Over the
past few weeks, I haven’t posted very much about the volunteer projects. Since that is the whole purpose of the trip, I
think it’s time to write an update. Last
Friday was my last day teaching English at the school, and these last two weeks,
I am working at an orphanage for boys called Remar.
After just
three short weeks teaching, I have to give a tip of my hat to every teacher. Yes, it is very rewarding, but teaching is
also mentally and physically exhausting, and at times can be
disconcerting. During the three weeks at
the school, we taught three to four classes a day with between thirty and forty
student in each, four days a week. In
total, that meant we taught the few hundred students that made up the entire
school. Fortunately, we were able to get
to know a few of the students somewhat well during the daily recess, but for
the most part, classrooms were full of nameless faces.
The time at
the school was full of a lot of memories, most positive and a few
frustrating. We did finally get to teach
them the formal rules to baseball, which was a lot of fun for the children and
resulted in a resounding win for the boys’ team and their brilliant coach. (In all fairness, I gave the girls’ pitchers
a strike zone large enough to drive a small car through.) Unfortunately, I never had the chance to
teach the formal rules to fútbol
norteamericano, although we did spend a few recesses firing the pigskin. We also ended up teaching everything from the
months and days of the week to the youngest kids to directional prepositions to
the oldest class.
I can
gladly say that my teaching skills greatly improved from that disaster of the
first class, but it is hard to tell exactly how much help our being there did. Learning is a two way process, and with the
exception of handful of students in each class, many of the students seemed
disinterested in learning English. I
kept in mind that although I took Spanish from kindergarten on, I didn’t really
appreciate the importance of what I was learning until high school. Even with that in mind, the low point came one
day with one of our older classes, probably late middle school or early high
school by U.S. standards. Each student
had been assigned one irregular verb to learn in the present and past tense—two
words in total each. They had had a week
to learn them, and when we had the class go through it, almost no one could pronounce
their words, and many did not even know what their verb meant.
The other
frustrating experience was not so much related to learning English, but rather
the quality of education that the students were receiving in general. In our younger classes of twelve year olds,
we tried to teaching how to ask for and tell the time in English. For the exercise, we came up with a game that
involved them reading a drawn analog clock, and writing a sentence with the
time. In a couple of the classes, it
quickly became apparent that the problem was not just their understanding of English,
but rather that the children had never learned how to read an analog clock at
all.
In total,
the experience at the school was a wonderful experience, even with the occasional
frustration. I hope that at least a few
of the children will have found some inspiration or motivation in what we
taught them. Before I left for the trip,
my mom and sister did an incredible job of donating a suitcase full of games,
children’s books, and Spanish-English dictionaries for me to bring. I left about half of the things with the
school, and can happily say that the teacher, Manuel, seemed very grateful for
the donation. The other half of the
stuff I have been distributing to the orphanage of the course of a few
days. I will have a more thorough post about
the orphanage next week. It’s probably
best that I give myself a week there before I jump to conclusions about the
situation. In the meantime, this weekend
will be my first long distance excursion from Cusco, as I will be spending my
weekend on various islands in Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the
world.
Scott
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