This week was my first week of teaching and believe me I was so happy to start, that’s why I’m here for after all. After three weeks of not doing anything I was suddenly rushed with a million and one things to do. I have been asking for the syllabus since I arrived and every time I was told that it was on the way. However, through no direct fault of anyone in particular, I was told that it still wasn’t ready two days prior to me beginning classes. I told the board that I would make one myself which they agreed to. So everyone who doubts my organisational skills, please note it is fate for me not to be organised, even when I try to be, something gets in the way. I began to plan the syllabus but as I had no idea what the children had done before it was very difficult. In the end I decided to use the first week eliciting what they already knew.
Although my classes have been small I have found them to be very difficult to teach, due to both the size and the range of ability. All of my classes seem to have one or two children who have never studied English before. With a want not to segregate them solely from the rest of the class I have been trying to include them; however this is just not possible. I have to figure a way to teach them the basics such as numbers and colours whilst I teach the rest of the class how to join sentences and conjugate verbs. I don’t particularly want to leave children sitting there for half an hour while I am explaining the task to the other children.
As the learning centre is very limited on resources, I am trying to make lots of resources that they can reuse. So instead of attempting to learn Spanish or reading in the sun, like most normal people would do, I have been sitting in what has felt like a prison this week, the learning centre, cutting out ABC’s and days of the week. WOOHOO! The joys of teaching…who am I kidding, I actually love it!
After finishing my ‘alphabet’ on Wednesday, I returned to my house really late (don’t laugh, 10.00pm is like 4am here) to find the doors locked and everyone in bed. Crap! I could see Paulina and Violetta asleep in bed. Ironically, about an hour before, I had had a conversation with Angela about how her friend had gotten locked out of their host family’s house so ended up sleeping on the lawn with a bunch of laundry to keep her warm. You have no idea how much I didn’t want to wake them but as I stood on the door step in shorts and a t-shirt shivering, I knew I couldn’t do the same thing. The back door I though… but I had no such luck, it was locked. I tried the front door again…Nope. After pacing up and down outside my host families windows for a few minutes, it began to rain. I decided I would have to wake them. I ran around to the back to put my laptop and carefully cut out letters under shelter, I would be damned if they got ruined. All of a sudden, next to the shelter, I spotted a small open window. BINGO! I pushed it further open and tried to climb in, it was literally the smallest space ever but I was determined to get through it. One leg at a time and then my arms. The whole episode would have been hilarious to watch, I would pay to see it on video.
After about five minutes of struggling, a bruised knee and a scrapped arm, I was in. Who knew stealth training was part of the Copey experience?! I opened the door and grabbed my stuff. As I tried to creep into bed, the phone began ringing. All my hard work to not wake the house was about to be undone. I grabbed the phone quickly and in my best Spanglish (a mix between Spanish and English) answered it. ‘Hola….’ No answer. ‘Hola….’ No reply. I hung up. No one around here would call and not say anything at that time of night; I am convinced it was a neighbour calling to check that we were not being burgled. As far as I know, I managed to get away with it and my host family do not know, although just because I haven’t heard anything does not mean that the whole town doesn’t know about the embarrassing affair. Maybe I should just stick to my ‘colour by numbers’ day job and leave the MI5 antics to the professionals.
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