Kids these days

Seeing as I have only one more week left with the kiddies at Cor, I'm starting to look back a little on what we've done together. And I have to say, it's a little frustrating. I haven't really been able to do what I had originally set out as my goals for working with the kids - cooking healthy meals, tutoring English or other homework. They weren't kidding when they told us there wasn't a lot of structure.

Although, today I did get to spend some quality time with one of the boys, F, who seems to always be struggling with one thing or another. It became pretty clear today that although he knows how to write his letters, he has very little sense of what they mean or how they come together to form words. On top of that, he's used to some of the older kids just giving him the answers when he's struggling, so it was tough to convince him that he could do his work on his own. So we made a compromise - F had to come up with 10 words that start with the letter "L" and write them out; I wasn't going to just give him the words or tell him how to spell them, but what I did instead was to give him clues (in Spanish of course, as best I could) about a few words that started with "L" (Ex. What's something that you drink every day, it comes from a cow, and it's white? Ans: Leche) and then helped him sound them out to get the right spelling. Spanish is an incredibly easy language to spell because almost all sounds have their own corresponding letter (this is a simplification, but more or less true); and so I was really worried by how much trouble F was having spelling simple words like "lobo" or "leche" or "luna". He even forgot which letters they started with - and the assignment was words starting with "L"! Keep in mind that F is about 8 years old. The point where I realized that he really had no idea what he was writing was when we got to the second part of the assignment, where he had to write sentences with four of the words. Once again, F expected me to give him the spelling of every word in the sentence letter by letter. So we had another long drawn-out struggle for him to sound out the words - the hardest part for him seemed to be the consonants. As we were finishing up the last sentence, I got distracted by another kid and A, one of the older girls, came over and finished F's sentence for him. But I let it go, because F had been such a trooper throughout the rest of the exercise.

In a lot of ways, this experience with F underscored the conflicting feelings I have that I am simultaneously having no impact and a huge one. While giving F a clue for luchar (to struggle), I grabbed him in a bear hug and asked him how he was going to escape. He could barely stop giggling to figure out the answer and after I let go, he snuggled up under my arm for the rest of the exercise. Several times before, we've had trouble with F being very willful and not listening to adults, or lashing out at other kids for bothering him or taking his things. Lukas was told by one of the cuidadoras (worryingly, the one who always works with the kids on their homework) that Ese chico no sabe nada, "That boy [F] knows nothing" - and she said this to Lukas right in front of F and the other kids. It seems like a lot of the kids at Cor are falling through the cracks at school; many have had to repeat grades, some seem like they might have learning disabilities that have not been addressed. So maybe taking them to the park is doing more than it seems at first glance. I just wish I could stick around longer to find out.