.  “I’m not good with language.  Can’t speak a word.”  I asked him how he got by, and he gave me that big grin again and said, “I’ve got lots of bilingual friends”.

He sang a couple more tunes–mostly George Jones kind of stuff, and I asked him if he knew any Roger Miller.  Sure he did, what tune did I like.  I asked him to play “King of the Road,” and he did.  A few bars in, he saw me singing along, so he called me up to the stage.  I jumped up and started singing with him, taking the high harmony on the chorus.  Unbelievably, I didn’t think to take pictures or video, which is surprising, considering I’m an inveterate selfie-narcisisst.  Maybe I was just enjoying myself a little too much, or maybe it was because I was about 60 yuan-beers in.  It’s too bad; it was a pretty nice-sized crowd, and I thought we sounded pretty good.

He only had about one more song after that, and then this guy came on.  He did a Chinese opera act, which basically looked like a lot of very dramatic Kung-Fu in an elaborate costume.  The coolest thing was that I thought that mask was painted on his face, but at various points in the performance he pulled it off to show his face–so quickly you couldn’t see him doing it–and then just as quickly put it back on.

The final act was this guy below, who did that very Western thing of having all of the instrumentation sampled on his keyboard, with a drum machine, all simulating an entire band.  He was actually quite good; it sounded like he was playing all original songs, and thy sounded like American pop music, but he was singing everything in Chinese.

At a certain point, I ran out of yuan and decided to head out.  I got considerably lost on my way back to the hotel–it was one of those comical scenes where you keep passing the same place over and over again, realizing you’re going in circles, yet continuing to take the same turns.  Eventually I made it back, to rest up and get ready to go to the Wuhou shrine in the morning and then head back home to Chongqing