Searching for Sunshine

This will make a lot more sense by the end of the blog, but let’s just say that this is the result of our classroom recess game Monster.  This student decided his monster would be a flying spider bat. Don’t worry, I asked this young man if the spider bat was eating me in the picture and he said no, not right now.  Apparently he is putting me in a web to eat later.  I guess teachers are a bit tough for bat spider bats and need some curing time.

Searching for sunshine is something I am trying to be more conscious of doing right now.   It is easy to fall into the trap of being overwhelmed by life, so I am trying to find things big and small that bring a little joy into my life.  Here are just a few.

Even though we are already into the second half of the school year, I still feel like I am just getting to know my students.  My bidet drinker from last year and I were best friends by October.  We are fast approaching February and I am just starting to have that same sort of relationship with some of my students right now.

That has not kept a few bits of sunshine from creeping into my classroom.  One in particular happened last week when my class was taking a standardized test on iPads.  I know, don’t get me started, standardized testing in kindergarten, but it is what it is.  The math test had 45 questions and it took my students between 15 and 45 minutes to complete.  And let’s just put it out there that 15 minutes is just a few minutes shy of the sweet spot for processing time needed to answer 45 questions accurately, so again, don’t ask.

Sorry, standardized testing is NOT the happy moment I was referencing.  That moment was provided by a young man who soon after the test began, started yelling, “I got the high score!” every time he answered a question.  And no, there is nothing that tells the students whether or not they answered a question correctly.  They just choose their answer and hit submit.  So, I was more than a bit confused, but also just happy that he was answering questions, so I let it go on.  Well, every time he yelled it, he got more and more excited, and then he started trying to tell me and all the kids around him about his amazing progress.  I won’t say that I had the most sterile testing environment, but in an attempt to keep the playground level shouting to a minimum, I decided to investigate.  Of course I start by congratulating him on his latest high score and then I settle in over his shoulder to find out what is going on.  It turns out that the high score he was seeing was the question counter.  Every time he answered a question, he would see the number of the next question in the bottom right hand corner.  In his mind, every time he hit submit, he got a new high score.  My first thought was “well, at least he is counting bigger numbers”. My second thought was, “what now?”.  Ok yes, I should have explained the question counter and how it wasn’t actually showing him his score, but I went with “when you get to 45, you win the whole game”.  Don’t judge, he finished his test.

Going out to recess is another highlight and something I do each day the weeks we are on campus, and for me it is one of my favorite parts of the day.  I love the fresh air, the exercise, and the laughter, and sometimes I let my class come out too.  I say that tongue in cheek because for kindergarten kids recess can swing in a heartbeat from a mob of pure unadulterated freedom, joy and chaos to a long line of kids needing bandaids, refereeing, and reteaching.  So my strategy here in Brazil has been to see how many kids I can get engaged in something so that I have fewer problems and more fun.  Playing Mister Adam versus the world on the soccer field is always a hit.  Pretending to eat the toes of the kids on the swings is always good for a laugh, but nothing seems to work quite like playing Monster, which like all good games, just kind of happened.  Because half of my kids seem to live in a fantasy world all day, I spend a lot of recess wandering around and trying to figure out what each little group of kids is doing.  So it was not a surprise to find myself talking with one kid who was explaining to me the intricate process of his transformation into a monster.  The surprise came when he asked me if I was a monster too. I of course told him that all teachers are either monsters or aliens, at which point he ran away screaming that Mister Adam was a monster, and well, game on.  And I don’t know the last time you actually tried to chase and catch twenty five year olds on their own turf, but it’s not easy.  Occasionally they will pack up like a school of sardines, but typically they know to spread out and can even work like a pack of velociraptors to distract you from the weak.  Luckily, even my pitiful pandemic fitness affords me more endurance than my five year olds, so I can wear them down, but it’s close.  Thankfully,  I have yet to knock myself out by catching my head on the top of the door frame of the plastic castle, and I only got stuck momentarily in the tube slide.  That was actually lucky because they lost track of me and I’m pretty sure there were a few skipped heartbeats when I popped out the bottom of the slide in the middle of a group of girls roaring like a good monster should.  And so far, Monster is 100% problem free.  They are so tired by the end of recess they are begging for a break.  Now if I could just follow recess up with a nap myself.  I need to wrap this blog up because I have to finalize the Monster’s Assistant schedule for next week.  I may not have math planned, but I darn well better know who is helping me be a monster on Monday morning.

And  if it is still hard for you to really imagine what it is like to teach kindergarten, at least the way I do it, I am including a link here to a video that pretty much summarizes my daily existence.  It is catchy, confusing, weird, funny, and will possibly never leave your head.  It is the current favorite brain break of my class.  I give you, The Cat Party.  Two minutes and twenty two seconds inside the mind of a five year old, and possibly their teacher.

Be safe, be healthy, be well.

Love from Brazil,

Adam

Feliz Ano Novo

 What other professions besides teaching are there where missing work takes more time and effort than going to work sick?  Has anyone ever gone to the doctor and had a sub?  Can you imagine a doctor leaving detailed histories, medical notes and treatment plans for all of the patients that their sub will be seeing when they are out sick?  Maybe some do.  I just get the phone call asking me to reschedule.  And clearly for those of you who know my wife and I, you know that I am talking about her.  She woke up this Sunday morning not feeling great, decided that it is smarter to stay home for a day to make sure it isn’t anything serious, and has worked most of today just so she can be sick tomorrow.  And right now thankfully she is just teacher sick, which usually means an extra cup of coffee, a long day at work, and an early bedtime, but with Covid, she has to stay home.  We are on campus this week, and everyone has to fill out a questionnaire on an app every morning asking if we have had any symptoms in the last 24 hours, and she would get the big red stop sign if she tried.  And it makes sense.  We got back from traveling to northern Brazil seven days ago, which puts us in the incubation window.  We are 99% it is just another case of Ghost Covid, where every cough makes you wonder, but it’s not worth risking.

It is 2021 now, and as much as I was hoping it would bring changes for the positive, that does not yet seem to be the case.  Covid is rising again here in Brazil.  It is not on the level that it is in the US, but there is really nothing keeping it from going that way.  The first person was vaccinated in Brazil today, and while we are way down on the list of people to receive it ourselves, at least that process has started.  Like so many folks, we find that Covid is still step number one in everything we do, from grocery shopping to getting on an airplane.  It is sad how normal it has become to begin all discussions with can we do this safely?  Or at minimum, can we do it at a level of risk we are comfortable taking?

And it still remains weird to share anything happy during all of this, especially with the amount of suffering that is happening right now all around the world.  We have always lived a very fortunate life compared to so many, and that divide only seems to be increasing the longer the pandemic lasts.  We try to give back in our own small way, but it definitely feels like a drop in an ever expanding bucket right now.  That is my disclaimer in an attempt to assuage my guilt before sharing our latest adventures.

We have been back from our big holiday break for one week, and as much exploring and enjoying as we did, one of the hardest things has been not being able to share Brazil with as many folks as we had hoped we could.  Every place we go seems to connect in our minds to friends and family back home.  “So and so would love this.  This would be the best place to come with so and so.”  And there have been a lot of places and a lot of so and sos. Fingers crossed that maybe we will be able to show some folks around in June or July before we leave, but we will be sad to keep Brazil all to ourselves if that doesn’t happen.

And we feel so lucky that Brazil is open, because as sad as we have been not to be able to explore the rest of South America, Brazil is an incredible country all on its own.  We started this vacation by taking a quick four day trip to our most touristy destination yet, Foz do Iguazu, which is an incredible waterfall in the southern part of Brazil on the border with Argentina.  It is kind of like a combination of Niagara Falls and Victoria Falls, and well worth the hype.  One bonus of the pandemic is that there were only about 10% of the normal amount of people there, so it did not feel crowded like it can.  Imagine Yellowstone with 10% of the regular amount of people.  And we stayed at a hotel with a water park, which is still kid heaven for Hannah and Lila, especially since it was virtually empty which means you could go down the slide as many times are you were willing to climb the stairs.  We also got to visit a conservation and education organization who is working to preserve the Atlantic Rainforest, which means we got to see up close some of the amazing species of birds, like macaws and toucans, that we have been loving seeing on our journeys.

We then turned right around and went back to Chapada dos Veiadeiros, our local national park, to spend time with friends hiking and exploring more of the waterfalls we have not seen yet. The running joke for most of our time here in Brazil is that Hannah has somehow developed the ability to affect the weather and cause rain to stop, no matter the forecast.  It began last Christmas when we went to the Amazon in the middle of the rainy season and the rain stopped the day we arrived and restarted the day we left.  It has continued in so many ways that it has become laughable.  One day, Sara and Lila went on a bike ride to one part of town, and Hannah and I went to another, and they got soaked in pouring rain and we got sprinkled on for two minutes.  When we were hiking on this trip, we would see rain clouds all around but somehow always end up in the clear spot.  As we were packing up on our day heading back to Brasilia, it rained so hard streets were flooding and we could barely see out the windshield for a while, but then when the sun was back out for the hike we did on the way home.  

We spent the middle week and a half of our break back home in Brasilia.  Brasilia really has become home for us, and it was exactly where the girls wanted to be for Christmas.  We had a whirlwind four days of baking and decorating before Christmas Day.  Baking is no small feat down here.  The apartment ovens here are really not much bigger than a toaster oven, so the assembly line of Christmas cookies was a little slower than in the US.  Luckily, they were a dedicated team of bakers and I supported by washing dishes and sampling the different varieties.

We ended our break by spending ten days up in Salvador, which included some new stops and a return to Surf Camp.  When we made the decision to come to Brazil, we made the girls a deal that they could each choose one of our vacations while we are down here.  After last Thanksgiving up in Salvador at Bahia Surf Camp, that decision was made.  So, we found ourselves spending our last chunk of vacation back on the beach for round two of learning to surf.  We did add on a couple of days in the city of Salvador itself, which is full of amazing architecture, history, and people.  We also added a day on the end to go check out a sea turtle sanctuary, but we devoted a week to just the beach, swimming, surfing, eating, napping, and relaxing in a little slice of Bahian paradise.

And so we find ourselves in January of 2021, only five months from our adventure here coming to a close.  We are starting to have discussions and to make plans for when we return to the United States, and it is a little sad.  Like so many things, time has flown and stood still at the same time.  We have lots of adventures remaining before we leave, and with luck and some vaccinations, maybe some of you can come down and share them with us.

Be safe, be well, and be happy,

Beijos,

Adam