I was so nervous I left my place at 5:30AM to be sure I was on time (I sat outside the classroom for nearly an hour, which didn't help my anxiety). Fortunately, I managed to get from Heredia (where I live) to Alajuela (where the high school is, and unfortunately about 25 kilometers away) in less than an hour and a half. I think I'll leave at around 6:10AM next week; that's still pretty early for a Saturday morning.
The Class
The students are absolutely wonderful, which makes up for the entire lack of media in the classroom. There weren't even white board pens or erasers. It was by some miracle that I bought dry-erase pens and had them in my pencil case (everyone in Costa Rica uses pencil cases... and fanny packs).
Though every student save one showed up exactly 10 minutes late (Tico time), they were entirely engaged from 8AM-noon. I nearly forgot about their break in the middle of the class, and not a single student reminded me. My other teachers were right about the high school students; their brains are like wet sponges. They were forming greater understanding as I watched.
The Bad
In addition to having neither markers, erasers, projectors, electronics, or A/C, I had created a lesson plan for the wrong section, in the wrong book. Fortunately, I had time to scramble (while we did introductions and discussed what the students learned during their last English block (with a fellow Politecnico professor). I quickly flipped through one of the students' textbooks as soon as the panic wore off. There was a section in their textbook called "Our Planet" which corresponded pretty well to my lesson planned around "Experiencing Nature and Talking about the Environment." Saved! I wasn't able to do the same grammar focus or activities from the book, but I was able to use many of my other activities.
Highlights of my first day with my own class
- I realize I can be as goofy as I want (and I think it helps increase motivation and decrease negative affect/anxiety) because nobody that knows me is watching.
- The incredible attitude, understanding, and maturity of my little high schoolers.
- THEY'RE LITTLE. I know that if I was teaching high school seniors in the US there would be more than a few of them towering over me. My students are anywhere from 5 foot 6 to about 4 feet tall. It was in no way confusing who was the teacher. In the future I can shave before class.
- The expression "fake it 'til you make it" really does hold up. I had students out of their seats at the end of class because they were so engaged, and many did the typical Tico move of thanking me afterwards.
- TWO ACTIVITIES in particular:
- In order to create our symantic map on nature (Symantic map = web of related words around a common theme) I broke the class into three groups and gave them 5 minutes to make lists of words pertaining to the topic. Then I called up a representatives from each team to read off their lists one at a time. The awesome part: I had them compete "Boggle Style" with their lists. I strongly suggest this activity; I think I'll add it to Politecnico's "Resource Library" (in quotes because their currently isn't anything in the library).
- One of the things we're supposed to incorporate into every class is an opportunity for extended speech production. Our goal is also to maximize student talk time. To do this, I gave each group of students a jar of play-dough and the instructions "I was out (somewhere in nature), when I found a (make something out of your play-dough)." As a group, the students were to make an object, describe how they found it in the forest/ocean/beach/sky/desert/snow, and what happened next. I asked them to use the class discussion as inspiration, and the result was hilarious. One group told a story about killing a spider in a cave (very artistic spider), another found a ukulele-playing alien in the forest, another was abducted by an alien, and the fourth found a skeleton sun-tanning on the beach. Everyone had a lot of fun, and I am confident the students learned something.
Moving Forward
I'm going to search Politecnico to find the right book and secure myself a copy. It is really hard to teach grammar and writing, on the fly, as a new professor. I definitely need to focus on grammar and other quantifiable aspects of language moving forward.
I spend the last five minutes of class getting feedback from the students about the current class and what they'd like to see more off in the future. The responses shocked me. The students candidly admitted that they needed more work on pronunciation and grammar, though they also acknowledged (correctly) that they always want more vocabulary. Another thing that surprised me was how they all understood the importance of language production and requested that we do more presentations. They rock!
As crazy as it sounds, I may request to continue teaching high school classes after this rotation. They meet Saturday morning, but down here in Costa Rica I'm not really crazy about staying out late or drinking. The buses even stop picking people up after a certain hour.
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