So I thought I should talk a little about teaching and the school because that is the main chunk of my time during the day. I have been officially teaching for 5 class. The school is run by Proyecto MAMA which is an origination based here in Honduras that is focused on helping young mothers. They provide a lot help in the form of education because private schools are better but expensive and public school aren’t known for quality, plus the teachers sometimes strike because of political stuff that I don’t know well enough to try to explain. But I’ve heard stories of kids having teachers at school only a couple times a month. In short education is a good strategy for Proyecto MAMA to provide aid. They have scholarship programs that sponsors kids to go to private school as well as offers tutoring classes, library facilities, and other classes at low cost (English, Computers). The computer classes I teach are about $4.50 total, $1.50 to sign up and about $1.00 per month for each of the 3 month course (1 trimester).
My first week here I was told was to prep for classes that start next week. That’s all they told me. I lucked out because I actually have an intern, give it a sec to let the irony soak in. She is going to graduate (the equivalent of) high school and she needs to do an internship type thing. She was a lot of help pointing me in right direction to start because she has been involved with the facility in other ways before. I had to come up with a schedule for the classes I was going to teach, so I whipped up an Excel spreadsheet to rough out a weekly schedule. I felt like I was throwing darts at a wall. After putting classes on Thursdays, I was told that Thursdays were reserved for kids who come for tutoring. My classes are open to the public but the kids who come for tutoring get to come in and play educational games on Thursdays. So after a few more stumbles through the process I finally had a schedule and so far I had only 6 students all signed up for beginning classes. I’m supposed to offer a variety of levels of difficulty. That didn’t seem so bad; I was looking at 2 classes of the same level one in the morning one in the afternoon. That meant 1 set of one hour lesson plans, in Spanish, to give twice on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Well since then I (as of today) now have 17 students, 3 classes of beginners one class is two 8 year old girls, 2 intermediate classes and an advanced class. Which, equates to 4 sets of lesson plans and being tired at the end of the day. I have a wide range of ages of students, from about 8 years to about 50 years.
I think I’m getting past the initial shock of the amount of work that this will actually be and starting to get some semblance of a rhythm. Teaching in Spanish is definitely getting easier as the classes go by, probably a little because of my improving Spanish but probably mostly them getting better at understanding broken Spanish. Sometimes when I teach I feel like 100% of my Spanish grammar is incorrect. But even so it’s still pretty neat to people’s eyes light up a bit, and you can tell without asking that they just comprehended the concept.
I feel like I have some big shoes to fill. The last teacher was a YAMEN volunteer from Columbia, so he was fluent in Spanish. The person before him was a guy from the States who came with a similar language barrier issue as mine but was here for 3 years. So he is remembered as being well versed in Spanish. Despite this, people are very patient with me and are understanding when I ask them to please slow down their lightning fast speech.
Also some random facts about my time here that you may or may not know:
I’ve already gone through one cell phone, broke it playing Ninja. (If you don’t know what Ninja is talk to your local junior high or high school student)
I’ve been to the doctor once already, some kind of stomach bug that I had for a week-ish, think I’m about done with it.
And
I haven’t shaved in about 3 weeks, it might be time.
Thanks for reading.
If you have questions shoot me an email.
