Tales from the Front (of the class)

So here we are, 2 weeks into the school year down here in Guatemala, looking back at the failures and triumphs of our first 2 weeks as Elementary School English teachers. Despite never receiving any actual training as teachers, I feel like over the past 2 weeks we've managed to get off on a good foot, setting daily routines from the very first class and keeping our 4th, 5th and 6th graders more or less under control. Despite hearing that it would be difficult to get the kids to complete homework assignments, we decided from the very beginning to have one assignment due each week that they receive Tuesday and hand in on Thursday. Incredibly, well over 80% of the kids have turned in their 2 homework assignments thus far!

Actually, it was quite funny when I announced the very first day of class that they would be receiving a homework assignment, obviously the announcement was met with a cacaphony of moans and groans "Profe, pero es el primer dia de clases", they lamented. However when it was revealed that their assignment was a wordsearch (or rompecabezas, which translates literally as 'headbreaker'), they began to cheer and demand I pass out the homework right then and there. Surprisingly, it appeared to be quite torturous for them to restrain themselves from completing the wordsearch until after class!

Since that first day, we've made sure to bombard the kids with all sorts of fun and relatively brief activities, so as to keep them engaged and entertained. For example we've modified the classic "telephone game" into an English pronunciation exercise, invented a version of soccer where students take turns shooting goals on Alyssa and I and must translate a single word or a full sentence depending on whether they make it or not, in addition to lots more fun activities. Last Thursday we took advantage of the linguistic simplicity of the Beatle's "Hello Goodbye" to practice salutations as well as such important words as high, low, yes, no and a bit of verb conjugation. Filling our curriculum with fun, engaging activities has worked so well that kids have been literally begging us to come into their classrooms on Fridays for an extra session of English enrichment.

Of course there have been some challenges too. A big one is that in each of our classes, there is a pretty large variance in the level of students' familiarity and proficiency with English. For example, there are students who have lived in the US for over a decade and speak English fluently, alongside some first year students at the Colegio who have never before been exposed to English. Therefore, we're trying to put an emphasis on group activities that allow students to learn from each other while building community in our classrooms.

Another challenge has been navigating the treacherous waters of emerging prepubescent crushes, note-passing and other related silliness. As two young potentially-attractive teachers, we've found that in our 5th and 6th grade classes, almost 100% of the girls prefer asking me questions to Alyssa and obviously the boys prefer Alyssa's responses to mine, whereas the 4th graders by and large don't discriminate. We're taking steps to try to prevent these innocent little flirtations from being distracting by refusing to give students the standard salutation (male to female or female to female) of a kiss on the cheek. Also we've made it clear that the next note that gets passed in our class is going to be made into an impromptu english translation exercise, so unsurprisingly we haven't seen any notes passed since the first day!

Anyway, all in all teaching has been a real blast so far and will hopefully only become more rewarding as we begin to see the fruits of our labor and get to know our students better. We'll be sure to keep you all posted!

hasta pronto,

Chris