Family shots

I´m not sure that we have mentioned Cristina much. Cristina is Susana´s younger sister. I think she is 19. She is the last one still unmarried, and lives behind our house with Mamita and Papito (Susana´s mom and dad). She is around the house a lot, helping with homework, chatting up Susana, or playing with the kids. Bentz and the girls love her, and are always happy when she comes around. This photo is particularly noteworthy because Cristina rarely dons the anaco (traditional dress), except for Sunday when she goes to church with the family. This photo doesn´t really do her personality justice, as she is (except for maybe Papito) one of the happiest, smilingest people we have ever met. I think that someone back in time told everyone to pose for photos as if they were mugshots, cause you can rarely get the adults to smile.


















Monica and Ruth had birthdays a couple of days apart, so Amy baked a cake. She is definitely making use of the oven that we bought before Thanksgiving. It was chocolate, and thoroughly good.


















This is quite likely the most common thing to see at our house: Monica hard at work doing her homework. I swear she does at least 3-4 hours of homework a night. The sad thing is that most of it is busy work, drawing maps to scale, making intricate diagrams of the eyeball out of styrofoam, etc. It would be cool to do this occasionally, but we are talking every night. And the presentation is worth just as much or more as the substance of the homework. In other words, if the handwriting or lines or shapes aren´t perfect, the score is docked just as much as if they labeled it completely wrong. It would be interesting to write about the differences in education that we have seen among the US, Hong Kong and Ecuador. In reality, I think that Amy and I think that a mix of US and Asian style education would be best.

Here, I think that much emphasis is placed on form over substance. For example, Jorie had to copy or write a poem and draw a picture for valentines day. She found a spanish poem on the internet and then took a long time to draw a very cool (and very well drawn) picture that related to the poem. Her teacher sent it back home with her, and told her to redo the whole thing because she had drawn the picture around the printed out poem, rather than handwrite the poem (the poem was only around 20 words). She had also written her name on the front rather than on the back.  Audrey nearly comes to tears every day because her teacher sends her home with handwriting homework. She usually is sent home to redo it the next day because the letters weren´t written correctly. Who knows, maybe we´ll have a calligrapher on our hands after this...