Wherever you go, go with all your heart.: Last Weeks in the Primaria and Explaining MEDUCA

Continuing off of my English Week post – I spent the next couple of weeks tying up loose ends and cleaning up the school after the English Week celebrations. I also was trying to set some goals to accomplish before my time at the primary school came to an end. My main goal was to help the teachers implement phonics. In order to explain why I thought this was important, let me explain a little bit about the English teaching and educational system here in Panama.

The Ministry of Education (MEDUCA) hires people to be English teachers who have studied English in college – this means that most of the time the English teachers have not actually studied teaching and that speaking English (at least on paper) is one of the only requirements. This results in having some great teachers that are completely dedicated to their students and will go above and beyond to be the best teacher they can be. But also, on the flip side, there are also a good number of teachers who don’t know much about teaching techniques and aren’t very motivated to improve. They care about their students, of course, but they just view their job as an 8-3 (or, as it may be here, 7-1) job and they aren’t willing to do much outside of that. Of course, these are generalizations and there are teachers all over the spectrum, but that gives you an idea of the source of some of the issues in the schools here.

In order to help their teachers improve their methodology, MEDUCA provides a week-long summer seminar (during their summer – January) and other workshop opportunities throughout the year. By attending these seminars and workshops, the teachers earn MEDUCA points. With these points they can apply for better jobs within MEDUCA. I don’t quite understand this system for one main reason – while the couple of seminars that I have attended have been useful information and well presented, the teachers don’t always implement what they learn, implying that they aren’t actually changing or improving their methodologies, so the points don’t actually correspond to whether or not they are good teachers (for example, one of the best teachers that I work with is only a second year teacher, and one of the worst has years of teaching experience, is a permanent teacher, and can’t speak English very well).

The result of this system is that students are graduating high school after having English for 12 years and are not able to speak or understand the language. This is why MEDUCA invited Peace Corps volunteers to work alongside their teachers so that we could bring some fresh ideas into the system.

So… one long explanation later – I decided that one of the things that I might be able to successfully implement with my four primary school teachers was teaching phonics. They weren’t teaching phonics, and a lot of the way that they are used to teaching pronunciation is to write letters that, when said with a Spanish pronunciation, will sound like the English word. While this can be helpful at times, over using it will teach the students only the Spanish-pronunciation word, not the actual English word.

I wanted to show my teachers that if they start teaching the pronunciation of English letters and words from a young age, the students will have a much better accent and be able to sound out words instead of always looking to the teacher when they encounter a word that they don’t recognize as a sight-word (word that they’ve just memorized). Granted, phonics won’t be as effective for ESL or EFL students as they are with native speakers because the ESL/EFL students won’t have encountered as many words in conversation, but it can still be an extremely useful tool for pronunciation and word recognition.

In the couple of weeks I had left at the primary school after English Week, I tried to plan with each of them to implement some phonics lessons. I even gave them suggestions as to what letters/sounds to teach with each of their lessons for the trimester and went to each one of their classes and gave a sample lesson with phonics. This had mixed results because I ended up trying to do it all in the last week I was there. Of the days that I actually taught, one of the teachers had something else planned that day, so I didn’t actually get to show him the lesson, another teacher had a prior commitment, so I ended up teaching half of his classes without him there, and half of the other students were too young to really start teaching phonics (I decided to start doing this is 2^nd grade). So, it didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped, but hopefully with continued encouragement from me, they might end up working it into some of their lesson plans.

After that last week, I was kind of sad to have to leave the lower school because I felt like I was finally truly getting into the rhythm of things there and figuring out how I could be of the most help. But, then it was time to switch to the high school. But first – my parents came and I had two weeks of training. Descriptions of those to come in the next couple of posts!

I'll leave you with a few pictures from English Week: