Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater

When I think of tests, I fret over what questions to put on them and how to appease all of the teachers. But when kids think of tests (and I'm sure it's the same with more experienced teachers) they think about cheating.

Last week during their first test, the kids all had problems with wandering eyes, whispering, and even blatant paper trading. Since we had split them into two groups, we could lie and say that we had taken away points for cheating from some students in the other group. That seemed to do the trick because this week during the test the room was dead silent for the first fifteen minutes.

After that, this young kid aptly named Klever asked to go to the bathroom. Klever is aptly named. Even though fifteen minutes into the test he had written down absolutely nothing, he has smarts in other areas. He knows how to command the attention of the entire class, how to fluster his teachers, and how to cheat. Last week it ranged from whispering to other students to asking the teacher for the answers. Despite his efforts, the test period ended without his having filled all the blanks. And needless to say, his score wasn't very good.

This week he asked to go to the bathroom. And I let him. When my teaching partner caught wind of what I had done, she left the room and walked out to the bathroom. She returned several minutes later with a disgruntled Klever and a crumpled sheet of paper. "I found him with his and when I asked him about it he said, 'I'm reviewing.'"

He'll take a new test on Monday, and if he cheats again he's out of the program.

It's so strange to think that we're here offering these kids a chance to be the first in their family to go to high school and get and education, but that they're still not motivated. If I knew that failing this summer program and not receiving a scholarship meant that I would probably never attend school again, I would be working my ass off.

I think it's time to consider the differences, to reconsider our methods.

Testing! Testing!

This evening I'm finally feeling better, and my first activity back on my feet was to create the weekly Friday English test with the five other English teachers. We all sat in the tiny hostel office and argued for about an hour, all the while passing my computer back and forth.

In theory, all the teachers should administer the same test so that grading is fair across the board. That way, a student from one school who receives a scholarship is more or less just as intelligent as a student from another school who receives a scholarship. And the concept works really well for the math teachers. From day one they've been meeting each night after dinner to create homework, daily "mad minutes" (how many simple math problems can you solve in a minute), and weekly tests. But tonight, when we sat down to do the same thing, we struggled.

English is a hard subject to teach. It's not as though there's a certain number of facts or concepts to cover each day. There are certain vocabulary words and verb conjugations, but drilling those things into a kids head doesn't even come near helping them acquire skills such as pronunciation, confidence in speaking, and sentence formation.

In our classroom we play a lot of games to get the kids talking and practicing vocab. To get them to make mistakes. We teach them new words as they become relevant. For instance, when we ask the kids how many brothers they have, the most common answer is 11. Now, what they mean is something like 5 brothers and 4 sisters, but when you make the word for brother plural in spanish, it simply means siblings. So we used this common mistake to teach the kids the word siblings. But none of the other classrooms have learned this word.

There are so many instances like this. One group didn't learn a group of vocab words one day because they were have too much trouble with the old ones. Another group went over the conjugation of the verb "to be" over and over, so it should be a sizable portion of their test.

Eventually we came up with a "core" that each of the three groups will alter as they see fit for their group of students.

I can't wait to see what happens when we try to come up with a uniform grading method. I'm sure that we'll debate for hours about how much should be deducted for incorrect spelling, how incorrect the spelling has to be for it to be completely wrong, and whether a question that everyone got wrong should be omitted from the test.

But hey, maybe too many teachers perfect the student?

Frustration

I haven't written for the past couple of days because I come back from teaching completely exhausted. During the car ride out to the village of Chuchuqui, we talk and giggle, but on the way back, we simply stare out the windows at the passing mountains. In addition to the usual frustration of teaching things that are already so familiar to you that you've forgotten how to explain them (like how to say hello), there are so many more that I never would have expected.

First, language barriers. For some kids, spanish isn't a first language. They speak an indigenous language and often slip into it during class. Imagine if all those kids giggling at you in class were giggling while speaking a language you don't understand, leaving you free to imagine countless jokes as possibilities. Also, speaking of language problems, it is nearly impossible to command the respect of the students when they know you can't speak Spanish with absolute precision. They giggle at each mistake I make.

Second, pronunciation. Even though much of the curriculum is devoted to teaching usual language class things, from vocabulary to verb conjugations, none of that matters when the kids can't master pronunciation. Some of the sounds in English, like the "g" in girl and the "h" that is actually pronounced, are completely foreign to these kids. And even with endless repetition, it still doesn't seem to stick.

Maybe it doesn't stick because they've never been told how to study. They come in each day and it's as if we need to build everything from the ground up again. We give them homework and advice on how to learn new vocabulary (say the words out loud to memorize them), but it hasn't seem to sink in.

And then there is the vergüenza. The kids are too ashamed to say that they don't understand or need help or couldn't hear.

Oh. And there's this group of guys that hangs around the school and whistles at me. Actually, being white here means that when you walk on the street, men will whistle at you and say "hello."

I'll be headed back tomorrow. That's all I got.

In the Classroom

Since everything is new to me here, I'm on information overload and everything is going to come out in fits and starts. Maybe chronological order is the best way to go.

I started out the day with a run. One of the other volunteers knocked on my door at seven thirty (apparently this has been going on for the whole two weeks that everyone else has been here ), and a large group of us met up in the courtyard to go for a morning jog. Usually they just run around a track at a nearby stadium, but today they wanted to actually get somewhere and have hills, so they decided to run to the cemetery. I did not make it to the cemetery. Since we're up fairly high in the mountains, the air is a lot thinner and that makes it really difficult to breathe. The rest of the group says that it gets easier as time goes on, and I hope they're right.

I hope that as my lungs grow, my knowledge of this town will too. If we hadn't gone running in a group I would have been completely lost after about five minutes. Everything looks the same. It's not just the squat, pastel houses and small shops, it's also the short streets without traffic lights and equal height of all the buildings.

We spent the morning making posters of the English alphabet, gathering supplies, and generally preparing for the classroom. Everything was complicated by the fact that I had no idea what to expect.

We took a small van up to the school in the village of Chuchuqui. It stalled out on one of the hills, so we rolled right back down. I was sitting backwards because for some reason there's a row of seats facing the wrong way. It felt a lot like falling. Again, completely irrelevant.

Teaching. It's so hard to remember because I was so terrified the whole time. And something about speaking in Spanish makes it so much harder to have an awareness of what's going on. It takes so much effort that the only way to go is forward (rather than fretting about the past or the future). Most of the day was devoted to introductions and creating rules and discussing note taking skills. But we also spent a lot of time going over "l, m, n, o, p." Apparently that is one of the most difficult parts of the alphabet song. It's so easy to forget how foreign the most familiar things can be to people.