Some days I love being in the schools: the kids are learning and interested, they come up and hug me, I enjoy talking with the teachers and feel like we're having a great exchange of ideas. Life in Panama is good.
Other days I feel like breaking down and crying, screaming in anger, or both simultaneously, at the students who don't care and who disrespect their teachers, and at teachers who aren't motivated to plan engaging lessons for their students and who don't put in effort to improve their English.
Most days are somewhere in between these two extremes. Let me shed some light on these emotions with a story of one of my weeks about a month ago.
The setting and characters:
I was working in the colegio with the professor who teaches 8th and 9th grade. Now this is a teacher who really means well and he wants to help his students. He has come to all of our charlas, so he has only shown me that he is motivated towards improving and helping his students, but as this story shows, there are some things that are still lacking.
The current unit was weather, so at the beginning of the week when I asked what he was working on, he showed me to handouts with some readings for the students on the topic of natural disasters. In my opinion, the one he had chosen for 8th grade was actually harder than the one for 9th grade, but both were over the heads of the students. But at this point, I couldn't talk him through choosing something else as he had already been working on these readings for a week and a half (?!?). So I went with it.
Act 1:
He told me he wanted to work on pronunciation - which made me happy, since I feel like that is something missing in most teachers' English curriculum here. So off we went to class. He proceeded to read the passages while the students thoughtlessly repeated after him. He then asked me to be the reader so that the students would learn a better accent from me. This killed me because the students - unless they are internally motivated and extremely interested in English already (not the norm) - aren't going to actually learn how to pronounce the words just by repeating after me.
The other issue was that only about one third to one half of the students actually had the handout. Here, the students have to pay 5 cents per page for copies (they are not covered by the school), so some of the students didn't want, or couldn't, pay for the copies, and others had lost or forgotten the handout(or as they say here: it left me at home), so only a few actually had the page to follow along. The others were talking, throwing things across the room, and generally not paying attention and being disruptive. While this in itself infuriated me, more than half of my anger and frustrations were directed at the teacher who had planned this lesson without any engaging materials or activities. If I were a student, I probably would have been behaving in a similar way (or at least considering it). I got so upset at one point, I left a class 5 minutes early. I was just about at the point of tears and/or screaming and yelling.
So what to do? That afternoon during a free period, I talked with the teacher about behavior. It doesn't matter if the students have the copy or not - they need to be actively trying to engage in the class. This means sharing with a student near you who does have the copy, sitting straight in their chair, looking at the speaker (whether the teacher or another student), and participating when asked. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to talk to him about how to make this kind of lesson more engaging at this point in time.
Act 2:
The next day we went to class and spent between 20 and 30 minutes (of the 40 minute class period) talking to the students about behavior. The teacher did most of the talking, but I also tried to impress upon them that the only way they were going to learn was to practice. The worst class (which is also the largest with about 35 students) was still talking and not paying attention while the teacher was trying to talk to them about this serious topic (in Spanish). I was getting more and more angry and when I finally was given the opportunity to talk, I refused to talk over them and waited until they quieted down. I then told them that their behavior was teaching me that panamanians aren't respectful, shouldn't be respected, and that since they weren't listening to their teacher, why should I listen to them? Now, I know that this isn't true. Panamanians are wonderful people and I hold many in high regard. But that's not what their behavior was communicating to me.
10 minutes later, I hope that I got something across to them about behavior and about how to learn a language. I understand - I learned French through middle and high school all the way through college. I have learned Spanish since arriving in Panama in January. I get that languages can be hard to learn. But you won't learn unless you pay attention and practice. Now, my little soap-box speech probably didn't change any lives or drastically change their attitude, but I did get a round of applause when I sat back down and I hope that it might have encouraged a couple of them in the right direction.
The teacher finished out the classes by continuing to work on pronunciation, which was just as un-engaging as before. But he asked if I could come to class the next day. I needed to prepare for a charla the following day, but I said I could come to the first 3 classes. Boy, am I glad I agreed to that.
Act 3:
I arrived, and he started going over some pronunciation but quickly let me have the reins for the class. I tried to tie the words back to their meanings and get the students to understand the words alongside learning how to pronounce them. I also tried to explain why you pronounce them a certain way. I really want to help the teachers teach phonics, but it's hard when I'm only with a teacher for 2 days every 3 or 4 weeks.
Then we went to that biggest class where I had my big speech. They were still misbehaving some, ut I took over and with an impromptu lesson got them interested, paying attention, and participating. Now, don't take this to mean that I have all the answers and I'm some magical teacher who knows the secrets to getting students to engage with and learn the material. It's much more likely that I just got lucky with this lesson, but I have learned a lot about how to try to connect with the students and not just have rote lessons of memorization with copying and repeating.
I wrote the words up on the board, had them do some repeting after me (they need to have some base to work from) but then had them do most of the pronunciation both in groups and individually. With some of the harder words (like biodegradable. No, I don't know why they need to know this word... again, I was just going with what I had to work with) I told them that we were going to repeat in rows, so I went row-by-row and had them repeat after me, then I told them that when I pointed at their row, they had to say the word. This aspect of competition and unexpectedness got their attention. I was still having trouble with one row in particular that just refused to say the word - only 1 or 2 students were saying it, and only softly. The competition helped them a fair bit.
But then I did the same thing with another word and that difficult row finally participated! I gave them some praise when they all said it loudly (the word before, it had pretty much stopped the game), but kept moving on because I didn't want to overly praise the behavior that I expected of them.
At the end of the lesson, the students were happy, wanting me to come back and teach all the time. That made me feel great. Then the icing on the cake: the teacher thanked me so much for being with him and helping him - that he had learned a lot from that lesson. Just from my impromptu lesson trying to focus on getting the students to participate.
Epilogue:
At that moment I thought: this is my Peace Corps experience in a nutshell and what I hope continues to happen. Occasionally there are extreme frustrations, but I keep on working and, in the end, hopefully the teacher learns how to become a better teacher and how to engage his students, and the students become interested in English and enjoy class. That's really the purpose of my work in the schools.
Now, this isn't an every day, every week, or even every month experience. But it does happen occasionally, and those are the days that I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing here. It was a great feeling to have that feedback from the students and the teacher, and I hope that I can continue with that kind of work as much as possible.
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