Teaching, Day 1

Sorry--I'm putting two entries up at once since it's been awhile since my last blog....

On Sunday, Chabella and Ernesto (host sister and brother) invited me to visit their grandparents' house with them. It was the first time they'd taken me anywhere so it was really great just to chat and walk around with them. On the way down the hill to the bus, we were bombarded by a ton of water balloons by these neighbor kids. After we dashed out of the way, managing to stay mostly dry, Chabella explained that February was Carnival month, and to celebrate, Ecuadorians throw lots and lots of water. So February can be really fun--unless you need to go to a business meeting or to work or something. Showing up to work soaking wet is not very classy.

Their grandparents' house is about 10 minutes by bus. We walked in through a blue gate into a cute little garden and then through the open front door. I met both their grandparents and also Ernesto and Chabella's dad. It was a little intense though because all of them were having a pretty heated discussion about (from what I could catch--old people Spanish is very difficult to understand) the upcoming divorce between Ernesto and Chabella's mom and dad and then something about buying a house. Not sure what the house part was about. But I managed to stay pretty occupied by looking at the tons and tons of art on the walls and reading the Quito newspaper. I was so proud of myself because I read an entire article in Spanish about the terremoto (earthquake) in Haiti. Which I actually didn't know had happened until like a week ago. The school here is collecting bars of soap to send over to Haiti which is really great seeing how these kids and the school itself don't have much money.

After the awkward, family drama conversation, Chabella and Ernesto took me around Tumbaco a bit. I saw the tiny Tumbaco park, which is really just a fountain with some grass around it, and we browsed through a couple music/movie stores. I already know I'm going to be coming home with lots of both music and movies--music because my brother is totally obsessed with reggae and always has it turned up really loud in the house so that I'm also becoming obsessed and movies because they're soooo cheap. Cheap mostly because they're illegally video taped in the movie theaters but whatever.

That night was also really great because we had a family movie night of sorts. Chabella, Ernesto, our mom, and I all squished onto the couch and gorged ourselves on animal crackers, candy, and popcorn while we first watched this really dumb Ecuadorian movie with a name something like "Rodents" and then a really bad copy of "Avatar." "Rodents" was absolutely ridiculous. If I hadn't been so exhausted and afraid of offending my family, I would've been laughing my head off the ENTIRE time. One bad thing after another kept happening. An example scene would be: these two "tough guys" rob a house, one gets shot in the shoulder by the house owner, then the house owner gets shot and killed, then the tough guys smoke some coke and drink some drank, and then they find out that their cousin's dad (so their uncle) died during surgery, their cousin had a seizure, their other cousin is pregnant, etc. etc. etc. It was so bad is was hilarious. The only cool thing about it was that it was filmed in Ecuador and it showed some very typical Ecuadorian things. (For example, they showed this shower that was the EXACT same type of shower in my house here. Kinda neat.)

Today (Monday) was the first day of teaching. Of course, it was just my luck that I woke up horribly sick and couldn't get out of bed until 9am rather than at 7:30am when school starts. My mom/boss told me off for that laterÉ whoops. Adriana, the other English teacher, can't come to the school until 10:15am because she has an English class every morning until then. So when she arrived, we started with the Pre Kinder class. Oh my god. They had just come in from their recess and would NOT pay attention or sit still or do anything but roll on the ground and hit each other. We had to have the other teachers help us just to get these kids to stop running around, and we hardly got anything done besides a half-hearted name game and this thing called a "bolsa magic." (A "magic bag" is a bag that each student reaches into and pulls something out of--could be a colored object, an animal, a picture of a fruit, etc.--and then they're asked "What color is this?" or "What animal is this?" etc.) Finally, our 45 minutes were up, and we moved onto Primero de Bascia, but somehow we ended up only having 15 minutes with them. We'll learn the schedule eventually I suppose. This is the easiest class--there are less kids and they're much more chill. We actually got to do our lesson plan with them (learning the names of the family in English and teaching them a song). And we never even got to the oldest class because school was over.

I'm realizing teaching is quite difficult. You always have to be on your feet, must be able to improvise if something doesn't go right (and it never does), and be really creative every day in coming up with interesting ways to get these kids to learn. I'm really glad I love kids, though, because otherwise the difficulty would not be worth it. Already, when the kids were leaving today, they would come up and ask me questions or give me a hug or give me a goodbye kiss. They make me want to get better.

Thankfully, instead of me teaching my own class tomorrow since Adriana only comes Mondays and Wednesdays, there will be no English class. I'll just be helping out in the other classes, and we'll resume our English class on Wednesday. The kids in the Basica class, who didn't have English today, kept asking me when they were going to have English and were very sad to learn that it would be two days from now. After a few weeks, though, I'm sure we'll fall into a schedule, and the kids will actually learn things in English rather than us just trying to get them to sit down and listen. But oh boy, what a crazy day!