First Two Days of Teaching

Monday and Tuesday were the first two days that we international teachers had a schedule and supposed lesson plans. I say "supposed" lesson plans for two reasons. The first is that I teach gym class. For me, lesson planning a gym class just means keeping a record of all the games we've already played so that I can be sure to keep our activities diverse. It also means that I prepare ability-appropriate activities for students with special needs. I planned September last Sunday, in about ten minutes. Lesson planning for the Language classes I teach is different, however. First, we were told that the students would all have English Language books from which we would get our lesson planning (apparently here the lesson plan is "follow the book," so I'm going with the flow). So I lesson-planned September Language classes as "Follow the book." I also have a battery of wordy games and songs to do with the students when we reach the point in our 70-minute sessions of speaking in a foreign language (for the kids) when they just break down and the boys start fighting and the girls start coloring and doing their hair. Turns out, they won't be getting their books until October and we're supposed to be reviewing what the kids learned last year. Okay, I can handle that. But it would be helpful to know what the kids learned last year. So for right now all I'm doing is playing wordy games and singing wordy songs and with the younger kids I'm doing lots of repeat-after-me games and sing-along lots-of-motions songs.

Monday was a disaster. That's why I decided to wait until today to post on my blog because I don't like posting after a bad day; I'd much rather wait until after something good has happened so I won't sound angry. I didn't know I wouldn't have a book to work from until I arrived in the 3rd-grade classroom to teach English and the teacher told me what I just told you. And didn't tell me what I just told you that I still don't know. So I tried several games with the kids but it was still too early in the morning for them to be able to pay any attention to me. Failure. After that class, I was on duty to watch recess, which was fine. Then I had the middle of the day to myself so I made a gigantic Scrabble set out of letter tiles we have in the staff lounge to take with me to the 4th-grade class that afternoon. I had some trouble getting the 4th-graders to focus, mainly because they had just come inside from the second recess, so after a few minutes I just sat down and waited for everyone to get quiet. I'm still surprised that worked. My favorite bribe thus far for getting kids to do whatever educational (aka boring) is to tell them that whoever wins (because it's always a contest if I can make it into one, it helps make them want to do well) the current activity gets to pick the next one. That also worked with the 4th-graders, but after a 75-minute session with them and playing soccer with the kids a recess I was pooped and still had to teach Corporal Expression to the 5th graders. In my lesson plan, for the first day of CE and for all kids who are physically able (aka everyone that can both see and walk), I had tire relay races. Now, it is understandable for you to be questioning: "Tires? Why tires?" The answer is simple. They're my only resource for now until I can go shopping with one of the school directors to buy soccer balls and basketballs. I brought frisbees, but it's too early in the year for that. I pumped up two kickballs at the beginning of the year, but one has already exploded and the other is the only ball I have. There's also the basketball I found, but it's too old to be useful and the fact that the kids only want to kick it doesn't help the fact that I already have to pump air into it twice a day. The the basketball is in hiding until further notice. Yesterday was just a really stressful and tiring day. We also spent all afternoon shopping downtown and at the Cooperativa (I just call it the coop now) for food and other things for this week. We found a place where hopefully I can buy an Ecuador jersey that fits me, Leslie bought flowers, we bought a MoviStar sim card for our phone so that calling our friends will be 8-times cheaper, we bought food and we did something else I can't remember right now. And after all this and the Ecuadorian chocolate liqueur we bought to try I still couldn't sleep well last night.

Today has been a blast. I started the day with a doubleshot of second-graders (my 70ish-minute Language classes are two time blocks put together) for Language and I showed up mentally prepared to just play silly games and do silly songs. We started with head, shoulders knees and toes because when the kids sing along they're learning several parts of the human body. We also did a walkthrough of a regular morning with lots word reciting and of motions. Did you know how many things you have to do to be able to take a shower in the morning? Assuming you're already awake and out of bed, you have to take off whatever clothes you're wearing, open the door or curtain, make the big step into the stall, close the door or curtain, get the water started, get wet, put the shampoo on your hands, use the shampoo, get your soap ready however you prefer to use it, clean your body paying particular attention to your bottom because it's funny, wash all the soap and shampoo off of your body, turn off the water, open the door or curtain, take the big step out of the stall, close the door or curtain, grab your towel, dry off your body paying particular attention to your bottom because it's funny (you can also dry off inside the stall of course but we didn't), put your clothes on and leave the bathroom. And that's just taking a shower; what going through an entire morning routine would be like and imagine all the important words you can learn! Yes, today was a much better day than yesterday. The second-graders were too young to play with the big scrabble letters because they couldn't pay attention long enough to realize that you're supposed to use letters to make words, instead of using letters to build castles and tall stacks of nothing. What got them on the right track was that I offered to take them outside for our last several minutes together if each kid in the class made a word out of the letters on his or her table. The girls all spelled their names, which was no small feat considering their names are Arianna, Trinity and Lizbeth (my guess is that's the new trendy way to name your child Elizabeth in Ecuador). The other two girls needed considerable help from the national teacher and the therapist to be able to make words, but that's not because they aren't bright, only because they have physical limitations that make seeing and lining up tiles very difficult. A couple of the boys who really wanted to go play outside pondered and peddled their letters until they could come up with words like "cat" and "moon" and as soon as they had their words I let them go help the other several boys. Of course, that means that every other boy in the class ended up with the word "moon," but I thought that was clever enough to pass once and we went outside to play. Outside, I learned that these 2nd-graders are physically incapapble of lining up on a line and standing still for longer than it takes to say "Okay, what we're going to-." But it's all good, learning experience for me and nobody got killed or maimed. My next class today was these same kids for CE. Those who were able enjoyed rolling the tires around the concrete basketball/soccer area and I don't remember what we played after that but they enjoyed that as well. Actually I don't think they played anything after that because they arrived to my class around fifteen minutes late and the tires kept the entertained for the other twenty. The two girls Tati and Maria Josue, who both have trouble walking and Maria is mostly blind (I'm not sure what "mostly" means, that's just what I was told), sat down in the shade with Caro their national teacher and played pass by rolling the ball to each other with the basketball. I consider getting those two girls active in a CE class to be a special enough occasion for the basketball to appear.
My next class was CE with the first-graders. When they heard me say "Okay, everybody line up behind a tire" immediately their faces lit up and they didn't wait for me to tell them what to do. Those tires were rolling all over the place and they never would have stopped if some of them hadn't gotten tired and started to sit out. I wanted to play tag with them, but they'd never heard of it! What first grader hasn't ever played tag! Aside from the ones in the US right now, of course, because tag is obviously too violent an activity for children to be playing at school. Somebody might have an uh-oh and get a boo-boo and that's definitely not allowed at school in the US. The stranger part is that all the kids at the CEDEI school have heard of Sharks and Minnows and play in on the basketball court. I immediately changed the name of "Tag" to "Shark" and all of a sudden all the kids knew how to play. That was a lot of fun.
My last class of the day - I have more classes on Tuesday and Friday than any other day - I had CE with the 4th-graders. They were excited to play with the tires only because I told them the winner of the last race would get to choose what we played next. And they chose Red Rover. I had heard that the kids at this school love playing Red Rover (if you don't know what it is, wikipedia probably has a good page for it) So we played Red Rover which was interesting because the kids aren't old enough yet to be able to break each others' grips.
All-told, the day was much better because the kids enjoyed my classes more which made me enjoy my classes more and though I was equally exhausted going home from work I was in a much better mood.

Also, we're much closer to finding tickets to the Ecuador-Uruguay game. We're on a waiting list for a package deal which include a private bus roundtrip, one night in a hotel with breakfast, the game ticket and a sack lunch for eating at the stadium. We also think we've found people in Quito who can buy tickets for us (because they're only being sold at the stadium) and get them to us for a little more than the price of the tickets, which all things considered is incredibly cheap.

I'm excited for tomorrow; I only have three class periods and they should all go fairly well. Wednesday is my easy day. I may post again tomorrow evening, but after that I'll probably have to wait for the weekend :-P