Teaching in Nicaragua

Teaching in Nicaragua

I want to write something of the challenge of teaching in Nicaragua and also to report on my first teaching experience here. The background is this:  As I wrote before, this is a poor country.  The teachers are badly underpaid (they receive about $200.00 per month).  Although the government has made a commitment to Communicative English for secondary students,  the challenge remains of training its teachers to depart from the tradition in which they were raised, that is the copying of  English texts and  lists of English words and the learning of rules of English grammar.   We hope to put useful  conversational English, more “authentic” written and read English, into the high school classes.  Apparently it is true that some English teachers don’t speak any or much English.  To make matters worse, there are overcrowded classes and a general dirth of any teaching tools except the students’ pens and notebook, a whiteboard and colored markers.  No text books, no copies, no computer equipment, no electronic equipment of any kind.

Teaching in this context requires great resourcefulness and the Peace Corps is all about that.  It is also about sustainability. I wasn’t sure how that word applied to teaching English, but here’s the deal.  Teachers work with counterparts, essentially training them in the two years of service so that when the volunteer leaves, the expertise remains.  That’s sustainable.  A big part of this is creating materials, essentially out of nothing, to make up for the lack of books, workbooks and the like.  The essential tools of the PCV trade are markers, roles of wide cellophane tape and large sheets of paper.  Additionally PCVs recycle everything.  For instance, if I can find a picture of a family, I can use it to help teach the words for the family, to help teach numbers (count them), to discuss colors, clothes, prepositions (next to), moods (happy, sad), etc.  So pictures get laminated to pieces of discarded cardboard by covering them with cellophane tape and they’re good for a lot of classes.

  Because classes are large, sometimes teachers have the students write their names on name tags and then laminate them with the aforesaid tape. This an aid to learning names and the tape makes the tags durable and you can put tiny stickers on them as rewards for participation.  A friend of mine in the U.S. offered to laminate 50 pieces of paper for me to use in class, a very generous and helpful idea.  But I need 200 pieces.  And getting material from the US is not sustainable.  So the students make their own laminated sheets with the ubiquitous tape.  Instant slates.

So here’s something people could do to help the effort along.  Could you start saving pictures of anything you could imagine I might be able to use from papers and magazines or from food wrappers or anywhere else.  I can use them with tape, or I can trace them and color them.  Also if anyone runs across a coloring book with nice simple drawings I could trace, that would be great. Is there something like a Simpsons coloring book out there?  I hear the Simpsons are popular in Latin  America and I could use the figures for many lessons.

The materials we create are only part of the answer to the teaching challenge.  I taught my first class on the vocabulary for sports to a group of 8^th graders.   I got some good interest by bringing a ball into the classroom.  The kids aren’t used to any kind of real life object so it caused a sensation.  I got them to say the sports they liked and wrote the sports on the board in English.  I acted out the verbs like ”kick” and “hit”.  I got the kids on their feet to repeat the actions and words.  I had a follow up writing activity.  It wasn’t the best lesson in the world, but good enough.  I enjoyed it and so did the students.  They learned some vocab and I reminded myself what it felt like to teach.

 We’re about half way through pre-service training.  Next week I go with a training group to Rivas, a city to the south for some extended practice teaching, a week of it.  I get to live with a present PCV,  that is to crash on a mattress on the floor of the room he has in the house of a local family.  Later in the week there’s a fair where we learn about the sites that are open to receive volunteers.  We can make requests, no guarantees.  I’m not sure I’ll make one.  I might ask to be in the mountains. Still getting my own site is a long way off and there’s a lot of Spanish to learn in the meantime.