School's In!

  So, I’ve come full circle it seems.  When I was younger, I was so anti-school.  I felt like my homeschooling experience was by far the best way to educate yourself.  Now here I am in Nicaragua teaching in front of classes of up to 45 kids!

                Ok, let’s clear some things up.  I’ve been in Nicaragua for over a month now and started to get the hang of this English education business.  I won’t lie, stepping into that classroom for the first time was pretty scary.  It was actually in my opinion a bit of a disaster. 

                The theme of the day’s lesson was Environmental Protection.  Nicaragua’s Ministry of Education requires themes in a lot of their classes that sometimes don’t seem to be something that fit with language learning.  None the less, my counterpart and I tried to find a way to work it in.  We decided to work on the three R’s: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle; all of these are cognates in Spanish and should be easy to teach. 

                We came up with some interactive ways for the kids to learn them, but the first big hurdle was our use of Spanish in the classroom.  The teacher was used to teaching in Spanish extensively in class, and he wanted to translate everything I said as I said it to the class.  Took some work, but I managed to convince him to let them mull over what I said and try to understand it themselves.

                After the kids fully understood the vocab came the grammar, and things just went down hill.  Gerunds were the subject and they are completely foreign to Spanish speakers.  Where we would use a verb with the ING ending as the subject of a sentence, they never would.  But I reacted as best I could simplifying as much as possible.  When the bell finally rang I was ready to get out of there.

It wasn’t all bad.  The vocab was understood it just came down to assuming prior knowledge.  That’s where we always trip up here.  It’s really very unrealistic to walk into the class, just  throw down a completely new structure and expect them to get it in just one class. It takes multiple tries, and you’re bound to have classes that just completely bomb.

I’ve come a long way since that first day, and I’ve had many successes.  I’ve had classes that I feel that  every single kid completely understood what I was teaching.  I think it’s really important to celebrate those small successes, they’ll keep you sane.

Another Paper Airplane??

Little Eleancito’s face after having made his favorite thing in the world it seems: Paper Airplanes.

Vacation English Camp: A 9-Day Rollercoaster of Language

It’s finally over. Two weeks of hard, solo work with 60 plus students has come to a close.  Lots happened, both good and bad.  

            The idea was planted in me by a counterpart of mine that offhandedly said that there should be some kind of prep work for the students coming into the first year at the institute.  Before this, the students had never received any kind of English education.  If they knew anything, it probably came from watching movies with subtitles or the occasional thing that an older brother or sister taught them.

            Originally I had hoped this could be a two-person job with me and a counterpart, but what with the professors taking full advantage of the break, it quickly fell to just me.  

            I remember how it felt when I first showed up to the class room.  I thought at most I’d have 15 students.  I had 32 the first day and it kept growing until I cut it off at 63.  

            I learned in the first two days that I lacked in classroom management.  Part of it is there being one of me and over 50 of them.  Their ages ranged from 11 to 15 and they saw right off that I was an inexperienced teacher and keeping some order in the classroom became exhausting.  

            But they learned quite quickly, and we accelerated through topics like, classroom objects, colors, personal introductions and even the alphabet.  Looking back, I think the class was, despite its flaws, a great success.

Tests proved to be a beast.  I had never written or given one in my life that was more than a swimming test in a Boy Scout camp.  I divided it into written and oral.  Giving oral exams to 60 plus students was mistake number one.  I started at 930 and wasn’t finished until 3 hours later even when I was taking them two at a time.

Grading drew out another experience that I would not like to relive.  On the whole, the majority passed well and those that failed were kids that really couldn’t care less about the class as something more than a hang out.  However, there was one girl that tried so hard, came every day, participated in every activity, but she just couldn’t pass a test to save her life.  Even with a very generous helping of extra credit, she couldn’t make a passing 60 average.  

When she started crying and ran out of the class after I told her I just couldn’t pass her, I never felt so terrible.  I felt like I had failed her more than anything.  But this is the reality of teaching classes of this size.  Some are going work their butts off and still not make it.  If I “pity pass” them, I’ve disrespected the hard work and talent of those that earned the passing grades.  And after that they would be less motivated to keep up those good work ethics.  

So after nine classes, every one of my students will be going into first year English a little more prepared, some better than others.  But in the end, learning languages is always a work in progress, and no matter what grade someone gets, it all comes down to successful communication.