MACHI Classes and Activities

I can't believe it's been more than a month since I last posted! I'm not a very good blogger - but I have a lot to say now so I'll be posting more frequently. September was not the most optimistic of months for me, so that's my excuse!

Well, I thought I would write an update on the work that I've been doing. Like I said, September was a bit of a downer for me - I was homesick and trying to figure out how to really make this program work. With few resources (supplies, etc.) and budget confusions (transportation here is incredibly expensive) we've had to be very creative with our teaching ideas. Anyways, I'll describe the classes first and then put up fun pictures of a few of my favorite sessions.

This summer we took a survey in the villages to see what parents wanted their kids to learn about the ancient Maya. After compiling all that information we came up with seven topics: General Culture, Food and Farming, Household Knowledge, the Calendar and Cosmology, Entertainment and Writing, Rulers and Kingdoms, and Architecture and Cities. The most responses we got were general culture and food, while the last couple were added by us (originally we had eight topics but due to budget constraints we had to incorporate one [Warfare and the Ballgame] into the others). We're doing each topic in eight communities, which means two trips a week, two schools per trip. It's going very well, except that the schedule is constantly being re-worked. Some teachers forget we're coming (despite our best efforts to confirm and re-confirm), others seem to not care when we show up, while others want a full, written schedule through December. It used to stress me out, but now I'm more used to "Belize time" and I try not to worry about it.

The idea is for the guy I'm training to deliver the lesson, which I've written and put together with the help of my field director who's in the states. This has been the most challenging part of this job, and I'm proud to say that's it's starting to pay off. He is way more active in his presentation, asking the students questions to get them involved, explaining the activities that we do and helping the students when they have questions. I don't know yet if he'll continue to do this on his own when I leave (I suspect not), but I'm also happy to say that the MACHI project in Toledo has been revived and they are going to continue it next fall!

So here's a day in the life of MACHI in Toledo:

We load up the truck with all our equipment first thing in the morning, which includes the tupperware supply box, the generator (if the school has no power), the laptop, the speaker, the projector, and whatever miscellaneous items we may need for the daily activity. The supply box has a cornucopia of things: cords (extension for the generator, normal for the speaker and projector), a sheet to project onto, string to hang the sheet on, tacks to hang the sheet up, chalk, crayons, markers, camera, postcards for prizes, various paper cutouts for cut and paste art projects, candy, bird feathers, antlers, food items (i'll explain later)......it's basically a mess after the last two months! It sounds like a lot, and it is, but it's amazing how you can have all this and still feel like it's hard to convey information! So we load the truck up, stop to get gas, and head on out to whichever village is first on the list. If we're late, I make sure I drive, because I drive much faster than my co-worker (who just got his license last month and is not as comfortable on the highway yet).

In a perfect world, we arrive at the school 15 minutes early to set up, but of course this is not always the case. I've found that even when we're 20 minutes early we still start late because the students aren't ready yet or something. Anyways, we try to make the classes as active as possible, teaching with a lecture and powerpoint presentation, but trying to get them involved by referencing earlier classes and asking them questions to get them to interact with us. Activities that get them to stand up and move around are always good, as are activities that are competitions - they LOVE to compete. The Food and Farming class was really fun, so I'll show you some pictures of those activities.

First, we showed pictures of different kinds of food, and asked the students if they thought the old Maya (as they're called here) ate them. For example, the old Maya did eat tamales, avocadoes, papaya, and annato (achiote), but they did not have pigs, rice, chickens, or tortillas (more or less - there's no archaeological evidence until the Postclassic (AD 1000-1500) for comals, which you use to make tortillas). They had to stand on either side of a chalk line, one side marked yes, the other no, and then stand on the side that they thought was the correct answer. I don't have any pictures of this (they must be on the project camera) but it was really fun!

After they learned more about food and how it was farmed in ancient times, we did another activity. This was one of my favorites - I modified the idea from a conservation website. We got different local plants and spices that the old Maya had and put them in little containers with holes poked on the top so you could smell them but not see what it was - we had cacao, allspice, copal (incense), chili pepper, and oregano. Then the students had to identify what they were smelling! We also had a "feeling" game -we had deer antlers, a turtle shell, turkey feathers, curacao feathers, a corn cob, cohune nuts, and achiote pods. I might be forgetting a few items, but that was the majority. We divided them into teams and had them compete to identify the most items correctly. I can't find pictures of the game, but here are the items they had to ID:

Items to smell

Items to feel

That was a fun one - it was a cheap (free, actually) and tangible way for the students to learn about history. Fantastic!

The next week we did Household Knowledge, with included weaving, pottery making, stone tool making (I was wishing my friend David was there to do a flint knapping demonstration!!), grind stone making, etc. Weaving seems to have been an incredibly important part of household and community economies in ancient times, so we spent some time discussing that. At the beginning we explained about different patterns and how they had religious and historical meanings, and even identified to which village the wearer belonged (which is still true in Chiapas). We passed out cutouts of different patterns and had the students find their "town" based on the weaving pattern they had. Then they had to guess what the pattern stood for (ancestors, frog, toad, vulture, Maya universe, flower).

Actually a pattern signifying the Maya universe

We showed a movie clip about modern Maya weaving, and showed how you can still see the same patterns on cloth woven by women in Chiapas as those worn by ancient women carved on stelae.

Modern cloth

Lady Xoc performing a bloodletting ritual - check out her dress!

The closing activity was to make their own ceramic bowls. I thought at first that this would be very difficult, but it actually wasn't. Good clay can be found along most rivers and streams in this area (no surprise really - Lubaantun was known for their ceramic whistles and figurines). The students loved it. It was also interesting what they chose to make. The boys mostly made knives, but also little pots and sansars (incense burners), while the girls also made sansars, pots, grinding stones, and little mortars and pestles.

Making pots in Santa Cruz

The young potters in Indian Creek

A grinding stone in Indian Creek

Sansar in Santa Cruz

The next week was the Calendar and Cosmology, which went really well. We've gotten good at integrating activites and movie clips into the lecture style of the presentation. For this one we had two movie clips - one about the calendar (which is kind of complicated) and one about cave archaeology (about ATM, the cave I blogged about earler). The Maya had four different calendars, but we didn't want to confuse them too much so we described the calendars and how precise they were - but the take-home message was that the ancient Maya were historians that were very concerned with keeping close track of time. Anyways, the cave clip was to illustrate the different areas that were sacred to the Maya.

The acitivity for this class was to make posters for their classroom. We divided them into groups, and passed out crayons, markers, and glitter glue (thank you Beth! She sent me supplies in a care package) to decorate posters that I had drawn. Now, I'm not much of an artist, but I had to give them something to work off of. The idea was to color different parts of the Maya universe, and paste pictures of the different gods that go in the different parts of the universe. So we had three posters: the Maya heavens (I drew a sun and moon and stars), the earth (a ceiba tree), and the underworld (a cave - by far the hardest for me to draw). Amazingly, the students understood what I drew and then added on to it:

Coloring the Maya Heavens

The ceiba tree (earth)

Decorating the cave (underworld)

My Mom was visiting for one of these presentations, and she thought it went very well! It was nice to have some outside perspective, because no one else has seen us do these presentations.
During this round of classes I also had a great idea to teach conservation. So obviously the focus has been on making history tangible, approachable, and fun with these classes - I've found this hard to translate into a conservation lesson. We've given them the information about conservation, defining it, having them respond to different scenarios about what constitutes conservation of sites and what is destruction. But it's hard to make that tangible; I want them to be able to see what happens when sites are destroyed, not just think abstractly about it.

My most recent solution is the Disappearing Pyramid. At the beginning of class, I draw a stepped pyramid (that looks like a temple) on the chalkboard, and write the topics we're going to talk about that day on each level. Then I explain that we know all of these things because buildings like this were preserved. As we talk about each topic during the course of the class, I go back to the board and erase that topic from the top of the pyramid. By the end of class there's no pyramid left. The students can actually see what happens when buildings are destroyed. At the end of class I draw another pyramid that's empty, and have them generate what they just learned because some sites have been conserved. We've done it a few times now and I think it's a great way to teach. It's also flexible and you can do it in a variety of ways. For example, I would love to actually build a 3D pyramid out of blocks and have things written on the blocks so the students can physically destroy/build the pyramid themselves. Or, it would be neat to build the pyramid out of boxes, and have a replica or drawing of an artifact in only some of the boxes. When the students open the box to see what they'll learn about next, some of them will be empty, illustrating how information is lost when we don't conserve sites.

Now we have two more topics left: Rulers and Kingdoms and Cities and Architecture. We only have a few weeks left and I'm sure they will fly by. I've been in Mexico for the last week, and my co-worker presented on Entertainment and Writing without me. I saw the last class on that topic, and it went really well! I was pleasantly surprised - I must be having some impact on him (you never can tell)! I'm also getting involved at a local alternative high school called Tumul K'in. It's an amazing place, and I'm helping with their Maya History class. I'm also trying to do a cultural heritage project with them as well. It's a unique place in that the students live there and help run the farm, and they have an emphasis on cultural heritage in their curriculum. I'll save that for a separate post, but it's some pretty exciting stuff.

Me teaching about the disappearing pyramid

Ceiba tree in Santa Elena

Another cave in San Antonio