Well folks, it’s official.
Six times a week, for an hour each go around, I am an English
teacher. So far I have taught:
- · Greetings
- · Conversation
- · Animals
- · Numbers
- · Colors
- · Days of the Week
- · Body Parts
- · Family Members
- · Months of the Year
Classes usually go along these lines:
1)
I write the words and their Spanish translations
on the board.
2)
One by one we go through and pronounce them.
First as a group, then individually.
Sometimes this is utterly hilarious, but I hold in my laughter for the
kids’ sake.
3)
I desperately think up games that remotely
involve English so as to keep their attention.
Look at all the lovely pictures of children happily
learning:
Things usually go smooth as silk, as if I truly knew what I
was doing. But there have the
occasional…incidents, some of which I would oh so love to share with you.
1)
Do you remember how to play Red Light Green
Light? It goes like this: One person, at
one end of the field, blacktop, street, whathaveyou, yells “Green Light” and
turns their back. While their back is
turned, the rest of the kids run towards them until the first kids\ turns
around again, yelling “Red Light,” at which point the kids have to stop. IF they are seen moving by the Light-person
they have to return to the beginning. We
play this game A LOT in my class, substituting “Red Light” and “Green Light”
for whatever English words we’ve learned that day. Usually I hang near the back playing referee,
but one day, when an especially fickle, picky, and otherwise unfair child was
in charge of yelling the words out, I decided to go for it. I’d run, I’d win, and we’d get a new kid in
ASAP. I began to run straight ahead,
ignoring the inevitable mud splash from the puddle ahead of me. After all, this was for the kids. Lo and behold, there was no mud splash. There was me, slipping in the mud and landing
flat on my ass. I stood up, as the kids
looked on unsure of what to do. I was
very much covered in mud, very much blushing, and very much wanting to rewind
to three seconds ago and just let Mister Picky and Unfair be as Picky and
Unfair as he wanted to be. Instead I
had to walk one of my youngest students back to the health post where her mom
worked and show off my mud-covered butt to everyone in the town square.
2)
As you know, Quechua is the first language of
the majority of the people in my town.
Which means that when the teenage boys in my high school want to be
little shits they say vulgar things in Quechua.
Now, I may not be able to understand much in Quechua, but rani, aka
penis, is now one of the words I recognize most easily. Also, making the OK sign here in Perú means
something VERY different. They learn
English, I learn when to be offended.
3)
After a month of playing Red Light, Green Light
I decided to shake things up. I
introduced a game, normally used as an icebreaker, where someone, standing in
the middle of a circle, says a word in English.
Once it’s said, everyone has to stand up from their chairs and find a
new one to sit in. The person without a
seat then has to say the Spanish definition and a new English word, and so and
so forth. It was going splendidly until
a girl’s nose collided with a boy’s head.
Head was fine, nose not so much.
The blood poured from it. I was cupping my hands beneath her nose
trying, unsuccessfully, to stop the blood from getting on her coat. As I try to calmly get her to where my toilet
paper is stashed, the rest of the kids kept playing without any encouragement. They were un-con-cerned. We finally get to
the classroom and with my blood-covered hands I unzip my backpack and pull out
the TP. The bloodstains may one day get
out of my backpack:
[I thought about asking her to pose
for a picture but it seemed a little inappropriate]
Standing outside the classroom I have to
keep telling her to hold her head back because she wanted nothing more than to
lean forward and create a small lake of her blood on the cement.
So watch out guys, English can kill you (or
maybe it’s just when I teach it…)
Besos!
