Soy una ensena (I'm a teacher)

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These past two days have been pretty crazy! Yesterday I started at the school were I was assigned to teach with my partner, Amanda. The first day was supposed to just be observing the classes. We arrived and met with the Principal. She was very friendly and explained how their NGO, CAFNINA, functions. The school is actually only one of their programs. She of course explained all of this in pretty fast Spanish, but I caught the gist of it. After that, we went to our first class. This class is the older level. They are between 12-20 years old. We just sat in on their math lesson. Their teacher is very young and nice. The kids are pretty loud and a bit disruptive, but not in a disrespectful way, they just like teasing each other and having fun. The second class is made up of younger kids 7-11. They are quite adorable! We went to recess with them and they kept asking us "Como se dice ______ en ingles??" (How do you say _______ in English?) over and over. I was really glad to see how curious and eager they are to learn English, but of course I didn't know a lot of the words in Spanish, so my answer a lot of the time was "no se" (I don't know)! After recess we went back and observed their class.

Today was very different! We arrived and the Principal wasn't there and our Program Director didn't really tell us what to do. We only vaguely knew what our schedule was supposed to be. So we went up to the older kids' classroom, but it was a different teacher! He seemed to not be expecting us, so it was a little bit awkward. But eventually we figured it out. Of course we didn't really have a lesson plan because we didn't know what to expect, so we just came up with ideas as we went along. I speak Spanish better than my partner, so I did almost all of the talking. There was definitely some confusion at times. It's really hard to explain grammar in a foreign language! But we did get through it, and by the end we had gone over expressions like "how are you?", numbers 1-20 (which they mostly already knew), interrogative words, and parts of the classroom. It went well overall, but I had dry mouth by the end! It's pretty nerve racking to teach teenagers in a foreign language when you've never even been a teacher before! They really must have faith in us to have such little supervision! But basically kids are all the same. The interactions were pretty similar as when I tutored in Berkeley and Oakland, except in Spanish. The little kids are really cute, but the class is actually more difficult because they are complete beginners. We went over the alphabet and then tried to sing the alphabet song, but it just sounded like mush! Some of the letters are very hard for them to pronounce, but we're going to work on it everyday. We went over numbers 1-10, which they got pretty well. We also went over colors. Then we had them draw pictures and write the color in english next to the picture. We actually ended up going over our alloted time by half an hour because we didn't have a watch! Oops! But we at least filled the time and the kids actually seemed to be retaining some of it. We spent more time tonight preparing the lesson for tomorrow, so it should be smoother.

Most of my day here is done entirely in Spanish! Talk about immersion! I don't see how I couldn't be much more fluent by the time I return home, it's already gotten much better in a few days. Very, very few people here speak English, like only 3 of the staff members and no one else I've met! It's great for immersion, but makes me very tired having to concentrate so hard everyday! I can't be shy or embarrassed about it though because it's a matter of day to day living.

Overall, it's been very challenging so far, but really great. I feel like I'm learning a lot both about Spanish and Guatemalan culture in general. We even had a guest speaker yesterday come to talk about Guatemalan history. As you can imagine, I was quite interested in that!

Well that does it for today. I hope everyone is doing well. !Hasta Luego!

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