Mexican Education Systems 103

I have had the opportunity to visit a couple of classrooms at a private bilingual school in Morelia. The staff of 50 at this primaria/secundaria has only 3 native English speakers: the English director is a 30-year Mexican resident from San Francisco, the 5th grade English teacher was born in Mexico but raised in Chicago from age 4 to 17, and the 6th grade English teacher is a native of central New Jersey who came to Morelia to visit friends 20 years ago and never left.

The English Director explained that nearly all of their 9th graders take the Preliminary English Exam (PET) every year, an English proficiency exam published by Cambridge University in England. With very few exceptions, they all pass; half score in the advanced range.

Naturally, I had to check out what they are doing. I observed the 5th and 6th grade English classes (taught by the teachers mentioned above), each consisting of 22-25 students. Teachers are required to use an ESL program (“Backpack” by Pearson Education) that has extensive speaking, reading, and writing components as well as teaching other subjects in English. Both teachers were continuing a writing lesson from the previous day and assessing oral conversation with pairs of students. I must say I witnessed some excellent teaching and took extensive notes.

I couldn’t help but compare these students to students of Mexican immigrants in Richmond. In general, the bilingual students in Morelia struggled with speaking English, but they understood academic English and were able to read and write almost as well as they could in their native language. In Richmond, students understand and speak conversational English, but they struggle with communicating at higher, more academic levels. (The large Latino community in Richmond is also somewhat isolated from the dominant society in the US, so their exposure to English, especially accademic English, is not as great as one might think despite the fact that most students were born and raised in California.) Richmond students also struggle with reading and writing in both languages.

Certainly, I’m comparing oranges and manzanas (apples). The students of the private school in Morelia are of middle class families whose parents are educated and have the resources to send their children to private schools. Most of the Mexican immigrant families in Richmond come from small rural communities with very few resources and have received little formal education.

But the point is this: after spending five or six years of 2 and a half hours of instruction in English mostly by teachers who are not native English speakers, Mexican students in the Morelia bilingual program read and write better in English and Spanish than students of Mexican immigrants in Richmond. It is worth investigating whether having a solid, continuous foundation in a primary language makes it easier to acquire a second language.

My observations are consistent with research (see A National Study of School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students' Long-Term Academic Achievement, by Thomas and Collier, 2002) that indicates that students in dual-immersion programs – which have biliteracy as their ultimate goal – have greater academic achievement than monolingual students and even students in other bilingual programs (such as transitional programs) by the end of high school. If this is the case, then one must wonder why schools in West Contra Costa USD (Richmond) are moving in the opposite direction.

Bringing the Mexican back into Mexican food

I haven’t paid enough homage to the food we’ve enjoyed here in Michoacan. Nothing we’ve tried here even closely resembles what you order in an authentic ”Mexican” restaurant in the United States. You can actually see the enchiladas that are not drowning in melted cheese, which you frequently find in Tex-Mex restaurants. I haven’t seen a burrito, and fajitas are only served in touristy restaurants.

So what kinds of gastronomic delicacies can one encounter in Michoacan? For starters, there is Tarascan Soup, a bean-based soup with a mild chile and strips of corn chips. Corundas and Uchepas, cousins of the tamale, are very popular in Michoacan. I’ve been told that the Gaspacho was founded in Morelia – diced pieces of fresh mango, papaya, watermelon, cucumber, and jicama mixed with powdered chile, salt, and salsa served in a cup. Other traditional Mexican dishes are very common here: posole, chicken in mole sauce, real tacos, menudo (don’t ask what it is, just enjoy it), arrachera, milanesa, tortas, and much, much more.


The Purepecha women in the pictures above are grinding corn and chiles to make atole - a hot, thick, flavored corn-based soup. Each pueblo in Michoacan has their own specialty of traditional Purepecha dishes, and these particular women were preparing their atole for the annual atole cook-off in Morelia each November. ¡Delicioso!

Mastering mental math in Mexico

At least once a week, I am shortchanged when buying something from the store. I’ve come up with three possible explanations:

1) Many people do not have enough math skills to calculate the total purchase amount without pencil and paper. Most everyone tries to do it mentally because they are busy, but not everyone can pull it off. Usually, the error is not in my favor, but there have been a few exceptions at restaurants in areas that are heavily visited by Mexican tourists, such as Caleta de Campos and the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary.


2) The sizes of the coins are similar. Sometimes, vendors give me a two-peso coin when they should have given me a five-peso coin. Interestingly enough, again, this mistake never occurs in my favor.


3) When paying with larger bills, such as those worth 200 or 500 pesos, a bill is usually forgotten. For example, if I buy 70 pesos worth of goods with a 200 bill, I am only given 30 pesos in change. Again, this mistake has never occurred in my favor.

The other explanation, which is more prevalent perhaps than I’d like to believe, is an attempt by Mexican vendors to informally and quietly redistribute wealth from its Northern neighbors, who are accustomed to computers counting their change for them instead of utilizing their own mental math faculties.

Sometimes, the “mistakes” are blatantly obvious. A couple of times, waiters have added items to our bill that we never ordered, clearly hoping that we wouldn’t review the bill before paying. While this is not a typical experience, it illustrates the point mentioned above.

My advice to you youngsters out there is to beef up on your mental math skills before you spend you money anywhere. And don’t take wooden nickels from strangers.

La multa or la mordida

Ah, yes – to pay the fine or the infamous “bite”, or mordida. Paying off officials and politicians, be it at the local, state, or federal levels, is as old as any custom in Mexico. Certainly, corruption exists in all political arenas in all countries, but here it is part of everyday life.

One type of mordida is the reactive one – when you get caught violating a law. A friend told me about the time a traffic cop motioned for him to pull over for not wearing a seatbelt. The officer presented two options:

A) He would confiscate my friend’s driver’s license, which he could pick up at the police station after paying the $700 peso fine. Or,

B) The officer could take care of everything for him right then for a lower fine. My friend would return to his car, get $400 pesos, hide it under his license, and bring it back to the officer.

Naturally, my friend chose the more economical and pain-free option.

Another type of mordida is the preventative one. I have another friend who owns a retail store that sells contraband goods, essentially material that was smuggled across the border to avoid paying import taxes. She pays $500 pesos to a local official every month to make sure that they don’t raid the store. It is a cost of doing business.

Everyone sees it as a win-win-win situation: the underpaid lower-level government workers get an extra boost, the violator gets off with a lesser “fine”, and neither of them care about the lost revenue to the government because the collected fines would have eventually gone into the politicians’ pockets anyway. So why not spread the wealth around?

To judge Mexican society on this ethical rationalization would be futile and impractical.
While the buck may get passed around physically, it certainly doesn’t stop at the top. Mexicans see government as an entity that, although it has plenty of money, doesn’t provide the services it promises because of corruption at the higher levels. Even if those at the top were able to kick their corruption habits, convincing the rest of Mexican society to do the same would be a generational effort.

Fringe benefits

The current Mexican president, Felipe Calderon, was sworn into office in December of 2006 after winning a controversial election. (Sound familiar?) As it turns out, Calderon is from Morelia and his mother lives only a few blocks from El Bosque, Morelia’s Central Park.

We took Jade and Marley to the park in El Bosque upon our arrival before Calderon’s inauguration. “Old school” would be the phrase to describe the playground equipment at the park – metal structures securely set in concrete slabs. Fun was much higher on the designers’ agenda than safety, to say the least. While we always had fun at the playground, Joyce and I breathed a sigh of relief every time Jade left unscathed.

In March or April, they closed down the playgrounds and surrounded the site with ten-foot walls of plywood. When it opened in May, the people of Morelia feasted their eyes upon a glorious, enormous, state-of-the-art playground including an exercise loop for adults. I’m sure that the city of Morelia will happen upon other public works projects that will be funded at the federal level. Living in the birth place of the current president over the next six years will have its benefits.

Fear not the “tacos al pastor”

There is a little taqueria in town that sells great tacos. (Not the Taco Bell kind, but the real kind – sliced beef with corn tortillas.) For a couple of weeks, we stared at this inverted cone of meat when we walked in the restaurant, afraid to give it a try. When we finally we gave it a shot, we loved it, and haven’t ordered anything else since.

Tacos al pastor are tacos with thinly sliced pieces of pork, which has been marinated, cooked, stacked and skewered in a cone shape. They garnish them with diced onions and cilantro, and add a slice of pineapple that sits on top of the cone. At 2 pesos (20¢) each, you can eat as many as you please. And we do.

Rules of the Road 2

Driving has an organic character in Mexico, even in cities. Where there are usually two lanes of traffic, a third will emerge if necessary as if the drivers spontaneously made the decision by consensus. It seems as if each driver knows the exact timing of the stoplights, knows the precise measurements of their perspective vehicle, and maneuvers daringly, yet confidently, between traffic. Once or twice, I could have sworn I saw wisps of dust being blown off the sides of a vehicle as it passed another, clearing it by no more than a couple of centimeters.

The horn, of course, qualifies as a Mexican instrument. If you happen to be daydreaming at a stoplight or waiting for some one to parallel park, folks will impatiently express their displeasure with the delay. As if playing a song, they will toot in unison or simply lay on the horn. And not just to get your attention, but until things start moving. Apparently, “Mexican time” doesn’t apply to driving.