GREENWICH — Jessica Maxán’s life slowed down when she traveled from Greenwich to Cusco, Peru, to immerse herself in Peruvian culture and visit a 400-year-old school over the summer.
People there moved at a leisurely pace compared to the clip she is used to in Connecticut. At meal time, food came out slowly, and in the public school, teachers played volleyball with their students.
The mountainous area was celebrating la virgen del Carmen, and students were charged with decorating shrines, ablaze with candles, in each room.
Maxán, a math teacher at Western Middle School, was one of two Greenwich Public School teachers who left U.S. borders to teach beyond the textbooks in their classrooms. She and Lindsey Eisenstein, a math teacher at Hamilton Avenue School who went to Australia and New Zealand, traveled through the Fund For Teachers, a grant program that has paid for teacher-designed professional development since 2001.
Stateside, the teachers are incorporating resources they found and the experiences they had while abroad in Peru, Australia and New Zealand to expand their students minds and make them more globally aware.
“In order to become a better Spanish teacher — you’re representing all Spanish-speaking countries when you’re teaching Spanish — I feel like I need to learn more about South America,” Maxán said.
Maxán, a native of Puerto Rico, can pull from the entire Spanish-speaking world for her classroom, but countries she has visited, including Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, Argentina and Spain, and the Dominican, Cuban and Puerto Rican cultures she grew up with, have more representation.
The Spanish language and cultures that students learn depend on the regional version of the language that the instructor speaks and the cultures that the instructor has encountered, so Maxán travels as much as she can. She decided she could do more to include Peruvian language and culture in her classroom, so she applied for and received a grant to travel to there.
In the capital of Lima, she discovered troves of literature from a landmark library called “La Casa de la Literatura,” a destination for teachers. She took a dancing class, tried ceviche and arroz chaufa, and watched a soccer game versus Chile in a park.
Maxán saw the largest sand dunes in South America in Huacachina, and diverse marine life in a wildlife reserve in Paracas. While in Cusco, she toured a 400-year-old school that the Inca noble class attended in Colonial days, and hiked to the abandoned Inca citadel of Machu Picchu.
“I came back energized,” she said. “I came back feeling like I knew something more about my every day — teaching.”
Back in Greenwich, she plans to have her students prepare Peruvian dishes and learn dances, and she will present Peruvian literature to her colleagues so they can incorporate those books into their classes.
Eisenstein also went south of the equator, traveling to Australia and New Zealand to observe teachers who give math lessons that are student-centered, rather than teacher-directed. The goal is to make the material relevant to the students’ interests, dreams and backgrounds.
“We’re changing as a district,” she said. “We’re working on more student-centered learning, and even more so at Hamilton Avenue.”
Eisenstein has gone abroad before to hone her craft, visiting schools in Dubai, Bahrain, Jordan and Morocco before heading to Australia and New Zealand this past summer. While Down Under, she crossed off her 60th country that she has traveled to, and her sixth country for professional development.
Most teachers today learned from teachers who stood at the front of a room and lectured, Eisenstein said.
But brain research shows this method is less effective than finding out the ideas, facts and subjects students already know and presenting the material in a way that allows them to make connections on their own, she said. When teachers do this, students are more likely to remember the new material, she said.
In addition, “the kids find (this method of learning) more interesting, and they’re more engaged,” Eisenstein said.
Stateside, Eisenstein is asking her kids to calculate the area of Uluru, or Ayers Rock, the iconic sandstone rock formation in Australia. She is also incorporating games and activities she discovered while abroad to make math — which still requires rote memorization of facts — more interesting.
Eisenstein aims to make her students globally minded through math, whether students are calculating how much water levels are rising in Bangladesh or about the culture, climate and people of the Middle East.
She said she wants other Greenwich teachers to have the same opportunities she did, and to apply for a grant through the Fund For Teachers. The applications are due Jan 30.
The Fund For Teachers’ efforts to improve public-school education in Connecticut are in part made possible through contributions by Barbara Dalio, a Greenwich resident and wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, through the Dalio Philanthropies.
jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.com
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