Honduran Schools....blaaaah

One of the problems that Honduras has, this isn’t just me being judgmental, I’m pretty sure everyone in here can agree, is that the educational structure is flawed. Besides the normal understaffed, under budget, and too big of class sizes there lies a number of other problems. One of the things that frustrates me and the other volunteers is the teaching style that is far too common here, it’s like teaching to the test but worse, they teach straight out of a book and have the students copy and memorize, word for word answers, leaving no room for creative thinking, reasoning, or logical thinking. One of our goals when teaching in the schools is to get them participating and thinking, anything to break the monotony of the learning style that they are so used to, it’s not easy to do this because they don’t like participating because they aren’t used to it, but it is cool seeing them become more comfortable with it. The other major problem with the school systems is the ridiculous amount of political power that the teachers have in this country. They strike over any and everything and they can get away with it with no problem, during August they taught 2 days, the rest of the month they were on strike, although their cause was justified, not getting paid, the amount of damage that they inflicted on the students was tremendous. There are already a ridiculous amount of holidays here that they get the day off for, with this 3 ½ week strike it just added to the problem. This long of a strike isn’t unusual either, something to this magnitude happens almost every year, because of this many school teachers, because they have the money, send their kids to private schools so they don’t have to suffer from the teachers actions. The students do however learn during this last strike, and not in a good way, after the strike was over many areas had a student strike that lasted a couple of days where the students just didn’t show up in a show of solidarity…horrible. This is also really frustrating when a lot of our work involves schools and students, pretty much this is a big problem with no solution in site and I am just complaining…oh well, we do what we can.