Independence Day

While most of us in California are familiar with El Dieciséis de Setiembre (Mexican Independence Day), most of us do not know--and formerly I was also part of this group--that Costa Rican Independence Day is on the fifteenth of September. However, I now count myself as having been one of its most enthusiastic celebrators. Lincoln School, wishing to instill patriotic spirit in all of its young children, declared an entire independence week of activities.

Guess who was put on the organizing committee for this week.

Ironically, in the group of seven organizers, three are gringas, and another three (with some overlap) are new teachers to Lincoln. You can guess how organized and gung-ho many of us felt about this. In the course of a week, we organized two assemblies, daily announcements, authentic music to be played fifteen minutes before school every day, and a lantern parade. One of my specific jobs was to teach my children some kind of poem about one of Costa Rica's national symbols. On the recommendation of the Spanish teacher I chose a poem about the yiguirro (with an umlaut over the u), the national bird. For those of you who don't know, the yiguirro is an ugly and ungainly type of brown robin. I let you judge the bird for yourself:
Anyways, I couldn't even say the word correctly, let alone lead the class in saying the poem. After my initial reading of it to the class, we had to have the discussion about the students not laughing at my accent because I don't laugh at theirs; we're all here to learn together, etc. etc. It was a very teachable moment. However, despite the language difficulties, my students not only learned the poem, but had it memorized for both assemblies. On assembly days, the students came in their "typico" outfits, and were really rather cute. Ask me to show you pictures when I come home; I'm not allowed to post them on the internet.

Luckily, we also had the actual 15th off from school. I celebrated by going to the local park and listening to some live music, before going downtown to San Jose in search of merrymaking. My housemate and I stumbled upon a parade, which mostly was made up of drum corps and flag-wavers with varying degrees of talent. However, I've always loved bands and drum corps, so I had a lot of fun. One of the best parts was seeing tons of kids wearing their typical outfits. It's neat seeing a custom that really is part of the local celebration, rather than something that's put on for tourists. But despite the fun, I think I'm pretty independenced out. I'm glad that I'll actually be able to get back to, oh yeah, TEACHING during these next few weeks.

This is a picture of my classroom all decked out to celebrate. The homeroom parents helped organize the collecting and putting up of the decorations. Sadly, most of the streamers fell down within the week...