Teaching

[a post started on Friday]

I have finished my first full week of teaching. My teaching load includes two middle-school-age classes at the Colegio Técnico Agropecuario José Peralta, an agronomy-focused secondary school (it is surrounded by fruit trees and other crops, all cared for by the students), and daily English tutoring at home with my host father Alvino and a young man who does farm work with him, Querubín.

I’ve encountered several major challenges in teaching at the colegio. To understand the first—lack of time—it is useful to look at the school schedule:

From a glance, it’s clear that the system is a complicated one, but it’s not immediately evident exactly how complicated it is. Students have eight class periods of 40 minutes every day, except for Fridays, when the school day is shorter—only the first six periods take place, and they are each 35 minutes long (I didn’t find this out until today, when the director told me I wouldn’t be teaching my second class). Students go home for lunch every day when classes end at 1:05, but there is a 40-minute recess in the middle of the school day.

Having eight classes a day does not mean that the students study eight subjects. The youngest students in the school, those in the octavo año de educación básica (basically the equivalent of 6-7^th grade) study 11 subjects. The eldest students have a mind-boggling 14 separate classes.

Some core subjects like math and language get double periods—80 minutes total—but I have no such luck with my English classes. As a result, I have to hit the ground running in my classroom. I find myself fighting the clock every day; within the time period of each of my classes, there is no time to take roll, check homework answers, or spend a single minute unproductively.

Another challenge I’ve had to deal with creatively has been a lack of supplies, or more specifically, a lack of a copy machine. I can make single copies at the town government office, where there is computer connected to a printer, so I have learned to base activities around shared, tiny slips of paper, some copied, some handwritten. I can also write things on the whiteboard for the students to copy (they are all very good at copying from the board), but that takes up precious time.

Also on the supplies/logistics front, I’ve had to get used to the idea that the classroom is not my own. Each grade stays in its respective room, and each teacher comes to the students, bringing his/her own whiteboard markers and rules about going to the bathroom.

Finally, I’ve been challenged by the size of my classes (large). Between my two classes, I am teaching about sixty students. Classroom management is a necessary first priority, because unless I have students’ attention, there is no hope for them to understand my English instructions. I still have a lot of work to do on this front, but I think my students are slowly getting used to my style of doing things. One point I’d really like to work on is collaboration between students. There are always some students who understand the class activities better than others, and some who want to pull me aside to explain if there is a word or two they don’t understand. As far as I can tell, they’re not very used to asking each other for help when they are confused, which perhaps is understandable given the large classes and lecture-style teaching they are used to.

Despite the difficulties inherent to a short-term job at a small-town school, I’m enjoying teaching very much. With noveno curso, we have been working on prepositions of location—on, in, under, next to, in front of, behind, etc. We’ve done a few activities that involved drawing and describing objects in a room and locating objects in our classroom. I also introduced prepositions of direction; the students directed a blindfolded classmate through a maze of desks using “forwards,” “backwards,” “left,” and “right.” They will have an assignment for Wednesday that combines these topics: a set of instructions for finding a hidden object on the school campus.

[Some octavo students with name tags-- I'm trying desperately to learn lots of names quickly]

Octavo curso, a class of almost complete beginners, has been focusing on a few introductory questions (“How are you?” “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” and more), as well as the use of numbers.

I’ve been teaching similar things to Querubín and Alvino. It’s interesting to have two very different teaching situations. While I often have to fight for the interest of my colegio students, both Querubín and Alvino are extremely enthusiastic students, sometimes to a fault. They can happily spend 1.5-2 hours repeating phrases, working to perfect their pronunciation (the biggest challenge for both of them). Sometimes, they are so interested in learning English words that they treat me like a dictionary. They ask about interesting and often random-seeming words “¿Cómo se dice gora en ingles? ¿Cómo se dice intocable en ingles?”

One night last week, I walked through the user’s manual of a new chipping machine Alvino and Hermania use to chop up sugar cane for the animals. Alvino already understood essentially everything in it, but he wanted to be sure he wasn’t making any mistakes in his care of the machine.

After teaching during the day at the colegio and tutoring Alvino and Querubín at home, I am completely exhausted. Even so, I have a lot of free time. Starting this week, though, I will have a little less because I will start teaching art and drama classes at the small elementary school near my house. I was walking home early from school one day last week and stopped by the school to wait for my host brother David. I started talking to one of the two teachers there (the whole school, ages ~5-10 is 17 students), and he asked me if I’d be interested in teaching some non-English classes. I couldn’t believe my fortuitous timing. Tomorrow, I will meet with him to discuss my plans, and my first day of classes will be on Wednesday.