Ready, Set, Go!
24 oct. 2010
This last week I was in Jinotega, Nicaragua which is on the Nicaragua/Honduras border. It’s a medium sized town in a mountainous region and with a cooler climate. We went for practicum week, or intense teaching time. I was in the schools all day Tues-Thurs (12-5:30p) and taught 5 different classes (7th-10th grade). Of course, this included planning lessons for these classes as well which was done outside of school hours (i.e. my “free time”). I taught prepositions of location (7th), simple past tense (9th), and natural disasters (10th). Doesn’t sound too bad? Let’s add that I knew NOTHING about the school, my co-teacher, the students, or the class’ progress, before stepping in front and beginning to teach. This made things interesting. I knew the topic and that was it. Go!
Overall the classes went well. I tried some new techniques I had been dying to test out on Nicaraguan students and I worked on time / classroom management. I learned some good lessons on flexibility (one day DARE took over half of my block-period class, so my timing went from 1.5 hrs to 35 mins.), creativity (watching my co-teaching teach), and communicative teaching (trying to incorporate listening + speaking into each class period, as well as finding the function for each lesson; why do they need to learn this topic / what problem does it solve).
My co-teacher, Victor, was awesome; a very spontaneous teacher who loves to try new games and teaching methods as he thinks of them, often off the cuff. He had a unique relationship with the students that I find hard to describe. They respected him and listened to him. They didn’t appear to doubt him no matter what he was doing or saying. In Nicaragua we would say they have confianza. More or less this means trust in English, but it means more than the English word we know. It means feeling comfortable enough to ask questions. It means feeling safe enough to take risks. It means respecting one another and the teacher’s authoritative role. It means believing that someone won’t lead you astray. All in all, it was a very beautiful relationship that he had formed in the classroom; one which I can only hope to imitate in my future classrooms.
Furthermore, Victor loves 2 things: coffee and English Idioms. Therefore my week revolved around these 2 things… teaching random idioms as they come up in conversation (for example: I plead the 5th, when pigs fly, he’s such a mooch, to open a can of worms, I didn’t do squat, don’t judge a book by its cover, etc.) and going to the school’s bar for coffee. Although I don’t drink coffee, I went multiple times with him so that he could get coffee. I would sip on a juice of some sort usually.
It was nice because it was a relaxed environment which made the somewhat hectic task before me a little less stressful. It also helped that my co-TEFLeros were there to support me 100% of the way – offering their ideas, suggestions, and just listening.
It was a great week.
