Oaxaca School for B

The DSL Internet connection is down today  (i.e. Monday August 22^nd, 2011) so we’ll have to write this up in Word and post it to Blogger.com later…..




Braeden started school today at his new private school, Colegio Teizcali. Realize that a private school here is not as exclusive or elitist as in America. Now that isn’t to say it can’t be exclusive or elitist here; some very private private schools are available here (as pretty much everywhere). But based on the information we rec’d from our Oaxacan resources (e.g. friends here, Internet sources), putting your kid in a public school is mostly a waste of time. From what I understand this mainly has to do with the stranglehold the Mexican teachers’ union has on the education system. There are probably ample information/opinion resources on that topic but suffice to say that Mexican educators seem to have studied the American Teamster’s playbook from that union’s “tough guy” years and amplified it tenfold. The children are simply pawns/hostages in a political game which leads to many days of cancelled school and very poor education practices when school actually is in session.


We arrived at school around 7:30 to find the typical collection of first-day-of-school parents and children. A few non-natives such as us were mixed in amongst the mostly Mexican crowd. We wore our no-habo-Español-gringo smiles as the Spanish-speaking staff, parents and kids stirred about in something slightly passing as organized kid herding. We eventually understood that the kids were being checked in by grade and then divided into new students and previous students. Once the previous students were let through the interior door to the classrooms & schoolyard area, the new students remained in the atrium/lobby/foyer lined up alphabetically by grade. Then slowly from the interior courtyard/schoolyard the new students names were called out. As the courtyard was around the corner of the interior doorway, we couldn’t see what was going on in there yet could hear clapping as each new student and their parent(s) walked around the corner into the schoolyard. When our turn came we found ourselves walking down a “pathway” through the courtyard leading to the (concrete paved) athletics area (the slightly winding pathway created across the open courtyard by two rows of fresh-cut flowers acting as pathway borders). All the staff and the returning students, as well as the new parents and kids already called in, stood about clapping and smiling at as us we walked to join the other fourth grade parents and students in the designated area.


Once all the new students had joined the assembly, a few short speeches (en Español) were given. E.g. the school principal welcomed everybody and had a boy and girl model this year’s uniforms. Next the microphone was taking over by a young man wearing black jogging-suit pants and a black t-shirt imprinted with “No Pain No Gain” (in English). The morning calisthenic begin…first _slow_ and then _faster_. Once this was done we re-assembled in our grade groups and the kids were taken to their respective classrooms by their new teachers.


Afterwards we stood around talking with two parents we met: Jeff, a gringo lawyer from CA, and Humberto, a native. Since both are bilingual we asked them what the highlights of the morning’s speech were. “Nothing of importance” was Jeff’s response.


At 2:50 school was released and Meredith and I walked back down to school to fetch our son and his 20lbs…oops…~10Kg of school supplies. No lockers or cubbies, it seems. At the afternoon swarm we met Jeff’s wife Kim, as well as a different Kim, and another couple from CA – Mark and Natasha, as well as a Nina. Mark and Natasha and “different Kim” (tagged as “Kim #1” by Meredith) are all new to Tiezcali and Oaxaca. The other gringos in our new clique have been here for a year or more. Actually, Mark and Natasha’s family have been vacationing in Oaxaca for years, but, like us, have just moved down here to live here for a year. I’m worried we’ll congregate as English speakers and forego immersion time in Mexico. Especially since I detect a since of relief and interest in getting to know these fellow Americans who have either already learned the things we’re currently facing or are struggling with the same culture-shock concurrently.