Another meeting with Dominican Teachers

Yesterday afternoon we had another opportunity to meet with three Dominican teachers who are part of a program called Center for Excellence in Teacher Training. It is a professional development program funded by the US government. We're going to learn more about CETT next week. We had a wonderful question and answer session about curriculum, class size, special needs students, salaries, book resources, standardized testing, and funding. We found out the Dominican public schools have three sessions each day...morning, afternoon and evening (for students 15 or older) with each session being 4 hours. Students attend only one, but some teachers teacher more than one. We also learned that the grade level structure includes Inicial (ages 5-6), Basico (grades 1-8), and Medio (4 years of high school). Private schools start teaching children as young as 2 years old. It was such an interesting meeting and we were all very impressed with the professionalism and enthusiasm of the teachers. Teachers in the DR have very few resources and their pay is about $200 American dollars a month for one 4 hour session. Today we are visiting a private volunteer organization that attempts to help the street children in the DR. Should be very interesting and maybe a little sad. More soon...