Classroom Costa Rica

Costa Rica has one of the best public school education systems in Central America. Even though we didn’t get to go to a public school we did visit a private school called the Monteverde Friends School. It was a great school with lots of students. Almost all the students spoke fluent English. The reason was because in elementary school all students are required to take the class. All the teachers know English because a lot of them came from the U.S. to teach there.

Their school day is a little different than ours. School starts at 7:00 am. That means they probably have to get up really early, but the roosters help with that. The school goes from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Each classroom has two grades and about 15 students. Real young students come three days a week and the older students come each day. The classes that the students have to take consist of math, science, language, social studies, English, and Spanish. All the regular classes.

In private and public schools, students have to wear a uniform. At the Monteverde Friends School they wear dark blue jeans or a skirt (for the girls) and a white button down shirt. The kids looked uncomfortable when we were playing soccer, that was the first thing we did when we got to the school.

At first I thought that we were doing really well, but then the students started to make goal after goal after goal. We made one goal, they made about seven. Their field was challenging. There were ditches, bumps and sand spots. There were red ant hills in the field too. Because of the field the game was a lot more interesting, and because of the red ant hills we had to be very careful where we stepped.

When the game was over the students came up to us and almost everyone was talking to someone. It was cool to see us connecting with the students. It was also convenient that all the kids spoke English very well. I noticed that some kids had a gringo accent. I didn’t expect that at all. We did speak some Espanol around them, but only because the teachers wanted us to.

We performed our play that we had worked so hard on to get ready. Because the play is bilingual and the audience was bilingual it made it easier to perform. The audience laughed so much I think it inspired us to perform better than ever. I noticed everyone acting more and really getting into their parts. We worked hard on making the play appropriate for the age group we were trying to reach. By the end of the play I had seen some of the kids laugh, look angry, and look sad. So I think they liked the play, a lot, and they understood the problem at hand and what we were trying to say.

It was a great experience for us to meet the kids at the Monteverde Friends School and to share our ideas through our play.

-Alex

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