First Day of English Class

Sunday afternoon I returned home to Iraca and felt pleased to be headed home, which is always a nice feeling.  When I got to the house, the little boy, Wilfredo, who I had taught War (the card game), was there with his mom.  I had expected someone would be there to take care of the animals.  I spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready for my first English class the next day.

That night, I slept terribly, probably out of nervous energy, and woke up at 5 a.m., only to be kept away by the constant scurrying of something rather large on the second floor above my head.  At one point, it ran across my plastic sheeted “skylight” and I was terrified some giant rat was going to come falling through my ceiling.  I don’t know what it is about late at night or early morning that can be so terrifying, when everything is scarier than it would be otherwise.  Maybe it’s that our minds are still partly connected to dreams and so anything is possible?  I was absolutely, and ridiculously terrified.  I tried to sleep, but the animal was making a ton of noise right over my head.  I finally put in my headphones and curled up in my blanket.  I managed to sleep until my alarm went off. 

I got up, ate breakfast, packed up my stuff, and headed down to the health post.  It was the morning of my first English class, and the Director of the school had waited until this morning to hand the key off to Natalia, the health worker, to give to me.  I had to get up earlier to go to the health post and get the key, and had had absolutely no opportunity to look at my classroom, clean it up, hang things up, nothing. 

Natalia walked back with me to the school for whatever reason.  There was ONE little boy waiting at the school.  I tried not to feel disappointed.  One was better than none.  When we opened the door to the classroom, we discovered that the entire chalkboard was still covered in white paper and gold letters from the Promoción celebration that happened a month beforehand.  Natalia called one of the teachers to ask if we could take it down.  Thank God he said yes.  When I went to pull the paper off the wall, we discovered that some genius had thought it was a great idea to GLUE the big pieces of paper to the chalkboard.  WHO DOES THAT? 

Natalia decided to clear out at this point, after she told us to try and save all the little gold letters from the thing on the chalkboard, and the little boy and I were left to try and get the big sheets of paper off the chalkboard.  Turns out, it wasn’t just glued around the sides, it was glued down EVERYWHERE and we had the tedious job of pulling tiny little shreds of paper off the board, leaving thick lines of glue everywhere with paper still stuck to them.  We were at it for about an hour, and at the end we’d made very little progress and a really big mess.  I was furious, but contained it so as not to scare away my one student.  Seriously though, what IDIOT GLUES paper to a chalkboard? 

By the end of the hour, two more kids had shown up, and now I had the little boy, Samer, and the two little girls, Lorena and Lesly.  I had a tiny space of usable chalkboard, so we got going.  Vocab for the first day was the following:

Hello – Hola

Miss – Señorita

Mister – Señor

Teacher – Profesor(a)

What’s your name? - ¿Cómo te llamas?

My name is ______. – Mi nombre es ________.

Nice to meet you. – Mucho gusto.

I was working out of a basic manual that Peace Corps had supplied us, with some added ideas of my own to make it feel more like my style. 

The first thing we did was to go over the class rules.  (all in Spanish for the kids of course)

1. Demonstrate respect for your peers, your teacher, and the class in general.

2. Arrive on time

3. Bring a notebook and something to write with.

4. Ask me questions if you are confused.

5. Give your best effort.

6. Learn something!

7. Have fun!

I started by having them copy each word into their notebook, and then I would have them repeat the word after me.  We moved through each word or sentence like that.  After a couple rounds of that, we listened to a TRULY obnoxious song that came along with the English teaching resources we were given.  Unfortunately, the kids actually like them and they are perfectly suited to the manual we were given.  I thought I would lose all credibility as a teacher by playing them for the kids and that no one would ever come back, but I was wrong.  They like it.  So we played and sang the song a couple times, and then we did question answer for a bit.  I asked them, “What’s your name?”  and they had to answer, “My name is ______.”  I was amazed at how difficult this was.  They kept saying, “My name is, mi nombre es Lesly,” rather than just saying: “My name is Lesly.”  I had a really hard time trying to convice them that “My name is” has the same significance as “mi nombre es”.  Given the similarity of the two phrases, even in different languages, I didn’t think it would be that much of a stretch.  By the end, I had added Anali, Mari, and Doris to our group.

I gave them a bit of time to color nametags.  I had spent a tedious amount of time the night before cutting out pieces of paper, putting two hole punches in them, and then putting a small piece of tape above where I put the holes so it wouldn’t rip.  The kids could then color nametags with the colored pencils I had bought and pick pink or green yarn to tie it around their necks.  This was a fun little exercise, and the kids loved it.

We then played a game, where I had a ball I made out of pink duct tape, and when you received the ball, you had to say, “my name is ______” and then say “What’s your name?” and throw the ball the next person.  I think we played this game for about half an hour or more and they still couldn’t always get it quite right.  There was a habit developing of them saying “name” correctly when they asked the question, and then saying “nam” or “am-ay” when they were saying “my name is”.  Had a hard time getting them to understand it was the same word.  When they said it really well, I gave them a piece of candy, which helped motivate them.

We spent a bit more time at the blackboard after that.  I had them ask me what my name was, I told them my name was Hayden, and then they had to say “nice to meet you,” which was an absolute disaster for a while.  They still say “niece” instead of “nice” and they say “meetch” instead of “meet” for some unknown reason. 

We played another game, where three of the kids had to go outside the door, and three stayed inside. The person outside had to knock on the door.  The person inside said, “What is  your name?”  The person outside said, “My name is _____,” and gave a name that didn’t necessarily have to be their own.  The person on the inside had to decide if it was actually that person.  If they decided it was, they opened the door.  If they were right, the person entered, if they were wrong, the person on the inside had to go outside.  It was a fun game for them and they wanted to play about twenty rounds of it, but by the end of it, they seemed to have actually remembered how to ask the question and how to answer it.  There had also been a girl hiding outside the door, who had slowly made her way inside, but didn’t start participating until halfway through this game.  I feel like these kids are so used to having to just copy things into their notebooks that they are super excited when they get to play games. 

They learned also how to say “thank you”, “Goodbye”, “yes”, and “no”, due to their own interested questions about how to say something.  I was thrilled that they were asking how to say other words in English.  It showed their enthusiasm!

Before they left, all the kids had to say “goodbye teacher” to exit, and I gave them all another tiny piece of candy.  At the end of the class, I was feeling great.  I was so excited to have finished and had so much fun with the kids.  It was nice to finally feel like I was working in my community and being productive in some small way.  It was also just exciting to teach again, and it felt good to be doing something that felt natural to me.  I also was impressed with myself, because I realized when the class had ended that I had just taught a class mostly in Spanish and I managed it all right.  I didn’t realize I had it in me!

I headed off to the health post because Natalia had told me that she would take me on house visits.  I sat there for three hours, she didn’t seem to be moving and the rain was rolling in.  I asked her if we were going to go on the house visits and she said the rain was coming.  I told her I would come back the next morning and she thought that was a good idea.  I tried not to think about it too much, but in the back of my mind I was worried that Natalia was not going to come through on her multiple promises to help me out with completing my survey.  I went home and finished reading Pillars of the Earth.