More about Teaching

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On Monday I took several of the lessons myself, as Angelica was precoccupied elsewhere in the Coleigo. Angelica is good at keeping the students in order, and giving them moral lectures as and when necessary. But unfortunately my Spanish is still quite basic, which makes these elements of classroom management pretty difficult when I teach solo. Things got a bit noisy today.

My teaching plan for the durration of my stay is to focus on 'Interests'. So far we´ve covered Sports, Games, and I´ve now moved on to Music with some of the classes. My strategy has been to use these topics of interest to develop dialogues and particularly conversational skills. It also gives the kids a means to talk about themselves and their interestes.

We´ve covered numerous conversations including 'favourites' and 'justifications' (why?/because...). The general English standard is pretty low out here, so I´ve been quite pleased with their understanding so far. Once I´ve covered the whole unit, I hope to try some excercises such as responding to a pen friend, and some spontaneous dialogue. You don´t really realise what a weird language English is until you try and teach it to foreigners... so many exceptions and complications!

Tuesdays lessons went much more smoothly. After school myself, Anna, Mellisa and Hullio, climbed up to some of the ruins that are scattered on the mountainside behind our house. On one side of the valley, you have the main ruins that pull all the tourists into Olly, and on the other there are a few remote Inca ruins... I shouldn´t imagine any tourists get to these as it involves a fair amount of scree slope scrambelling. You get some really good views of the town though.

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