Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Miss Claudia


As I mentioned in my previous post, while at the colegio, John and I primarily accompany the two permanent English teachers, Claudio and Claudia. First of all, I should mention that their job security is contingent upon the other remaining on the staff, seeing as the departure of one would necessitate a new search for a male and female pair with matching names.

Ok, so maybe that’s not true. At first John and I were taking turns accompanying Claudio and Claudia different days of the week. However, after the first week, once the time came to decide between ourselves which days we would accompany which teacher, John and I decided that for the first semester I would work with the younger students and he with the older ones. Level of fluency in Spanish was essentially the determining factor, since the younger students have more questions and usually need responses in Spanish in order to get the most out of our time with them. Claudia works primarily with students of enseñanza básica, or grade school, while Claudio teaches students of enseñanza media, or high school. Seeing as how the high school students can better carry on conversations in English, and John cannot yet communicate as efficiently in Spanish as I can, we arrived at the decision that I would accompany Claudia and he Claudio. We may very well switch things up for the new school year in 2009, after John has spent a few months here and gotten more comfortable in Chilean Spanish.

As I have gone accompanying Claudia, she tries to have me spend time with small groups of students to practice conversation and reinforcement of grammar and vocabulary they are studying at the moment. On the occasions when the class must go to the computer lab for an assignment, I am there with Claudia to answer questions they may have.
Claudia sees most of her classes for four horas every week, each hora being forty-five minutes. This means two days per week for about an hour and a half each of these days. As a result, it is hard to get students into the habit of frequent conversation in English, and they spend most time working out of their books or in the English computer lab at the school, primarily on written content. For this reason, eliciting conversation has been basic with most groups, especially the lower grades. For example, with the fourth graders last week, in forty-five minutes we barely succeeded in having each of abouttwenty students respond in complete sentences to the questions “What is your name?” and “How old are you?”

This does not mean, however, that the students have no interest in conversing. Many do often feel ashamed to try and sound foolish. Patience and respect, though, seems to be the best way to encourage them to talk. John has also enlightened me with the wisdom of tricking students into teaching one another, often by introducing a competitive element. When there is some sort of goal to reach, or particularly if the group is divided into two who compete against each other to complete a task, they will help each other out by repeating phrases for one another and encouraging each other. They also pay closer attention in general when they are under pressure and could stand to benefit from listening to those speaking before them in order to prepare and by listening to those speaking after them in order to make helpful suggestions.

Let me return to Miss Claudia now. Like all other teachers at the school, she has a home room with whom she starts the day with reflection and prayer. With her homeroom she is particularly insistent upon silence during the prayer and cleanliness in her room. Her attention to cleanliness carries on to the other rooms she travels to throughout the day. Each class begins with her greeting the class and them responding, in English, either “Good morning, teacher” or “Good morning, Miss Claudia.” By the way, she is married, but she has her students call her miss. Chile has a different system for addressing teachers than the United States, not only because of the difference in language. Where in the U.S. students would most likely address me as Mister Smith, in Chile the students address their teachers by their title, profe, followed by their first name. For example, most students address me as Profe Brian (teacher Brian), and occasionally Mister Brian in English class. Some of the younger students call me Tío Brian, which literally means Uncle Brian. This doesn’t mean that they see me as part of their family, though. In Chile the words for uncle and aunt are used for any sort of caretaker or supervisor of children. Since Claudia works with students from first through eighth grade, learning to adjust to the levels of proficiency and the teaching methods appropriate to each grade level has been challenging. The students in general are very interested and cooperative with conversation activities. Claudia and I are still in the process of planning ahead how I can structure future lessons. For the time being, though, speaking with the students about their interests and likes while incorporating important phrases and grammatical points has been successful.

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