So, the school that was arranged for me to do data collection in seems to be a bust in general. There’s Kaqchikel in use in the classrooms, but anecdotally they don’t seem to be in use during lessons. Not having permission to observe lessons themselves, I’m not entirely sure there’s any Kaqchikel content being taught. Any Kaqchikel use is certainly not in math lessons- one of the young girls I spoke to could only count to 5 in Kaqchikel.

Of course, I haven’t been able to collect any data yet at all, now going into my second week of data collection time. I’ve only had 4 consent forms signed and returned, and only 2 of those have answered phone calls regarding setting up appointments. I do (finally) have appointments set up for tomorrow and Wednesday afternoon. Gods willing those kids actually show up.

There does seem to be another problem with the school. It’s a Catholic school, taught by nuns. I didn’t arrange for this school, and it was the only one made available to me besides one that would be an hour’s bus trip away. There’s just something a little culturally OFF about a Catholic school purporting itself to do culturally sensitive bilingual education in a Latin American country that they assisted in the conquest of. The education here is probably slightly closer to the quality to that of the education in the public schools in the states that I’ll be comparing my data to, but without actual observations of the classrooms I just cannot be sure.

In any case, the data from the 2+ that I get here won’t be great and won’t be immediately comparable to data collected in Utah. It’ll be more like a case study… which would be okay if I actually had a more detailed questionnaire or any sort of approved plan for qualitative data collection.

This is great. Everything is fine.