Teaching, or lo que sea

I'm not quite sure what to think of my job. The majority of the students I've had classes with, which at this point is probably around 70 or 80 or so, know almost no English, despite having "studied" the language since they were six. Many don't know how to say "My name is," or "I like." It's not that I was expecting proficiency or anything--in my own high school, the language instruction was similarly lacking, and I made it through three years of French (even having skipped the second level) without being able to string together two sentences. But even then, I had some basic skills. For example, I knew how to tell an extremely descriptive story about a doll being thrown out a window, and I knew the sounds that all the animals made. I wonder what exactly goes on in these students' English classes. Up until now, I haven't had a chance to sit in on a class, and frankly I'm kind of hesitant to do it. I feel kind of like a brat criticizing the performance of people who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching, but there are some teachers at my school that honestly don't seem to do anything. What's worse, I've been witness to some pretty awful examples of teachers consciously deciding not to teach groups of students, and complaining about students (both individual students and entire classes) right in front of them. At the rate I'm going, it seems like the majority of English students will cycle through my classroom about once a month, probably much less. It's kind of difficult to see what my role should be in such a system. I'm tempted to ignore any last minute instructions from teachers about how I should spend my hour with their students (instructions that have amounted to things such as: "practice the pronunciation of the simple past tense"), and just make up my own lessons, culling ideas from my TA days, ESL websites, and random teaching books I've found at the school. But even then, if I'm only seeing a student once a month for an hour, I don't think my effectiveness level will be all that high. So at the moment I'm left fairly unsure of what I'm supposed to be doing. Luckily, the one hour per month these students spend in my classroom is not exceptionally important to their overall education. Still, it would be nice to know that I--and the rest of the English Department--wasn't wasting their time. And in addition, it'd be nice to spend the next seven months feeling useful and effective in what I came here to do.

This post, I'm realizing, has taken a definite turn for the negative, belying the fact that I've also had a lot of fun working at the Alta Axarquia, and that I've even had some very successful classes. For example, during Thursday and Friday of last week, I was in charge of coordinating Halloween activities for all of the students of English. Over the two days, a few hundred students made their way down to a classroom that had been decked-out in truly ridiculous Halloween decorations (including a 12-foot hanging witch that lit up), and cycled through handmade Halloween Bingo, team Trick-or-Treat-offs, and (a very enthusiastic, and very wet) bobbing for apples station. Luis, my director, insisted that we put dozens of tea tree candles all over the tables and then light them--I protested that this seemed somewhat dangerous, what with the hundreds of screaming kids running all over the place, but my concerns were shot down--which led to me very nearly lighting a decorative broomstick on fire. But very nearly lighting something on fire is quite different from actually lighting something on fire, and everybody seemed to have a lot of fun. There was an excess of cheap Spanish candy, an impressive amount of dressing up, and, and a good deal of fairly useless Halloween vocabulary being thrown around. The kids, for the most part, were--and have been--awesome. It's fun to have your name known by the majority of students in a school, and for them to call your name when they see you in the hall, or to stick their head out the window and call to you as you head home for the day. They seem pretty excited that I'm here, which makes everything so much better.

On a related note, I was inspired by Abi's post about the hilarious things that seem to come up in language classes--here are a few of my own:

- On a recent vocabulary test, one of my director's students wrote "coche" (car) next to the word "smart." I thought this was exceedingly clever and warranted at least a note from Luis, if not half a point.

- Emily, one of the the other lectoras in Periana (she's at the colegio, I'm at the instituto), told me that in one of her classrooms, a poster read: Do you have your rubber? The amount of proper English shoved down these kids' throats astounds me. Today, I was told that I couldn't write the word "neighbor;" it needs a "u." In an elementary-level book for a different class (that not a single student understands), the word "bonnet" shows up on the first page, in reference to a car. I still have no idea what that means.

- Apparently it's a running joke in Spain that Spaniards can't distinguish between the pronunciations of "shit" and "sheet," nor "bitch" and "beach." This is a common dinnertime conversation, though it has yet to come up in class.