Today we celebrated yet another holiday in school, El Dia de la Pau, or in English, the “School Day for Peace and Non-Violence.”. For almost the entire school day, we did different activities to commemorate Peace Day. I swear these children are never working.
For the last week and a half, the English teacher and I have been teaching the older kids (5th and 6th grades) an English song called “Whatever” (featured in the Coca Cola commercials) to sing for Peace Day. Although it is a great song, I wouldn’t necessarily have picked it out for the kids to sing because it contains a lot of lyrics and, even though most of the song is repetitive, it’s still difficult for children, or anyone for that matter, to learn an entire song in a language that they barely know. From the beginning, I didn’t think that it was the best idea to teach them this song, but I stayed optimistic like everyone else.
In order to make sure that the kids were able to get enough practice, we basically stopped teaching the unit in the book and devoted about 4 English classes to learning the song. I thought that it was a horrible idea to have the children skip English lessons for almost an entire two weeks just to learn a song, especially since the English teacher is constantly talking about how “behind” the children are on their lessons. Another reason why I thought that this was a bad idea was because: allowing children to do nothing but sing (in other words, play around) for four classes in a row never results in anything productive.
When we told the children about the song that they were going to sing for Peace Day, they were so excited; and they actually cooperated with us when we went over the meaning and pronunciation of the lyrics. By the time the 3rd and 4th class rolled around; however, they started thinking that English class was a time to play around so they talked uncontrollably, played and joked endlessly and they couldn’t sit still. I became so frustrated with their behavior; they were acting worse than the infantil classes. They were learning the song, but they didn’t really get to the point where they could sing without glancing down at the lyrics.
To make matters worse, on Thursday afternoon, two school days before they were set to perform, the other teacher thought that it would be a good idea to add choreography to the song. So the kids can barely sing the song and now they are faced with the daunting task of learning choreography? According to the other teacher, they were going to rehearse the choreography on Friday (which was my day off), so I was hoping that they would have it together by Monday.
When today came around the children showed me the dance and choreography (which none of them could remember) and, well, it was quite interesting. When the other teacher asked me what I thought about it, I said that they were barely singing the words and that they definitely weren’t in sync. But I told her that it was good (to keep from sounding like a total pessimist). She told me that she thought that it was good and that I was probably being critical because I was American and I knew English. “No one will know what they are saying anyway,” she said. Um… ok. We finished practicing and I hoped for the best.
In the middle of the morning, all of the classes gathered around outside for the first activity of the day. Each class had a series of peace-related words or phrases placed on paper flower petals. One at a time, a couple of representatives from each class went up to read the petals and place them around the center of the flower on the wall. This lasted for about 15 minutes.
Later during the day, right after the siesta time, the presentations were set to begin. First, the children in grades infantil-4th presented a song together. It was cute. Then, it was the 5th and 6th graders’ time to perform the “Whatever” song. To say the least, the performance was very interesting, it wasn’t bad, but the children were just a little confused about the choreography and they weren’t singing very loud. I started to try to videotape them, but I then put the camera down to try to help them with the singing and choreography. At the end of the day, people still enjoyed the performance, not because they were good, but because they are just kids. I’m just glad that it’s over.
After the presentations, two white doves were released into the air by one of the teachers. Following the dove releases, everyone went back inside to prepare for the “marathon.” This was the most interesting part of the day. All of the children and teachers had arrived to school today wearing sweatpants and tennis shoes. It was said that we were all going to participate in a “marathon” to benefit the Save the Children foundation. Each child had to bring in a Euro to participate, and the parents, who were also allowed to participate, had to donate 2 Euros.
We each wore a marathon sticker that we put on the front of our jackets. It was so funny to see the little children, the three and four-year-olds also come out of the classroom to participate. When the whistle blew, everyone started to run. I was running along with the other English teacher, but we did stop and walk along with one of the students who recently had surgery.
In case you are wondering what kind of marathon this was in which every single student, even the little tiny ones, participated in without even having a significant number of adults present, well it wasn’t really a marathon. It was more of like a 5 minute walk/run that took place in a closed-off section behind the school. When I saw the path that we all were going in, I couldn’t help but laugh. This is why everyone came to school wearing tennis shoes and dressed like they were going to run up a mountain? The “marathon” literally did take about 5 minutes to do, and when everyone finished the scene was so amusing. The children had crossed the finished line and immediately collapsed onto the ground huffing and puffing and begging for water. They were so dramatic, but so hilarious.
I really enjoyed the Dia de la Pau, I was very happy to see that the staff cared enough about celebrating peace to devote an entire school day to it (if that is why they did it). I am also very glad that we participated in a “marathon” for a great cause. It shows that the people here care about helping others, which is something that I’m passionate about. I’m sure that the children also enjoyed themselves.
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