Monday (10-20-2008). Teaching English. Day 1.

I met with Diego at Sendero at 10 am and had a quick Canadian House orientation, mostly consisting of some Australian administrative lady arguing with Diego that I should audit a class rather than being thrown right into the classroom. But there simply wasn’t enough time. By the time Diego dropped me off, I was set to teach four classes in a row, all different classes and all different age levels. The students know about as much English as I know Spanish—virtually none.

Ryan and I reconvened and I spent most of the afternoon working over the lesson plans in the different teaching books I had been given. Out of respect for Saula, our host and the head of Fine-Tuned English (the rival school of Canadian House) I did not bring up the fact that I would be doing this. My stomach spent the majority of the afternoon recovering from eating an entire bag of sugar cane I had purchased off a street vendor. At 3:15 I walked to the school, very impressed with my ability to navigate Loja by myself via foot. At 4 pm, I began.

Class 1: 4-5 pm. Ages 7 and 8.

Try explaining Simon Says in English to a class full of Spanish speaking seven and eight year olds. Had the secretary not walked in relatively early in the class, it would have been a disaster. But I got them playing and it went well. Most of the class was focused on teaching them to say “This is a pencil.” “What is this?” “This is an eraser.” The kids are very cute but some of them are clearly way ahead of the others and as a result get bored and walk around the room. It wasn’t too difficult to manage them though with another adult in the room.

Class 2: 5-6 pm. Ages 11-13.

We mostly focused on the names of countries and describing nationalities. The second half of the class was devoted to the plural form of words and the many rules that come along with it including the ever bothersome irregular nouns like cheese, mice and geese. It’s a pretty nice class though and they were mostly focused. The school psychologist was present to translate, but unfortunately didn’t know enough English to adequately fulfill this role. But she was able to explain some of the more confusing rules to them in Spanish, which was helpful.

Class 3: 6-7 pm. Teenagers.

They had a written test which took the entire class. Even though I spaced out the desks, I could tell several were cheating—particularly three students who had some funny business going on with the passing of an eraser. This was later confirmed when they handed in their tests and they had all the same wrong answers in a pattern that matched no other tests but the clearly cheating trio.

Class 4: 7-9. Adults.

They had two hours for the same test and the second half was devoted to an oral portion, where they are supposed to carry on a conversation with me, with me guiding it with questions. I felt like I was interrogating them: “What is in your neighborhood? Describe your neighborhood.” “Do you like living there? Why?” “What did you have for breakfast, lunch and dinner?” “What is your favorite food?” Some of them actually broke a sweat trying to come up with some sort of response or understand the question. It was kind of hard to watch.

There it was. My first day really teaching in a structured classroom environment. Five hours, four straight classes in a row. What a whirlwind.

I met up with Ryan in San Sebastian square. He was chatting with two fellows, one from Guayaquil who was pretty cool and had lived in Montanita for three years. He is currently studying in Loja to be a chef. The other guy was very very drunk and continued downing a bottle of liquor. Apparently the two guys didn’t know one another. Drunk guy came up to Ryan and started talking to him about America being the current cause of the violence in the world and had somehow pulled in the third guy. Apparently he had hawked his cell phone to buy another bottle of liquor. I didn’t much like drunk guy. He kept invading my space to the point that I put my arm around Ryan and hoped drunk guy would take the hint. He kind of didn’t but eventually he passed out in some bushes and we said goodbye to cool culinary Loja student and left.