Canadians Can Be Fun After All

I added some more pics! Now that my FTP is working again, I was able to add more pictures. The pictures are of some classroom shots, the antenna disaster, hanging out with Canadians and Guatemalans on the weekend and some other miscellaneous photos.

The students have finally learned the parts of the computer so this week I have begun an introduction to Windows XP Pro. I told the kids at the very beginning of the school year that there are no games on any of these computers (I deleted even the ones that came with Windows like Solitaire and Hearts.) One day a few weeks ago, we asked the older students to type-out everything that they had learned in the computer class in the past year. It was sad to see them write that they played computer games the whole time.

Most of the younger students have never moved a mouse before, so when I asked them to click on the start button, you would have thought I asked them to write and compile a program with Assembly. I looked around the room and saw only two of the ten computers that had a student successfully open the start menu. Some students couldn't move their mouse cursor over the button, others didn't distinguish the left and right mouse buttons and a properties menu kept popping out as they clicked the start button with the right mouse button. Some of the kids couldn't even click at all! Antonio and I finally got them all into Word Pad. We told them to write the names of their family and friends and change the color for every name. As they started typing away, I picked up a handful of candy and said, "The table the has the most names at the end will get candy." All the kids got really serious and started typing as fast as they could. It was hilarious to see their faces.

The older students are a little better at moving the mouse around, but they still need a whole lot of work. I started introducing all the items on the start menu, like "search," "run," and "all programs." We also got the older students to practice changing font faces, colors and sizes in Word Pad. We did this with all the classes and in between classes, I would go from computer to computer closing all the programs to prepare for the next class. When the last class came in, I was standing in the back of the lab and noticed a program open on one of the computers that was minimized. "I must have missed that one." I thought as I restored it to close it. Once it was restored, I noticed that it was actually the search program, and I wasn't sure because I closed it so quickly, but I thought I was currently running a search. We told all these kids to only open certain programs and told them that they were not allowed to open up other programs, so whoever opened the search program wasn't supposed to.

As the last class was typing away, I started walking to the back of the class kind of scanning the computer monitors as I walked. When I got to the back, this one kid acted like he was up to no good. Being suspicious, I looked closer at his monitor to see Word Pad. open with text on it like he was supposed to be doing, but when I looked down at the task bar I noticed another program that was open. I asked him, "What is this?" As I clicked on it to bring it up. I was surprised to see it was the search program once again. As I looked to the left, I noticed that it was doing an active search. "What on earth could this kid be searching for?" I thought as I looked for the search string. Then I saw it, "Searching for 'games' on drive C..." "WOW! This is one smart kid!" I thought to myself as I called for professor Antonio to help me tell this kid (in Spanish) not to open up other programs.

That's the kind of thing I have seen with these students -- they are really smart, but they just don't have the resources or teachers to encourage their genius. All I had said about the search program was that it would allow you to search for files on the computer -- I didn't show them how to open it and use it, but this kid found out how and started searching for games. Oh, and you should see some of the things these students are drawing in the Photoshop class! Many are very talented in art, and even with using a mouse, their drawings are very good. When I go back to the states I am going to buy some writing tablets for these computers so that these kids will be able to better express their artistic talent.

Once one group of students finally understood the idea of layers in Photoshop, they took the idea and ran with it. I gave the class time to play around in Photoshop to see what they could come up with, and these three kids drew a face and created a new layer to draw the eyes, then they moved the eyes-layer around to make it look like the face was looking around. I laughed at their manual-animation and walked away to assist another student. Soon, the three students called me back to them because they wanted to show me their new creation. They had drawn a fist the came up and hit the face and made his glasses fall off, the teeth fall out, and the nose start to bleed. These kids are super-creative and they are just now being given the chance for them to express it in computer graphics and programming.

After a long week of teaching, I like to go to Antigua to hang out with the friends I made there when I went to the Spanish school. This past weekend, I brought Ivan along with me to hang-out. Ivan is a good-looking single Guatemalan guy who does a whole lot of work and not too much play. In Antigua, there is a place called "La Sin Ventura" (without luck) which is basically a Salsa bar. We were standing just inside the door looking for people that we knew inside. As we were scanning the packed place, I was telling Ivan that it's not too often that a good-looking Guatemalan guy comes into this place and that women would be climbing over walls just to get to dance with him. He just laughs at me as if I was being sarcastic. A few minutes later, this table of Guatemalan women got Ivan's attention and motioned for him to come over to them. I started to smile as I realized that they were all wanting to dance with him.

As one girl got up to dance with Ivan, I remembered that he told me before that he couldn't dance. I thought maybe he was joking when he said that, but when he started dancing with this girl, I realized that he wasn't joking when he said that he couldn't dance. After a few minutes of stumbling around the dance floor, the girl gave up and sat down. Although, to do have to say that it looked like they were both having a blast together.

After staying Friday night in Antigua, (and yes Ivan, you DO snore, and yes, it IS loud,) we headed back to the city Saturday morning to hang-out with a Canadian team that came down here to work with Shalom. Ivan called one of his friends, Christian (who has a car!) and asked him to hang out with us. As we packed all 10 Canadians, Ivan, Christian, and me into two cars Guatemalan-style, we headed to the mall to hang out a bit and look around. One of the Canadians had a birthday the next day, so we decided that we would try and surprise her with a Guatemalan-celebration of a birthday which includes a piñata. The only problem was that we needed the car that didn't have the birthday girl in it to go buy a piñata so that she wouldn't know about it. The birthday girl was in my car, so the other car went "to run a few eranands for Ivan" while we went straight to the mall. After the mall, we went to a place called "4 Degrees North" to "experience the atmosphere." It was just a little plaza with some coffee shops and things in it. After eating some ice cream (that we waited for like, no joke, 45 minutes for) we headed back to the cars where someone in the group suggested that everyone should switch to the car that they hadn't been in yet. We all just went along with the suggestion, and when everyone got into the cars, someone in my car said, "Well that was stupid!" It was at that moment that everyone realized that the birthday girl was now in the car the had the piñata in the trunk.

Everyone in the car started laughing hysterically to the point of not breathing as everyone in the car in front of us was looking back at us wandering what was so funny having no clue that our big surprise plan was just made a whole lot harder to make a surprise. In the pictures if you scroll down about half way to the picture labeled, "The other car wondering..." That was the other car with everyone looking back at us wondering why we were laughing so hard. Directly under that picture is a shot of everyone in my car who was laughing so hard.

Anyways, to make a long story short, we were able to set up the piñata without the birthday girl knowing and we also had pizza, cake and a movie that night. It was quite fun! Who knew a bunch of Canadians could be so much fun? :p

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