¡¿Teaching español to 200 chicos?!

First, for those that don´t know, I got a buzz 2 hours before I got on the airplane to Ecuador. It was one of the best decisions so far since it cuts my cold shower time in half. See the attached photo. The photo was taken at a port where a couple friends and I went scuba diving. And yes, all of the boats in the photo are still in use, and they took us into the middle of the ocean in one that was similar to the white boat with 3 stars. I was glad I knew how to swim. Now for the blog...

I went to the school for the first time on Thursday, and then again on Friday. The situation is a little more than overwhelming. There are around 200 kids that are divided into a whole bunch of grades and classes, like a normal school. But there is one English teacher, Marina, who pops in and out of classes for 40 minutes at a time trying to teach kids English. Depending on the grade, she makes it to their class 2-4 times a week.

There are several problems with this arrangement. First, the English teacher does not speak English. I communicate with her exclusively in español over shouting kids. Second, she has no control of the classroom. When Marina comes into the class, the normal teacher leaves to go on his or her break, and the kids go crazy. When I say loose control, you must be thinking of what happens in a normal American classroom when the teacher looses control. Let me give you some examples. It is a struggle to

• keep all of the kids in the classroom
• make sure that no one is fighting too much with anyone else
• get a child to understand you in Spanish during the chaos

And that is before we try to teach them English. In the 40 minutes of each class, we gained control of the kids for about the middle 20 minutes. During this time, most of the kids were in their seats and were not talking very loudly. However, Marina has really only been teaching for 3 months, and she is not the most organized with her lesson plans. Once the kids are listening, she does not keep their full attention for very long as she has to spend time preparing/thinking about what to teach them once they are kind of quiet.

I have a laundry list of suggestions for her that would be difficult enough to tell her constructively in English. Hopefully by the end of this week I will be able to communicate a couple in Spanish. The school has their week of testing this week, so I have been going in to help administer English tests and answer questions. Look out for the next blog about how they do/don´t prevent cheating...