Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Time To Teach

Before I began this trip I had a serious aversion to teaching English. It seems like going to South America to teach English has become some sort of modern day missionary movement and my goal of traveling was to immerse myself in different cultures... not convert them to Englishism. Over the past 7 months I've softened my position - English just opens too many opportunities that anyone who comes to teach really is contributing to the greater good, globalization be damned. I just don't have any interest in centering my trip around it. Still, I figured I might as experience this teaching thing at least once.

Each afternoon at 2pm myself and four other volunteers make the half-hour walk to a local middle school for an hour of English class. My first week I actually worked with the kindergartners but thankfully a new volunteer showed up with girl-scout-troop-leading-experience who relieved me from glorified babysitting duty.


Thinking about it I have minimal experience teaching: I trained a few of our summer interns as well as my replacement at SVB for the last month I was there, I'm a certified Scuba instructor but have yet to teach a real class, and I coached one season of my little brother's soccer team 8 years ago. And while I'm very comfortable with my command over the English language, teaching it is quite a different animal.

The first two days of class were less than productive. There were 5 teachers for about 20 students (aged 11-15 and almost all girls), a pretty solid teacher-student ratio, but we just weren't organized. To be fair we had been given the impression that the older kids had a tiny bit of English experience, but other than one or two of the older girls we were working with blank slates. Our loosest of teaching plans disintegrated after about 5 minutes and we shared quite a few blank looks of indecision between us.


On our walk back to the hostel after back-to-back failures we resolved to sit down and put together a formal lesson plan. Rather than structure the classes around verb conjugation, pronouns, or anything resembling a formal language lesson, we themed our lessons around practical vocabulary and figured the sentence structure would appear naturally by asking questions. After that first updated class we all felt much better, confident that the students had actually learned something. We would continue to refine our strategies after each class but essentially here is how we structured it:


First 5 minutes two of us walk around the room, introduce ourselves, and have the students say their names in complete sentences ("Hello, my name is Billy, what is your name?"). Next we review the vocab from the day before and answer any lingering questions (pretty much everything we learned from the day before is a lingering question). Then it is time for the day's lesson, where we write the vocab on the board, have the class repeat it in English, and then explain the Spanish translation. For the last half of the lesson we break into small groups of 2-3 and go over a worksheet of questions. The small groups are where the real learning goes down since most of the students are too shy speak in front of the big group. Interestingly enough the same students sought out the same teachers each day so I got to know my squad well.


To be honest, teaching was a rush. I found myself getting really into each lesson, high fiving the students when they did especially well, and just having a good time. I still don't think I'll pursue English teaching long term - I'm determined to speak less English in my next destinations - but if the opportunity arises I could consider another short stint as Profe Billy.

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