I'm eating candy as I write this

In my lovely class, Didactica de las Matematicas, I have an assigment. On Tuesday, I need to give a presentation, and example lesson for 1st, 2nd, or 3rd graders. It needs to involve some kind of game or concrete material to teach the content. A few weeks ago, we did an assigment that included finding about 15 examples of games and concetre materials for teaching, and we are supposed to choose one of  these that we found for our presentation on Tuesday.

One of the activites that I found is called Dulces en la Bolsa, which means "Candy in the Bag". This activity is about probability--each pair of students recieves a bag of candy and they have to pull one piece out at a time and record the color. After collecting data, they can draw conclusions about the probability of drawing a candy of a certain color.

I choose to use this game for my presentation for obvious reasons. This way, I get to buy lots of candy and eat it!! Yesterday morning I went to the grocery store, Tottus, and perused the candy aisle. I settled on two bags of candy: Frugele and Bon Ami. I have taste tested them, and they are very good. I also have set aside the candy that I need for Tuesday, and I had 110 pieces left over (now, there is considerably less than that), which is wonderful!

This morning, after going to church, seven of us went to a museum--Museo Santuarios Andinos. Here, we saw the frozen body of an Incan maiden, Juanita. Until recently, no one thought that the Incans practiced human sacrifice. However, in the past 20 years or so, many discoveries have been made about Incan practices. The Incans worshipped the volcanoes, and when the volcanoes erupted, they determined that their gods were angry, so they sacrificed children (11-14 years old) on the mountains. For these children and their families, it was an honor to chosen as a sacrifice. Since the mountains are snow covered, some of the bodies froze and were very well preserved, like Juanita. I think the guide said that 10 bodies of Incan sacrifices have been found by archeologists on the mountains.

The artifacts in the museum were fascinating--the children were burried with all kinds of pottery, metal, and even food. It would be easy to get lost amidst the artifacts and history and forget the personal aspect of the museum. A young girl was sacrificed on a mountain. It is a sobering realization. I think it's easy for us (at least for me), to initially feel disgusted and maybe disappointed at this practice of human sacrifice. It's tempting to think, "A life wasted... what a shame." But, I'm not completely sure that that is the correct response. I'm not sure what IS the correct response. But I'm thinking that this practice of sacrifice perhaps deserves a bit more respect than many people want to give it. It is easy to quickly judge it (indeed, it IS wrong to kill people--I'm not at all suggesting that we should begin this practice again!) without seeking at all to understand it. To be sacrificed was an honor, not a punishment. Juanita was sacrificed 500 years ago, before the gospel of Jesus Christ reached the Incan Empire. But even then, people had the idea that blood had to be shed to save the people. They thought that someone had to be sacrificed in order for the rest of the people to live. And they were on the right track with that idea. They just didn't know that that sacrifice had already been made, once and for all, on a different mountain.