Teaching Actual Youths

Word of the day

primaria multigrado- the Nicaraguan equivalent of a one room school house

I've somewhat recently started a new lil project: teaching English at a rural multigrado school called El Penon. The profe there, a really smart guy who works really hard, asked me if I would be interested in teaching some classes there to his primary school to 4th-6th graders to help them get a head start for high school. There are also some students there who study in what are called "ciclos," (cycles) a one day a week form of high school taught by only one teacher (which sounds dubious to me, but I guess more education is better than less, right?) and he wanted to include them as well. At first I told him I was too busy, but then I realized that the real issue was that I was too lazy...While my Wednesdays are now legitimately a 12 hour marathon of time out in the campo (when all the classes actually happen, which is basically never), it's been really rewarding. And I have other times to nap. Like today...(Not even going to get into it, it's too depressing.)

Teaching younger kids is really interesting. For one thing, they catch on really quickly. I've only taught a few classes so far, but after teaching a class about "What is your name?" and then coming back two weeks later, they still were totally awesome at the dialog we were practicing, which let me tell you, rarely happens in high school. Brain plasticity! The classroom management issues are also a little bit different. There's a lot of rough housing and other silliness. However, while some kids are really shy, many haven't gotten to the awkward teenager stage yet and have pretty much no pena, which is amazing. They also haven't gotten the jaded high schooler attitude yet. A pretty common whine I hear from the high schoolers when I tell them to do work is "Profe, no quieroooooooo" (Teacher, I don't wannaaaaaaa) which is not anything an 8 year from the campo says. Again, awesome.

However, I have a lot more respect for the environment volunteers, who work with primary schoolers now. It is really hard to teach on kids level without talking down yet while still being understandable. I kind of feel like that in the high school sometimes too, but in the primary school it's definitely worse. Part of the issue is that the kids don't have much understanding about how their own language works yet, never mind another. I've also gotten really used to giving at least 50% (if not more) of my classroom commands in English, and I decided to introduce that bit by bit, but it still sometimes slips out, and it weirds them out a lot more because they aren't used to me yet. 

More stories of youths and hopefully some photos to come! We'll see how this goes...