The School System

     The Santo Tomas way of teaching their kids seems to absurd to me. On the days that the teachers actually show up, I'm not really positive what they do. (Keep in mind this is for high school aged girls). Tonight, during the girls' study hall, some of the older girls are doing exponentials in math. So as I sit down to help, the girls had their notebooks open, look at me like "I have no idea what to do." So I asked them where their book was. I'm then informed that they don't have one. They had examples worked out in their notebooks but when I asked them how the teacher got the answer, they said they didn't know. However, because of the language barrier, the conversation wasn't as smooth as it sounds. While I'm sitting there trying to remember how to solve for exponentials, they think I don't know what an exponential is, so I've got them explaining it to me over and over. I'm trying to tell them I know what it is, but I don't know how to find it because there are no notes, no book, no anything to show how to work the problems. So as you can imagine, the frustration is high between all of us and tension is slowly building. Finally, I just had to walk out because there was too much misunderstanding. (It was incredibly similar to my dad and I doing math homework when I was younger, only in two different languages).
     When I came back, Gaby had the answers but when I asked her how she got them, she informed me that she guessed by multiplying different numbers by themselves until she found the right one, because that's what her teacher taught her to do. I was completely shocked by this. These teachers aren't teaching these girls anything, they're just having them guess the answers. The teachers don't know the answers themselves. How are these girls supposed to advance if they don't know how to do anything. They're learning English but their homework is to spell out the letters of the alphabet (example: "G" is jee). The teachers can barely speak English themselves. So many things make more sense now, like why Peru is considered a third world country. The education system is little to nothing. For the kids that go to school, they barely get any instruction. These kids grow up to be the doctors, nurses, lawyers, etc in this country. It just seems to be a never ending cycle. When will it ever improve if they can't see what's wrong?