Teaching English

Oct. 13^th – 15^th, 2010

Since I will be teaching English and have no idea where to even begin, I requested project-related travel to another site to observe how another PCV is giving her classes, and to obtain some materials. I was gone for two nights, arriving on Wednesday and returning to my site Friday. Wednesday Janet and I made a delicious tuna fish salad with toast and melted cheese, and she showed me the plants she had been growing during her service here. She had oregano, cherry tomatoes, lemon grass, celery, coffee, basil, and sunflowers. Later in the afternoon we headed over to the school to prepare for class. She gives class from 3 – 5 pm Wednesdays and Thursdays to groups of about 20 adults who will teach their own groups of students, and has English game night also, once a week from 6 – 8 pm. What I learned most was to keep the class interactive and have fun because that keeps people interested and wanting to participate. Just standing in front of class lecturing or treating the students like children can create an uncomfortable boundary between the teacher and the students and doesn't seem to foster a successful learning environment. She had students come to the front of class to present to the rest a grammar activity they had prepared, other students presented to smaller groups around the class, they sang, they did dialogues, quizzes, and other fun activities.

Thursday morning we hiked about 2 and a half hours to an aldea up in a mountain to visit a Kindergarten class. The hike was beautiful. We passed corn fields, coffee plots, banana trees, rivers, parts of the trail that had been affected by mudslides, and we had to cross one river walking over some trunks of a tree.


 A couple ladies from the school came down the trail a ways to meet us and help carry our bags up the mountain. When we arrived, the children were already waiting, looking excited to have guests. We took a look at the small room that housed all their school materials and artwork, and also saw the small adorable chairs that were made out of wood and leather for the children to sit on.
 They didn't have chairs before and as plastic was too expensive, they used local resources to construct these chairs. It was suggested that in the future, the people of the aldea continue making chairs like these of whatever size as a business.
 We sat outside and the teachers gave us a generous helping of a banana and ciruelas. Ciruela is the word for plum, but it is completely different from what we have in the states. They taste like deliciously tart mangos.
 They then brought out plastic bags full of even more bananas and ciruelas - one bag for each of us! After snacking for a bit, we used felt hand puppets to tell the story of "The Three Little Pigs" then we switched it up and had the kids use the hand puppets to tell the story. There was a lot of blowing involved as we tried to blow all the houses down, and we asked several questions to see if they remembered what had happened in the story and which house was best to live in. They laughed a lot and seemed to really enjoy themselves :).
 We were only there for about an hour then left back down the hill, going down another way which saved us a lot of time, but which we would not have liked to climb up.


Janet and I had a lunch of banana pancakes and eggs, using the bananas we had just received. Then we headed back to school for another English class, then after that, prepared for English game night at her house. I baked banana cookies and she made popcorn.
 We had Scrabble, Scrabble Slam (in my opinion, a lot more fun than Scrabble), Boggle, and Monopoly set out on two tables. A good group of students showed up and started playing Scrabble Slam first, and then we switched to playing Monopoly. One guy had the misfortune of being sent to jail probably at least 4 times >_<. It was a fun night.
 After everyone left, I got to packing and Janet was extremely generous in giving things away! She is leaving site soon and thus is trying to get rid of stuff. She gave me several books, an external CD Drive since my Netbook doesn't have a disc drive, a big long plastic box filled with teaching English materials, another box with placemats, and other goodies, ground cinnamon (hard to find here! The most common form of cinnamon is the bark), Queen size fitted sheet and regular sheet, plastic containers, empty wine bottles to use for putting flour, sugar, whatever, and will give me her speakers when I go back to visit. It really was a great trip overall and her site, while small, is very beautiful and I enjoyed talking with her students and seeing that they were self-motivated and determined to learn.