While I’ve heard that the circumstances for teaching are never ideal, I continue to be baffled by how to handle the days preceding my first classes.

Last night I met my second two groups. It was only the night before that I got the workbooks, which were entirely different than those I’d first been given for the groups I began to prepare for the week before. That night I glanced through them, and then had only a little time in the morning to try to dream up ideas before heading off to my own Spanish intensive class that I started two days ago. So every day here is broken midday by heading for the bus at noon, taking class from one to three, and then busing home just in time for comida. On Tuesdays and Thursdays there’s barely time to eat before I head off to teach.

So yesterday I went into class feeling totally unprepared, though I’d managed to put in several hours of work. The first group, I found out only the night before, is young kids, from around eight to ten. Their workbook, I felt, is dreadfully boring and irrelevant. Yet they’re going to be tested on the material so I need to stick with it. How quickly they learn it affects how much time I have for more enriching, original activities.

I was to teach them the used of “should” and “shouldn’t” and a bunch of strange words related to “taking care.” Their level of English is so low that it was an extreme challenge to teach complicated vocabulary like “muscles” and “mind” and “postures” and “yoga.” They’d be squirmy even if they were interested. But this was hard.

I’ve never worked with kids before and never wanted to. I like kids, but one-on-one. I was more scared going into this group than I was with my four-hour conversation class.

I think I did okay overall. Luckily I’d spent some time on the Internet in the little time I had the previous night and had found a song about body parts that involved movement. I didn’t want to spend $15 on the record so I just used and adapted the lyrics, and kept the thing in my back pocket in case I needed it. I did. Halfway through the two-hour class — long even for motivated adults — I got them up and told them (and showed them) to:

Close your eyes
Open your eyes
Nod your head
And turn around, turn around, turn around

Open your mouth,
Close your mouth
Wiggle your nose,
And turn around, turn around, turn around

Stamp your feet loudly
Stamp your feet softly
Clap your hands loudly
And clap your hands very softly

Shake your arms
Shake your legs
Wiggle your fingers
And turn around, turn around, turn around

Touch your ears
Scratch your back
Rub your stomach

And turn around, turn around, turn around
Stamp your feet loudly
Stamp your feet softly

Clap your hands loudly
And clap your hands very softly
Bend your arms
Bend your legs
Bend from your waist
And turn around, turn around, turn around

I was so grateful that I’d thought to find and bring something like that, and need to look into similar activities. Each class will need them. I’ll investigate TPR when I have time. The trouble is, this whole demographic — low level, young learners — is one I have no education about, and now that classes have begun there’s little time between to start from scratch. Certainly I’m able and prepared to customize what I do based on what I learn each week about the kids, but to have no idea even what general approaches to use, and to have no pre-prepared stuff like a songbag, is going to be a huge strain.

The other thing I was glad I did was to think they might like drawing. Since the topic was sports, I figured they might need a break from conversation to interact differently with the material. So after endless discussion from the workbook I decided it was enough, and had them each draw a picture of their favorite sport. They were totally into it. Pix posted on my Pachuca blog. We ran out of time so next class tomorrow, I’ll have them tell me about their pictures. I think I’ll record them. I’ve photographed the drawings and will put them up on the blog.

I had them do role-plays about various sicknesses discussed in the book. It took them a while to understand what I was asking, but once they did, they liked it. One kid would act out a sickness. And I’d grabbed images online of what each required (according to the book): e.g. stomachache needs tea.

As suggested in the workbook, I gave them an assignment to write a story using “should” and “shouldn’t,” based on something they once did that they shouldn’t have. But they had no idea what I was talking about. So I spontaneously changed the assignment to writing about a story about their favorite sport. They still didn’t understand. A couple times I broke into Spanish to try to help (which I wasn’t supposed to do) and one girl who did understand me explained the assignment in Spanish. I understood her perfectly and knew she was telling them the right thing. Still they said they didn’t understand. But class was over. So we’ll see what happens.

I find that already I have a sense of my students: their level of interest and dedication, their skill level, their personality. Each is totally different and another classic challenge will be to try to engage them and enrich them all. I already have favorites, a preference I can never reveal.

Boy, does working with kids take patience.

Another challenge was last night’s schedule. I finished with the kids and had to race immediately to my next new class, consisting of teenagers and one man. As Magdalena introduced me I was trying to act calm and I dug out their workbooks, set aside materials and tried to figure out what the feck I was going. In this class and in the children’s class, I didn’t do the part we should do about expectation- and rule-setting. It was on my list, but it didn’t seem fitting. Instead, I introduced myself, asked about them and why they wanted to study, etc. I was a little scattered. I didn’t want to jump right to the workbook, having no familiarity with my students, but I hadn’t had time to sort out the order of my lesson plan materials. Very tricky to do that when you’re on center stage.

Again, I noticed right away a lot about my students. One was agonizingly shy (and she ended up in tears by the end of the class; Magdalena says she always does that. I gave her extra help after class but couldn’t hold up the class just for her. In talking to her afterwards I realized she’s a real perfectionist who needs to understand every word. So I’ll work with that next time.) The rest of the class was male. Three teenaged boys sat together and were always talking and cutting up. The father and his three sons completed the class. They were my most attentive students.

The workbook for them was equally dull. According to Magdalena, they had never been introduced to the past tense. So before I started on the workbook exercise, I’d decided to do something with Cuisinaire rods that I made up. We built a city. Each of us constructed an edifice or other city feature, and then said what people do there. I wrote it on the board. When it was all finished, I shook the table so that everything fell down. I said that the factory that used to be there closed down, and now it’s a ghost town. Then I asked each person to say what people did there in the past. I don’t know how effective the exercise was. They seemed to be amused by the act of building. But it turns out they did in fact know something about past forms, and most of them knew the right word to used: walk —> walked, e.g. And of course, there are so many irregular verbs that one can’t explain any rule in that context.

I told them about my blog. They seemed interested and granted permission for me to use their writings and images. I want the blog to provide some kind of resource for the students, but I have no idea how it can be of help except for my own documentation. I asked them to be thinking of ideas.

So then I went through the workbook which was absolutely painful. It was SO BORING. Being unable to follow a plan, I accidentally improvised and modified as we went along. I didn’t use the the tape that went with the book but read the dialogs myself. I had them read them in pairs. I made sure they understood the meaning. I corrected some pronunciation errors.

When I noticed the girl struggling particularly hard and had helped her all I could, I told her to underline words she didn’t know and I’d review them with her after class. Then I asked everyone: which is hardest for you of the four skills. Once again, listening is hardest for most, usually followed by speaking. So I promised them that I knew how to teach them some listening skills. Now I’m going to have to figure out how. I’ll need to do so gist listening exercises. But what I think they need isn’t in the book, as with the children. Somehow I have to slip in interest and relevance to a curriculum that is packed with material of dubious value (in my humble opinion).

To summarize for my own reference what I’ve promised:

• Saturday class: Links for Juan-Manuel about how to study independently as well; listening comprehension exercises
• Kids class: Find a shiteload of physical and creative ways to teach the dull material; figure out how to communicate to people who can’t understand me
• Teen class: Develop some listening comprehension exercises; figure out how to teach them to say the final hard “d” e.g. in certain past-tense verbs