In this article I am going to share with you how was my school in Guatemala, Nuevo Eden and my school in Baltimore.
In my school in Guatemala, the classes were between 7 am to 12 pm. The school was about 5 minutes away, so I preferred to walk. My two friends who lived a little further away would pick me up, and we would walk together, and they would always wait for me at the exit to walk back together.
If you want to go to high school in Guatemala, you have to pay while in elementary/middle is for free. In Baltimore, you do not have to pay to go to school.
My school there was small, it only had 12 classrooms, and there weren’t many children. Every year they changed teachers, and they changed the classes. There was only one teacher per class who taught all the subjects. Here in Baltimore, each course has its teacher, and I have about six teachers. It’s fun spending time with different teachers because that way you don’t get so bored.
In Guatemala, I had about 12 classes, and here only 5. I am learning a little about each thing. The classes are different than those in my country. For example, in my country, I did not take a science and art class. In Guatemala, they taught the history of other countries and gave us homework to investigate. But I didn’t learn much about the history of Guatemala. In one of my reading classes in Baltimore, I learned about Rigoberta Menchú, a feminist and human rights activist in Guatemala.
There were many English learners in the ESOL class, and they all spoke Spanish when I arrived. The teacher said things in English and Spanish to understand because we didn’t know anything. I did not take ESOL classes in Guatemala. We didn’t have English classes, but here in Baltimore, I do. In Guatemala, you learn English when you go to college, but not in school. In Baltimore, I think we were about 27 students from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Peru, Honduras, also students who spoke dialect did not speak Spanish and not English either. The ESOL class lasted an hour and a half and was every day. When I got to ESOL class, I didn’t know how to say anything, just ‘hello’, and now I am learning a lot.
Breaks are at noon here and there at 10 am. In Guatemala, you can have more fun because you can get out of school, outside. Here at school, they don’t let you go out because some boys run away from school, but that didn’t happen in Guatemala. It was fun there because there was a field, and we could play soccer, run, play ‘catch’ (if you got the ball, you are eliminated), and ‘break the chain.’ It may also be that I found it more fun because when I was there, I was smaller.
In the breaks here, we tell jokes, and we sit at a table to play with an app called truth or dare. The app throws questions (truth) and challenges. The app can be good for making new friends. One of the challenges is to talk to someone you don’t know or invite others to have a soda. They challenged me like that, and I made many more friends. I also asked other girls and boys to meet and chat.
Parqueología Migrante 