It’s hard to believe it’s been almost 3 weeks since I first landed in Guatemala. To be honest, all the new names, faces, places and words I’ve been learning has made a three week stay feel like three months, but I digress.
Arriving here overall was a whirlwind of new sights and people, but the striking thing to me has been the abundance of hospitality from everyone here. A common response people use here after introducing oneself is “para servirte”, meaning “at your service”. Here more so that anywhere does that actually feel like a truthful statement. The monks have been asking us on a regular basis if we are comfortable in our rooms, what we think of the food (I’m sure I’ll make a post all about the food at some point), and how we have been settling in to teaching at the school. Within Colegio San Benito itself, all the faculty have been just as welcoming, sharing food, providing words of encouragement for people who are VERY new to this line of work, and overall having a positive attitude every single day.
That being said, teaching has been quite the learning curve since we arrived, and I’d like to spend the majority of this post talking a bit about what it has been like, some of the challenges I have encountered thus far, and what my goals are at least till the end of this academic cycle in October.
Let me first and foremost describe a little bit about what this work has looked like so far. My partner Fredi and I are currently sharing classes which until the start of last week were being taught by Joe Rossebo, a BVC member who came to Esquipulas in January of this year. He had to leave before the school year was over, so Fredi and I decided to co-teach these classes at least until the next school year starts. We have 5 individual classes covering 3 grades. In Guatemala, the equivalent of high school lasts for 3 years, and the grades within them are known as Cuarto, Quinto, and Sexto (or 4th, 5th, and 6th). Each class has roughly 25 students, and the age range is roughly 14-19, though there is a lot more variance in age within grades than in the U.S.
The next detail of this school system is also conveniently where I encountered the first, and biggest difficulty with teaching. Each class only meets twice a week, and each class lasts exactly (drumroll please)………. Thirty-five minutes. You heard that right, just a little over an hour of in-class instruction time per class per week. Obviously to anyone who has ever been involved in the U.S education system, this is an extremely small amount of time to work with a class, especially in developing foreign language skills. To top it all off, this is the norm, at least within this school. As of writing this I am unaware if other subjects meet more than twice a week, but for every class the in-class instruction time per period is a whopping thirty-five minutes.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t all stress me out a bit. But I came here because I was willing to try teaching out, and all the stressors that entails. It didn’t take long for me to see that these kids are worth the effort, and that learning this language wouldn’t be a pointless waste of their time. One student in particular has already started to look at applying to schools near his family that live in the U.S, and I want to be able to help him acquire the language skills he needs to be accepted to those schools.
One phrase I keep coming back to was given to me by the dean of our school, who everyone calls “Chepe”. Describing the whirlwind that the last two weeks have been for me, he reassured me and said that everything we are doing is a process, and that we will learn how to teach “poco a poco”. I’ve been coming back to that phrase when thinking about my own challenges, but reflecting back on two weeks of teaching at Colegio San Benito, I think I need to remind myself that these students are learning poco a poco too. I can’t expect to move through whole units every day and expect all the students in my class to learn anything. It will take more time and care to ensure that real learning is taking place, and not just regurgitation for a 5 point in-class activity.
Overall, moving forward I’m going to try to focus more on having the same amount of patience with my students as I have been giving to myself. This will of course slow my idealized pace for the class down, but it will also allow Fredi and I to really cement important aspects of English in the students’ brains, and it will also help us build a closer relationship to the students, as we take more time to individually care for the needs of the students rather than rushing through blocks of textbook activities.
With that in mind, it will be a goal of mine for future weeks to find more time outside of class to make myself available to students who want help. At the end of the day, I can’t force anyone to learn who doesn’t wasn’t to learn in the first place, but the last thing I would want to do is seem unavailable or unwilling to help a student who actually wants help.
One final reflection from the past two weeks has been how well the students have engaged in class when I bring a loud and excited energy to class. On Friday we did a brief activity where we wrote categories of foods on the board and had students yell out foods that belonged in each category. I noticed that when I got excited about foods that I liked or foods that I myself hadn’t thought of, more students would call out with their own unique answers. By showing them my confidence and excitement about my own native language, it increased their confidence to join in the activity. As a side note-I’m grateful that this town has absolutely amazing coffee, because that is definitely going to help me maintain the energy needed to keep this effect going.
So yeah, the balancing act that this work is going to require is going to take a while to figure out, but I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t willing to live through that process. I’m immensely grateful for Fredi, my partner in the classroom for this bimester. Being able to tag team these classes and getting two perspectives on lesson plans has been a great blessing, and it has greatly helped with grading, as one can imagine. I’m also grateful for everyone at the school who has remained open and available for us, I have no doubts that we will be leaning on them more and more as these weeks progress. Lastly, I’d like to give a special shout out of gratitude to my older brother Jack, who is currently a middle school teacher in Denver Public Schools. Without his advice and experience as a relatively new teacher, I would not be nearly as at peace as I am now with all of this. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the teaching experience in the months to come, but as of right now I’m just looking forward to learning everything, poco a poco.
Ignorance is hardly unusual… The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.
-Brandon Sanderson