25 de junio 2010 - Sylvia Romero Contreras y Resplandor

Man!  Cajones isn't even on this sign!!

 The road to Cajones...

Today we ventured back out to Cajones to our community center, Resplandor, for a lecture and literacy demonstration given by Sylvia Romero Contreras.  She explained that Mexico is not an industrialized nation like the United States.  Public schools emerge from the industrialized nations as a way to train and prepare the masses for the working world.  Most of Mexico has not existed this way and their of educating their children has been more of an apprenticeship system in the rural areas with the more industrialized way of educating in the urban areas.  The curriculum for all children comes centrally from Mexico City.  This system is quite difficult as the necessities for education vary from setting to setting.  The type of education that a child in a Mazahua village requires is going to be quite different from the education necessary for a child in Guadalajara as the drive of each family is going to be starkly different.

Sylvia Romero Contreras lecturing to our group.

She also explained that there are not individualized parent/teacher meetings, they are held as large meetings usually under the guise of a family night with the children at the school.  Parents are humiliated and called out for their lack of participation or for their children's misbehavior.  Parents are also called to duty at the school where they may be required to do janitorial work or other duties around the school.  Teachers often reprimand parents for their children's performance in the class and hold the parents responsible for it.  For this reason parents will avoid these situations.

After Sylvia's very informative and interesting lecture, some children and their mothers attended a literacy workshop.  Sylvia gave a literacy pep talk to the mothers about reading to their children and techniques of how they can engage their children in the reading process by changing their voice or their body movement.  It was really exciting to see these mothers taking such interest in their child's literacy in an area that doesn't have a library or many books in the home.

Sylvia demonstrating acting out a story's characters.

A mother from Cajones looking at a book with her daughter.

Jesus and I...straight up G's!

Man...Mexico is H-E-R-MOSO!!

The view of the moonrise from Resplandor...ahhhhh....