Who thought I would be teaching English in a high school here in Argentina? I certainly did not.
A friend of mine on staff here goes every Wednesday to the local high school to teach English. He will be away for a week or two shortly and the classes need to continue, so I wandered over there to join him in his classes. This would give me some clue as to what to do when I take them over while he is away.
The school we teach at (on the right).
The first thing that impacted me about it all was the newness of the school. It was a reasonably large school and I had seen dozens of children walking to and from the place every day, yet there seemed to be very few around as we entered the yard. Perhaps this was just because they were all in classes. We had arrived a few minutes late.
I guess I was expecting some sort of class when we turned up, some sort of assembly of students either inside or outside of the classroom. On the walk here I had been warned that at times the students do not turn up or arrive late. We had discussed how the class had dwindled from around 20 students to significantly less... it was just that I was not expecting this much less.
There was one student that we managed to find. We dragged him in from the hallway where he was busy doing his homework. One of the few students actually obliged to be in the class because of a fund the governments provides them with, his attitude to learning was directly related to how much actual work was required of him during the class.If there was little work then he was happy and buoyant, but a bunch of exercises and he wiggled and wormed as if it may help him escape. It didn't.
Classes were divided into one hour blocks, with our one lonely year 7 student taking the first hour, and whoever decided to turn up from the year 8's during the second. Our first class dragged on somewhat, as I sat and listened to the basic teachings about the words
"this" and
"that" and a list of colours. Soon there were exercises involving the writing down such variations as
"This ball is black" and
"That car is white" which filled up much of the time. So too did fending off all of the procrastination techniques our subject was able to invent before actually getting down to do the work.
On the hour we changed classes. Not classrooms, just classes. Within five minutes, all of the students that we would have for our second class had arrived. Both of them. It seemed to me at the time that perhaps a better name in place of
"class" would be
"tutorial", although I was told that there can be quite a few more students than appeared today at times.
It turned out that our two students were running at different levels of skill, so rather than try to tackle the whole thing together, I was invited to teach one while the other was brought up to speed. It seemed reasonable to me, so I grabbed a piece of chalk and got started.
Now it is worth mentioning here that a long time ago, back before the turn of the millennium, I was a dinkum teacher (Hmm, am I really that old?). So after striking up some words on the blackboard with chalk, it brought back a whole bunch of memories of a time I had long left behind. Before too long, in my enthusiasm, I had whittled my chalk stick down to a stub. All that remained was a tell-tale pile of white dust at the base of the board.
The rest of that day went fast, and very soon I was marking the work of my one student and giving him his homework. We had talked about the words
"big",
"small",
"long" and
"short", and I am pretty sure that by the end of the class he understood the meaning of each of these concepts. Since I will be returning next week again, there will be opportunity to check on my work. It had been an interesting day.
What surprised me the most about all of this was that I actually enjoyed myself as I taught these basic concepts. Granted that it is much easier to walk into somebody's class and take one or two days as I am now doing, than to actually teach over the long haul, but this short-term opportunity is shaping up to be enjoyable.
Would I ever like to be a teacher again? Nope. No chance. But it has been fun, and as long as the students continue to learn, and my friend returns to pick up the classes again, then I think I will enjoy it.