Words/phrases of the day:
machaca- a type of fish that you can make "fish sausage" out of
payasada- clowning, tomfoolery. There's never any shortage of this.
perdida como una perra en una procession- lost like a dog in a procession- ie really really confused. I definitely have this feeling a lot.
un enmendamiento- Ammendment- tried and failed attempt #2 to explain the NRA lobby
Como tela si no hay arana?- How can you spin a spider's web without a spider? i.e. can't spend any money if none is coming in
After a few weeks of feeling rather bored, I finally had a busy week of school and other activities. Since I was working on two teacher training workshops, it felt a little bit like college actually: staying up late, typing and writing things, thinking hard, jamming with some good tunes, getting things done...the only major difference being that here there is approximately 1000% humidity, and so I try to do work while wearing as little as decently possible whereas in Boston, I was usually wearing sweat pants and a sweatshirt and also swaddled in a giant blanket. Not sure if being too hot or too cold is better, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted to do Peace Corps service somewhere cold.
Yapered and Papered: This week, my counterpart Antonio and I taught vocabulary about American money to our 7th graders. They went crazy because I brought real pocket change to class. Then they kept laughing at this one student named "Nicole" because they couldn't distinguish the pronunciation of her name from "nickle." Poor Nicole was nearly in tears by the end of everything. I tried to get them to pronounce it correctly, but it was a lost cause, mostly because they didn't want to.
ECRIF Workshop: My counterpart Rafael attended a month long training in Costa Rica to receive a TEFL teaching certificate. As part of his scholarship agreement, he needed to give some workshops to teachers in his community, so we organized a teaching circle.
Organizing a good teacher training workshop is always a lot of work, because to do it well, it's good to have the teachers practice whatever skill you're teaching, which usually requires materials and a lot of advanced planning. It was an excellent opportunity to co-present a workshop with a counterpart teacher (even better, he took the lead for most of it), from perspective of the sustainability, credibility and solidarity, but as always, things take longer with two people than with one. I spent about 4 hours at Rafael's house in Las Palomas on Sunday (although we ended up just chatting about #farmlife for a long time, and then nearly 6 hours working with him on Wednesday, although he did have to leave for a while because his neighbors' cows were getting onto his land. He was sick too, which was definitely hard for him while he was putting everything together.
After all this, it looked like the workshop was going to get cancelled because of a march to celebrate the police, but the delegado said we could have the workshop anyway, because he's awesome. Then, the march got postponed until Friday, so we were in the clear.
The workshop itself was very interesting. To start, many people came an hour late, which was not surprising, but was still frustrating. We knew we would have varying levels of English ability at the workshop, but due to the way I phrased the invitation, 2 school principals attended, who knew basically no English. This wasn't the worst thing, because it's good for them to know what's going on and especially since the workshop was focused more on pedagogy than on English. So we gave a lot more of the workshop in Spanish, and Spanglish, and some in English. It was pretty fun though. After we had explained the concept, to demonstrate the idea of how ECRIF works in practice, I taught a short lesson about English slang for describing people: nerd, cool, cheapskate, shopaholic, slob and put- together. We unfortunately weren't able to get through everything we had planned for the workshop, but we got close enough. ECRIF is a really helpful way of thinking about how language is learned, or anything else! For more information, check out: www.ecrif.com/
The Sound of Olive: On Friday, we had another mini workshop on vowel pronunciation, after TEPCE, a monthly teacher planning meeting. We warmed up by playing "Silent Categories": you give a category and then partners work together to silently and exaggeratedly mouth words from these categories to each other.
We talked about some of the difficulties Spanish speakers have learning English vowel sounds: they don't know how words sound because they've never heard them before and some English sounds are hard to produce because they don't exist in Spanish.
Then, my counterpart Jonathan and I presented one strategy for teaching phonetics to students: the color alphabet! By using colors, most of which are familiar to students, teachers can create associations between the sounds of these familiar words and new vocabulary. We finished off with a listening activity and "Run to the Board," a game in which participants race against each other to identify the correct word on the board. I'd planned to practice more strategies, but I'm finally learning how much you can get through in a TEPCE workshop.
La Manada de English: My counterpart Jonathan came up with a new name for our English Circle- the English pack! Like a 7 person wolfpack of nerds who like grammar and new vocabulary. It was a joke, but I like it.
I'd noticed that the teachers sometimes struggle with when to use the infinitive (to + verb) and , so I suggested it as a class topic. When I looked into the topic further, I realized that it is one of the most difficult topics in English grammar. There are quite literally around 30 rules that govern the use of the infinitive vs. gerund. In the end, I decided to teach infinitives and gerunds to describe purpose. It worked out pretty fun. After we did some practice, I had the teachers select everyday items out of a bag at random. I told them to pretend I was from a completely different culture and to describe what the object's uses were, using both the infinitive and gerund. For example: This is a ball of yarn. It's used for knitting. I use it to knit blankets. People love realia in class. I don't know why, but it always makes things fun.
Twenty dinner guests: On Thursday night, I'd just eaten a hastily put together dinner and was putting the finishing touches on the pronunciation workshop when my neighbor Kleydi stopped by: "Em, let's go eat!!" I had completely forgotten- we were going to eat fish sausage hamburgers with Christina in honor of her return to San Miguelito. When we arrived at her house, there was a small glitch. There were literally at least 20 people sleeping on the floor of Christina's living room, where her stove is. Christina had not been warned about this in the slightest. Because San Miguelito's Patron Saint celebration is this weekend, people from rural communities come to the church here to celebrate, as a "promise" to the saint. We staged a rescue operation for the stove and lugged it up the stairs to eat in peace. Despite the fact that I had already eaten, the fish sausage was delicious- flavored with cilantro and onion. I'm curious to see if anyone will show up on our living room floor soon, since my host family is also Catholic.
Cow thieves- During Saturday class we finished up an activity with 4th year to review questions with "did" and the past tense. We did a crime solving activity, to resolve the following crime: "A thief stole a cow from teacher Xiomara's farm last night!" We divided the class in half, into police officers and suspects. The suspects wrote alibis, while police officers wrote questions about the activities they had done the night before. Today, the police officers interviewed the suspects to find out who was guilty (ie whichever group couldn't remember their alibi). Some of the kids got really into it, picking up brooms to use as "guns" as they were going to question the suspects. Questionable justice. It was a really fun and communicative activity, and I'm glad we got to try it in the irregular school, because I have a better idea of how to do this type of activity before the topic of past tense comes up in the curriculum for the regular school.
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