Bronx River Education

Bronx Riverite goes Bolivian

While the Bronx is always an awesome ( in the Keatsian meaning) experience, getting out to see other parts is good too. Please peruse Banana Kelly teacher Carly Reiter’s little note about a small piece of her recent trip. DG

This trip to Bolivia was a bit of a whim. One day I was reading a travel article about the place and the next I was pulling an all-nighter to write a proposal for a teacher/travel grant I had heard of. Since I hadn´t really expected to win the $5000, I went a little crazy dreaming up the most outrageous trip I could think of. My wanderlust was in full gear that night. And admittedly, roaming around Bolivia in search of flamingos in the high desert and anacondas in an Amazonian sewer doesn´t sound nearly as daunting at 3am as it does after a good night sleep.

Someone once told me that if the prospect of a trip scares the shit out of you, it´s a sure sign that you should break out of you daily routine and go travelling.

Well, I´ve definitely gone travelling.

The first part of this adventure was set way up high on the Bolivian Altiplano. Altiplano in this case means extremely high altitude desert - and it has proven to be both. For the past few weeks I´ve been surviving at 4000 - 5000 m (that´s 13,000 to 18,000 ft) and have yet to see even one cloud in the sky, yet alone a single green plant. It´s crazy surviving on such little oxygen. And to add to that craziness, it´s winter here in the southern hemisphere. Temps can reach -4 below (Farenheight) at night - without windchill.

What attracted to me to this harsh place was a rare species of flamingo that survive in extremely salty, extremely cold, and extremely remote lakes way out in the middle of the altiplano. I wanted to see those flamingos for myself - and I wanted to test the water just as my students do back in the Bronx. My hope is that my students can figure out how those flamingos can survive in such harsh conditions.

I decided to spend a bunch of my grant money hiring an old Toyota Landcruiser, a driver/guide, and a cook. That sounds much more luxurious than it really was, but proved to be the only safe (and sane) way to find those flamingos. So, as we left the tiny town of Tupiza on that very first day, we were 6 piled into that LandCruiser. On the roof of the jeep was all of our gear, plus an enormous mound of food, water, extra gas, and spare tires that I didn´t think we could possibly use during the 6 day trip. It turns out that we used every drop of liquid on that roof, and those spare tires.

I really had any idea what we were in store for. It was as if we had landed on a different moon each day. The landscape was the most desolate - and harsh- as I have ever experienced. Vast and nearly empty, with no other people other than the occasional jeep full of similarly insane tourists and the odd llama herder or two. We did not see a green plant the entire time. And the only water we saw was in the lakes we were searching for. I take that back. We did stop at a couple of naturally-occuring volcanic hot springs, but those were not nearly warm enough for our frozen bodies.

Each day we ventured out in search of the next natural wonder. We drove through dry riverbeds and trackless volcanic sand dunes until we reached green, arsenic-filled lakes, ponds lines with naturally-occuring borax, wind-carved rock sculptures, thermal geysers, a 12,000 square kilometer perfectly flat salt flat, and one enormous, bright red lake filled with flamingos sifting silicon-encased algae cells out of the extremely salty (and extremely cold) water. Each night we found a ¨hotel¨ to stay in. Most were made of bricks made of either mud or cut straight from the salt flats. A few places had electricity for a couple of hours a night, but only one had working toilets or hot water. We went to bed by 8pm each night, cold, exhausted, with dust in our teeth, hair and up our noses, and with every piece of clothing we owned on.

I´m sure I make it sound like a miserable experience, but actually it was one of the most incredible trips I have ever had. I also bonded with Benhamin and Esther, the two hard-working (and hilarious) Bolivians who made sure we made it out of that desert alive - with plenty of data to keep my students busy for months.

Benhamin the driver took his job very seriously, but also made us laugh whenever he could. He badly wanted to learn how to speak English, so we spent some of our downtime practicing basic phrases. His favorites were trash bag and caca del donkey (he preferred caca over poo). Every time we passed a llama or donkey he would yell out ¨caca del donkey/llama¨, which made everyone in the jeep laugh. In addition to learning English, Benhamin couldn´t get enough of my science experiments. As soon as he saw my little water testing kit, Benhamin wanted to test every piece of water we passed. He had never learned how to read, but he quickly became an expert at testing the salt, pH, temperature, nitrates, and turbidity (dirt) in the water. I took some really cool videos of Benhamin and I testing water from one end of the altiplano to the other. Benhamin especially liked to explain the results of each test into the camera, and when I told him that most of my students spoke Spanish, he spoke into the camera as if he was speaking directly to the kids back in NYC. The cool part was that by the end of the trip, some of the other guides had heard about the testing and were asking Benhamin for his opinion about the results. You could see the pride on his face every time this happened. And by the end of the trip, I had multiple guides asking me for the results in writing so they could use them with their clients. This gave me the idea to get my students to send their projects (in Spanish or English) to the guides. They absolutely loved this idea.

So, I can definitely say that Part 1 of this adventure was a huge success.

At this very moment I am on a flight back to La Paz, preferring to spend the $70 to fly rather than suffer through another cramped 15 hour busride. I´m planning on staying at the famed Chalalan ecolodge for a while (it´s a 5 hour canoe ride up a river just to get there - my kind of place!). I´m also planning on taking a tour of the wierd Pampas wetlands where, hopefully, I´ll get to see an Anaconda along with some other strange wildlife most people have never even heard of. Then I´m hoping to catch a ride on a cargo boat down the Rio Mamore to a little town I´ve heard of that has anacondas living in their open sewers. Once I´ve found those anacondas, I hope to find a ride on a another cargo boat down the Rio Mamore to the Brazilian border. Hopefully.

This email is already forever long, so I´ll leave you with some of the more interesting thoughts from the trip:

-The witches market in La Paz was very cool, yet creepy. The dried llama fetuses were particularly wierd. I later found out that it´s tradition for Bolivians to bury a llama fetus underneath their new house. For good luck, apparently.
-I got good at peeing in the moonshadow at creepy bus stations
-I only met two other Americans this entire time. Everyone else seems to be European - especially French.
-Bolivians would rather send you to the opposite part of town rather than say Ï don´t know¨
-Esther our cook spent much of the trip admiring my hips and thighs. Apparently, big hips and thighs are a sign of beauty in Bolivia. Who knew?

Until next time,

Carly

Add comment July 27th, 2008

Galapagos Bound

As a student, the situation appeared quite unfair. I always dreamed of giving the teacher a test and then enjoying marking all of the incorrect answers. As a teacher, I took no joy in the marking of tests or work that was incorrect. Even in a question as straightforward as, “ Four students share a cake equally. What Fraction does each student eat?” I gave credit to Krishad’s answer of “One fifth.” “Simple,” he told me, “They saved a piece just in case another person showed up.” Right and wrong answers can really be a question of perspective.

Last week I spent a day in Washington DC “grading” teachers’ papers with two others. Unfortunately there could be only four correct papers out of the fifty that I had to go over, and no matter what the perspective, that was all that could be right. We were one of eight panels choosing the next 30 teachers that will travel to the Galapagos Islands this November as a part of the Toyota International Teacher Program. There were a record 900 applications from all over the US from classroom teachers from 6^th to 12^th grade, and teachers of all subjects. It was our charge to decide who would “pass” on to the trip of a lifetime, and who would not. While I felt privileged to be asked to participate in the process, I did not relish the idea of giving what would turn out to be a failing grade to those who would not be visiting Las Islas Encantadas.

The process starts with the staff at iie perusing the entire application for completeness. Not following the basic rules of requirements and word counts, and submitting all the requested information. To be fair to all, the rules must be followed strictly. They then take a slightly closer look to see if anything is just outrageous such as “ I will bring back a Galapagos Tortoise and a Marine Iguana to use in a travelling presentation to bring to the fore the importance of conservation.” But the reviewers at this stage are fairly lenient, leaving most decisions of merit to panelists like myself.

At the panel stage, three people, usually including one teacher, somebody in an environmental field, and somebody from an international organization, are given 50 applications to read and rate. For this particular application, the four sections were: personal statement (why you should go), Impact statement( how you will use what you learn), a lesson plan( how you present environmental issues in a hands on manner in your classroom), and reference letters. The most heavily weighted parts were impact statements and lesson plans, but the personal narrative would often inform how you reviewed the other sections. It was not the writing itself that would make a story compelling, but the heart and relevance that the teacher portrayed. Impact statements had to cover students, school and community and be feasible. Lesson plans had to be hands-on, innovative, even if you admit getting the idea from somewhere else, and extendable into various disciplines. It also helped to write in the future perfect, leaving out the maybe’s and might’s.

Strange as it sounds for a trip to what people consider a science teacher’s dreamland, being a science teacher did not work in your favor. Toyota wants environmental education to be interdisciplinary and requires a diversity in subject matter taught by the teachers that are chosen. Almost sixty percent of the applicants taught science. When you consider that a high estimate would be fifteen science teachers, that means that the science teachers are vying for, at best, a one in forty spot. Teachers in any other discipline are up against the odds of one in twenty. I don’t gamble, not even on a one dollar lottery ticket, but my money would be on the teachers of other disciplines.

What it finally came down to was a fight for somebody that a panelist took on as cause. You said to yourself, “This person not only deserves this trip (All really did), but would be an asset to the other US teachers, the galapagueño teachers, the Toyota program, and their school and community.” Then we had to duke it out, give in a little and hope that others believed your arguments.

When all was said and done, we chose a stellar group to take advantage of the program, but had to let go an equal number that were on a par with them. Bittersweet is one way to describe it but the biggest discussion on the way out the door was the applications were all amazing. There were twenty people that I wanted to contact immediately to share ideas and use as resources. For privacy, however, all materials that I was given were destroyed on site, and I have to hope to find those people by happenstance at a later date.

So I got my wish: To grade teachers papers. Unfortunately I could not listen to the explanations as I could with Krishad. But, for those that were not chosen, there will be another round soon enough, and all that can, should apply.

DG

Add comment June 26th, 2008