Friday, March 28, 2014

Even though we had to say goodbye to Di, today was a lot of fun for me at school.  On top of what we did for the first half of the lesson for the 9^th Graders as described in yesterday’s blog post, I got to finish the lesson.  So for the first half of the longer classes, we reviewed some of the things that caused the war such as Imperialism, Militarism, Nationalism, and the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  After that, the students were placed in their countries and given the chance to research and strategize before issuing a statement to the entire class.  Each country then had to stand and give a brief statement about what their country felt about the ultimatum that Austria-Hungary placed on Serbia and what they planned to do to keep the peace.  Afterwards, the students were given time to act as diplomats to come up with ways to keep the peace and prevent World War I.  They could form alliances with each other, negotiate territory, and offer bribes, but they were forced to follow through on their secret underlined instructions.  When the negotiating died down, I had each group return to their desks and we had a formal UN-style debate where only one person could speak at a time and they could ask questions of each other, offer their positions, and more-or-less debate.  The kids did brilliantly with this and they kept the debate moving forward.  I even think they learned a lot about the Crisis of July 1914.  I had the opportunity to film myself teaching today as part of a project with my portfolio for OSU.  It was neat to go back and watch the debates and see a lot of light-bulbs go off when different ideas clicked.  After school and after a meeting, McCall, Katie, and I caught a shuttle taxi to La Fortuna/Arenal Volcano.  I was pretty exhausted, so I attempted to catch a couple of Z’s during the trip, but the roads were pretty crazy for such a feat.  At just about sunset, we arrived in town.  It was actually pretty clear, so we had the chance to see most of the volcano as we got close to town.  We checked in to our Hostel (Backpackers Arenal) and got settled into our 8 person dorm-room style room (aka four bunk-beds in a medium sized room).  Dinner was calling our name, so we went into town and ate some gourmet style pizza at a place called the Lava Lamp (get it, Lava. Volcano. Tee-hee).  After our scrumptious dinner at the Lava Lamp, we explored a couple of the gift shops for souvenirs and then returned to the hostel.  We met some of our Dutch and Swiss roommates in the hostel room and enjoyed the things the hostel had to offer such as hammocks (me), a trampoline (McCall and Katie), pool, eating/sitting area with tables, and all kinds of fun stuff.  After a bit of hammock sitting, I retired to bed on account of it having been a long day and I was exhausted.