Teaching II...

For those of you have wondered, including myself, how exactly I could put to use my History degree, rest assured The Long Way Home and Comalapa have provided me with a wonderful opportunity to do just that.
Myself and fellow History major and volunteer, Rosie, have begun teaching a history series at the Tecnico Maya school I have previously mentioned. I have been assigned to the sixth grade class, which allows me to cover some fairly serious and complex historical events and issues, although in quite a simplified manner. The sixth grade teacher at Tecnico Maya, a bright, dedicated and distressingly under-paid and under-trained young man named Carlos, has asked me to teach the students something about the history of the rest of Latin America, as the students have already been required to study a bit of Guatemala´s.
I therefore started with a lesson in the historical relationship between Latin America and the United States, as it is a sordid, yet extremely important relationship for both parties. I chose to begin with what Americans call the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the United States, acting upon the principles of the Monroe Doctrine, for the first time in its history broke out of its isolationist shell and participated in a war outside of its continental boundaries. However, south of the Mexico border this war, along with what we call the Mexican-American War are respectively known as La Guerra Hispano-Estadounidense(The Spanish-United States War) and La Intervencion Norteamericana(The Northamerican Intervention), as most Latin Americans take offense to the fact that those of us from the U.S. reserve the right to call ourselves "Americans" instead of using an equivalent english phrase for estadounidense(person from United States).
As for the class itself, I believe it was something interesting and new for both the sixth graders and their teacher, yet I think I tried to accomplish too much with it. I used the well-known song "Guantanamera", written by the famous cuban poet, writer and war of independence martyr, Jose Marti, in order to illustrate through pop-culture how the historical events of the Spanish-American War still have implications for the present day relationship between Cuba and the United States. For the result of the Spanish-American War was independence for Cuba, as Jose Marti had envisioned and fought for, but not on their own terms, as the 1901 Platt Amendment ceded Guantanamo Bay to the U.S. indefinitely.
As I said, I believe I overreached on my first history "lecture" to the sixth graders, but it certainly made an impact on Carlos, and the directora of the Tecnico Maya school. Both of them observed with fascination during my presentation, and asked many questions during and after. I will no doubt get better and more efficient in my history teaching method, but if nothing else hopefully the teachers will learn something from them that they can pass to class after class once I am gone. In development work, as in life, if you teach a man to fish or to teach a new subject more properly, that effort will always have a greater impact on a community than just feeding them fish or information could ever have over the long-term.
I was immediately reminded of this at the end of my class, when Carlos and the directora of the school came up to me to discuss my lesson further. The older woman at one point asked whether or not the manner in which Cuba gained its independence had any affect on the building of the canal by the U.S. later on in the 20th Century, obviously confusing Cuba with Panama. Without hesitation Carlos went back to the board and clarified for the directora the difference between Cuba and Panama, and again explained the historical implications of the U.S. possession of Guantanamo Bay, loosely likening it to the history of the Panama Canal.
This geographic and historical ignorance demonstrated by this directora of a developing nation´s school, like the similar histories of many Latin American nations in relation to the U.S., was not and is not unusual, and I think it is an interesting yet not surprising anecdote.