Well, here I am, back again! It’s been a bit too long. My apologies to any of you who have been waiting for some fresh and spicy Scott content to fill your leisure reading time, I hope you haven’t missed me too much. In truth, things have been very busy lately and are now starting to cool off quite a bit.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the school year here ends in October. Specifically, the last day of classes for all students was October 11. Now, if you have more than 3 braincells, you will realize that this means that our school year is now over, and that I am no longer teaching as of this week. So, how did the end of the school year go, what did I learn, and what will I be doing next? Well, put up your feet and relax while I answer all these questions and more!
How did teaching go?
Looking back, the last weeks of classes after the Independence Day break seemed to breeze by quite quickly. We were able to cover some lessons about proper English sentence structure, the present perfect tense, and with the younger kids in Cuarto grade (4to) we spent a fair bit of time teaching about some commonly used English verbs, as well as some important English sentence grammar, in an effort to give them a better foundation in grammatical rules before next year. As always, the short amount of time we had in class complicated things quite a bit, but poco a poco it became easier to make the most out of that time. One of the activities we were most proud of was playing two truths and a lie with both of our Quinto (5to) grade classes, to teach them how to properly use the present perfect.
Overall, I’d say it went quite well. The students ability to identify the different parts of a sentence (subject-predicate-object) and to put them in the correct order improved massively, and while we kind of ran out of time to do really in-depth explanations of grammar rules with 4to, I felt like a lot of the students were starting to understand the WHY behind some of the rules that they had been taught, but never fully understood. As someone who has been a big fan of the word “why” for most of my life, it was a great joy for me to see the expressions of understanding when they finally got it.
As for the mornings, we continued to go every Tuesday and Thursday to support the English teachers for the younger students of elementary school age, and It was a chaotic, exhausting, extremely fun time every time. The highlight of the last few weeks without a doubt was Día del Niño, or International Children’s Day. While I personally don’t have many memories of this holiday being celebrated in the U.S, it is a pretty big deal here in Latin America. Kids often get candy and presents from their families and teachers, and students get to show up to school wearing costumes, as we would on Halloween.
Of course, I hear you asking, did I wear a costume? Why of course! Some of the teachers took Fredi and I to a place in town that rents out costumes, and while it took forever to find costumes that actually fit on adults, I was able to dress up like a pirate, and Fredi was a dinosaur. The day was basically a field day for the students, with a variety of games, shows and activities for them. All of them were on a sugar high and it was absolute madness. I think I had my pirate hat stolen at least 20 times, and I probably ended up running a few laps around the school trying to get it back. It was a very fun day for teachers and students alike.
Naturally, to balance life out, something a lot less fun had to come after this day, and that was the preparation for finals and final exams themselves. This week was especially entertaining for us as teachers, because right before the second to last week of school they hand out report cards that show how well a student is doing in their classes. Of course, many students at this point realize just how much they have been slacking off on their work, and so use this week beg, beseech, and besiege their teachers asking how they can earn more points. You’d think that this last-minute panic would encourage the students to study harder, but of course, as Hobbes says, “why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous?” I will admit that this is mostly all said in jest, and despite of the foolishness of the situations the students put themselves in, Fredi and I did the best we could to help them achieve their goals.
Anyway, Ill save you the boring description of us sitting there doing nothing while the students took their exams, but I will briefly mention my disappointment with the students who turned in incomplete tests after 15 minutes despite having a full hour to work on them (seriously you don’t even want to TRY filling in something?), and I’ll gloss over the hours and hours of tedious grading we spent the rest of the week doing, and sum it all up by saying that in general things went quite well. It was clear looking at the results that most of the students had genuinely understood the subject material, and those that put in the effort succeeded greatly.
So yeah, here we are at the end of all things. Well, not really the end, but more of a pause in the work of this year. I’d be a fool if I walked away from the end of this first official experience as a teacher If I didn’t reflect on the things I learned, so I’ll share some of the things I’ve been figuring out over the last few weeks.
What have I learned?
The first and probably most important thing I realized is how important it is going to be for me to work on building a relationship with my students early on next year. As you can imagine, with the limited time we had in class, it was hard for the students to really get to know me, and for me to get to know them. I’m ashamed to say it, but there is a decent amount of my own students whose names I still don’t know. When I think about the teachers in my life that had the biggest impact on my learning, it was almost always the teachers who were open about themselves, and who took the time to get to know their students. If I can take more time early in the year to simply be with my students, letting them ask me questions about myself, and doing the same for them, it will put me in a much better position to teach from that very first week. Not only will they be more comfortable approaching me with doubts or questions they have regarding the content of the class, but hopefully a positive relationship with the teacher will encourage them to take the work of their classes more seriously.
Of course, bearing all this in mind, I must also realize that at the end of the day, not everyone is going to care. There are simply some students who will have no interest or desire to learn another language, or even to form a relationship with me in the first place. While I wouldn’t say that this desire for all the students to want to learn consumed me over the last few weeks, there were a few times that I found myself disappointed that there were some students who just didn’t care to try at all. Looking back, I can see more clearly now that apathy is simply a human reality. No matter what I do, I will never have the interest of 100% of the students, and that’s ok. At the end of the day, my primary purpose in coming here was not to encourage students to learn to speak English, but rather to learn about myself, and learn how I can be of service when a need arises. I shouldn’t expect to be able to serve a student who sees no need for the things I have to teach, and again, that’s ok.
Keeping these things in balance, I have also realized that I must also manage my expectations with regards to the students who are interested, and are willing to put in the work. There were brief moments this bimester where I felt frustrated that I couldn’t move faster through subjects. I wrote in my journal on the last day of classes about my experience learning Spanish, trying to glean from it better ways to teach English. While thinking about all this I had to remind myself of something very important. My Spanish for a very long time was quite mediocre. The only thing that really catalyzed my ability to learn the language was my study abroad program in Chile, and being constantly surrounded by the language. I was no-where near fluent until I took that leap, and I was never even close to “fluency” when I was in high school. Seeing this, I’m going to make sure to check my patience more often, and remember that there is no conceivable way that these students will be fluent in English after spending one year with me as a teacher. Fluency is not the goal here, only learning and better understanding.
These are just a few of the major bits I’ve been thinking about over the last few days, I’m sure more will come up as I begin to prepare for the next school year. Right now, I’m just focusing on processing all these thoughts as they come in, and trying to figure out what I can learn to be a better teacher next year.
What’s next?
So, I hear you asking, “now that you don’t have classes until January, what do you do now?” That is an excellent question indeed. The first and biggest thing that is happening soon is that my visa is expiring! For the Esquipulas BVC site, we were not able to get work visas for the year of service, so instead we are on tourist visas which expire 90 days after entry into the country. Since our visa expires November 5th, Fredi and I have decided that we are going to go to Mexico! More specifically, Fredi’s family has invited me to stay with them in their hometown called Jolalpan, and if you know anything about Mexico, you’ll know that November 1st is Dia de los Muertos. Naturally, we have planned our trip around this and will be visiting during the week of the 1st. We are both very excited, and I will be sure to make a post all about it once we return!
After this, I of course plan on spending a lot of my time doing prep work for the next school year. Ideally at this point we will know which grades we will be working with, as well as which book we will be using to aid our lessons. I already have lots of ideas for assignments and handouts I can give to the students, so I imagine I’ll start work on that even before we leave for Mexico. In addition to planning for the school year, I intend to start some projects in and around the monastery, helping out where help is needed. So far, the conversation about what this work will look like has just started, and things are still a little unclear, but time shall reveal all. I will say right now in the early point, that there is a possibility of me doing some beekeeping work for the hives that are on the monastery grounds, and the prospect of that has me extremely excited.
But enough about that. There’s no point writing about things that have yet to happen, and many things might change in the near future. Before I leave you, there is one more life update I’d like to share.
Internet: meet Loki!
Loki arrived at the Monastery on September 18 and has been living in the formation house since he arrived. One of the monks here has a brother, and his dog had puppies, so he offered up one of them to the monastery. Hermano Daniel, the monk who brought him in, aptly chose to name him Loki because he is extremely “loco”. He is super hyper and is currently teething, much to the chagrin of my shirts, and my fingers. He has been an absolute joy to watch and take care of in spite of his bitey nature and his constant escape attempts, and from what I understand he will be staying with us for the foreseeable future. Enjoy some parting photos of this wee rascal, and see you next time!
