The quote in this title has never been more true for me.
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| The tile sign outside of the front gate to the school |
Now that I’ve almost completed my fourth week of “teaching,” I feel that I can aptly write about my experience so far. I’ll start with the basics. I’m teaching at a primary school (pre-school through sixth grade) called Josefa Frías in a town called Santiponce. The school is really great and the town is absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful. I haven’t gotten a chance to walk around and take pictures, but I will post some soon. My commute consists of a 20-25 minute walk to the bus stop and then a 20 minute bus ride, unless I catch the express bus which only takes 10 minutes. It’s a really easy, convenient commute because the bus actually stops right in front of my school.
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| The front entrance to the school. |
Now for the actual experience so far. One word to sum it up: interesting. There are two things that have been the most challenging these first few weeks. The first is the fact that my bilingual coordinator (the person who is essentially in charge of everything I do and how I do it) just arrived at school last week. So for the first two weeks the other teachers that have been covering her position have been scrambling, changing my schedule, shuffling me around, and giving really no direction at all as to what I was supposed to be doing. Also, 8 out of my 14 classes (yes, I have 14 different classes every week) are taught with her. So, I had been working with a sub who seemed to be just about as clueless as I was. Another result of her absence the first weeks was that in some of the English classes they had no sub, so they principal said to me, “well you can just teach the classes right?” Oh sure, I’m completely comfortable teaching classes I have never met, I have no idea what they are studying or what their level of English is, and I have no materials. Awesome. However, now that she’s here, there has been a complete 180⁰ change. She is a really cool lady, extremely supportive and helpful, and I’m really glad I am going to be working with her so much. She came right out and said “ok this is how it’s going to work, I’ll let you know at the end of the week exactly what you’ll be responsible for doing the next week. I’ll gather all the materials you will need and let you know at least two days in advance if I want you to prepare something, and if you need anything just let me know.” Whew. Finally I feel like I have direction and support for what I’m doing which makes me much more confident. She even took away one of my classes so that we can have an hour for coordination every week. This is huge, because the teachers don’t have plan periods like I’m accustomed, at least no plan periods that coincide with my schedule. The school day goes from 9-2 with only a half hour break from 12:00-12:30, so that leaves no time to plan things with any of my teachers. But now I’m much more comfortable with what’s going on.
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| View of the front gate from inside |
The second part that has been most challenging is the fact that I completely underestimated how different teaching a second language to elementary students is from teaching one to high school students. I realized that a lot of my personal teaching style is based on my ability to relate to my students and make jokes with them and be on their level. That is nearly impossible to do with the 4-10 year olds. When you’re working with kids that small, you are much more a parental figure than a friend.
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| the front courtyard |
To compound the fact that they are younger kids, we are not supposed to speak to the students in Spanish at all. So, to try and avoid the inevitable blank stares, I find myself speaking really slow, being really animated and using gestures for just about everything I say (hence the title of this post.)
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| the back yard flooded with rain |
I’m pretty comfortable with the 5th and 6th graders, but the four pre-school classes that I have are totally out of my comfort zone. The good thing about them though, is that really all you have to do is sing songs and draw pictures and do activities because they don’t even really know how to read or write in Spanish, let alone English. Little by little, I’m getting used to working with the little kids, and I’ve come a long way since that first day.
Last week was really fun because all week, all I had to do was talk about Halloween and do Halloween related activities, so it was a pretty easy week. Well now that I feel like I’ve covered all the basics I’ll leave it at that, now I can just share short, funny stories when they come up! Stay tuned for my next post about my trip to Lagos, Portugal.
