Clases de Inglés

Aside from San Roque, my main job at CENIT is organising, planning and, somehow, teaching English at CENIT's Primary School. Estar, the Primary School at the CENIT centre, has only 3 classes in it. Because it has to take children much older than they should be (market children who were not sent to school at the normal age often are refused entry into other schools, so go to Estar where they can begin at any age), it condenses 6 years into three, resulting in three classes of children aged between 7 and 16, and total chaos. When you tell someone in CENIT that you work English Classes, they give you a dry smile and wish you luck. There are 6 classes every week - 3rd Level have 2, 2nd Level have 3, and 1st Level have one double length class. There are either two or three volunteers in each class, and we run the classes alone. At present I plan the whole of 3rd and 1st Level, and together with another volunteer plan the 2nd Level. Improvement is slow, lessons in which no headway whatsoever is made are frequent, and the potential for disheartenment is very, very high. These children have energy that flares off constantly; they fight, they shout, they sulk - they have teenager problems, and they have very, very serious other problems. In the most terrifyingly offhand manner one Ecuadorian teacher informed me one day when all attempts at control and discipline had been abandoned, and the class had descended to something resembling a Medievil battlefield, that every child in the class was the subject of physical abuse at home, and that 60% were the victims of sexual abuse as well. Into this background step three gringos, trying to teach a language they don't want to learn...

Our principal challenges are preventing fighting, encouraging sitting down and actually doing some work, and creating work that will actually get done. Some are very, very clever; some are very, very sweet - most are very, very quick tempered, and the majority are just hitting those charming teenge years, which compounded with Latin Americans' love of dramatic and clichêd romantic gestures, means that they flirt, terribly, all the time. They kick, punch, throw furniture, pull hair, shout, scream, try to beat each other to death with broomsticks, and so on. They do not do the slightest bit of work without their teachers putting in 50 times more. We plan, very, very hard, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. On a good day they will work every example perfectly, and make the bounds of initiative that in children can so often lead to perfect understanding of something we hadn't even meant to teach, but the most clear explanation will escape everyone if one child is having a bad day, so there is not opportunity for their teachers to have bad days. I have been trying to steer the focus of these classes away from straightforward vocabulary to an understanding of how to form their own sentences by subversively teaching basic grammer rules. This means hiding the rule behind some kind of arbitrary process, and eventually demonstrating the extent of their learning by making them use their initiative on an unfamiliar example.

This approach, 'grammer without the grammer', means first using sentence templates and providing a very limited vocabulary list to try to force them to make their own sentences with a single subject type of a single verb, and slowly using the same type of template with other subject types and object types, always creating some kind of interesting theme to base them on (last week: insults with 'you are') and eventually springing a test on them which makes them realise that they can actually use the language that they know. It is a slow process, but every time they realise that they can do something, their sense of pride and achievement is amazing. I believe it will transpire in the coming weeks that their total lack of interest in the language is the result of having focussed for so long on learning massive vocabulary lists, and never feeling like their could actually say anything.

We have been concentrating on individual work - I make worksheets for them, try to make them look interesting and teach new rules clearly and subtly, and photocopy them for the classes - because this means we can mark their work and give it back witha grade, and allows us to identify in what areas each child needs help. The greatest thing this approach has achieved, however, is to develop some pride in their own work - a low grade, obviously considered and recorded, is an incentive to work harder, whereas a high grade makes them proud, giving them the self-confidence they need to use their initiative to learn harder rules. Successful use of their initiative gives them a sense of success, which in turn nurtures a desire to learn.