Work Update: I love my teachers

This school year, which started in January, I am starting my “real” second-generation work. This means that I’m officially (meaning we had a formal serious meeting about it) expecting teachers to do 90% of the work in the classrooms, meaning leading lessons from the “Peace Corps” curriculum. This is as opposed to first-generation work, in which a volunteer was directly in charge of leading the lessons, with moderate to minimal teacher support. I split the 212-page curriculum into three parts, and gave the parts to the social studies, sciences, and language teachers in each school that I work in. I also gave each teacher a list of dates (about one day a month for each teacher) on which they would be expected to lead “Peace Corps” lessons in their classes. The lessons aren’t actually created by Peace Corps, but rather come from a collection of textbooks, at least some of which were created in Central America and were designed specifically for youth in this region. Again, the topics in this curriculum are leadership/teamwork, self-esteem/identity, decision-making, goals, careers, communication, sexuality, drugs and alcohol, and violence (ranging from domestic violence to human rights). To make the curriculum integration a little easier for my teachers, I agreed to be responsible for bringing all of the materials required for the lessons, which generally means making photocopies and a poster or two.
               Since most of the lessons in “my” curriculum correspond with national educational requirements, I don’t feel so bad about asking teachers, who often already have a tight schedule, to dedicate one day a month to “my” curriculum lessons. To give an idea, this “tight schedule”, for many teachers, means that they have a full-time elementary-level teaching job in the mornings before coming to their afternoon middle-school jobs. Many teachers are also in the process of getting an advanced degree, as this (as I understand it) is a requirement for teaching. Also, their classroom time is limited to 5½ hours per day, which is generally actually under 5 hours per day since both students and teachers habitually arrive late to classes (I suppose this is sometimes understandable, given how exhausted some teachers must be and the fact that punctuality is not a major cultural point here). Classes are also cancelled for events such as week-long teachers’ sports events (next week), week-long Easter celebrations, week-long Independence day celebrations, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Teacher Appreciation Day, impromptu soccer tournaments, and many other Days and events.
                Apart from my concerns about the lack of class time, there were other things that I was worried about in starting this second-generation work. First was that my teachers would be unwilling to do it, as some were last year when I first experimented with asking them to be in control of the classroom. Some teachers simply either pretended that they didn’t hear anything that happened during the meeting where I discussed in detail what my (and their directors’ and educational supervisors’) expectations of them would be (aka that they, not I, would lead lessons), or simply chose not to be present at the meeting, and so they often walked out of their classroom to socialize in the teacher’s lounge as soon as I came to school. Some did stay with me in the classroom, but still expected me to lead the majority of the lessons. Luckily, some of my more awesome teachers started the second-generation work right away, without any problems.

A teacher (left) overseeing a human-knot leadership/teamwork exercise

                I was also worried that teachers wouldn’t lead the lessons in the “right” way. During our Peace Corps training, we learned that participatory learning and asking for critical thinking are rare here – students are asked to listen to the teacher teach/ramble, to copy dictations, to do  homework that only requires the simplest regurgitations, and are rarely asked to form or share their own opinions, or to even speak in the classroom at all. Although all of the lessons in the “Peace Corps” curriculum include participatory activities and several discussion questions at the end, I was worried that the teachers would either spend too much time on the “fun” (participatory) stuff and not leave enough time (either because of arriving late, limited lesson time, or because they spent too much time “preaching”) on the discussion questions. Furthermore, I was worried that some teachers might simply not understand some of the material in the curriculum. Last year, for example, a few teachers completely blew the lessons on being assertive, telling the students that assertiveness was bad and that everyone needs to be passive. Also, some of the teachers gave some wrong information in the sex ed chapter, even though the information was clearly stated in the curriculum. I feel that a problem like this would be hard for me to “correct”, as both cultural and informational barriers get in the way: I am neither an expert on Guatemalan culture nor science, and so don’t know that I’m well-versed enough to be able to change the solidified opinions of a middle-aged Guatemalan.

Students weaving through desks in a leadership/teamwork exercise

                BUT. So far, (crossing my fingers and knocking on wood), my teachers have been SO. AWESOME. Every time I’ve gone to school this year, I’ve left feeling energized, happy, and so excited about the Youth Development project. It’s clear that the students are entertained and engaged by the lessons, and it seems that the teachers like teaching them. None of them have skipped the discussion questions, which I didn’t even prompt them about, and the “preaching” has been kept to a minimum. When the teachers do preach, they tend to stick to the points that are suggested by the curriculum, and also add in relevant real-life examples that I never would have thought to talk about, sometimes with slang vocabulary that I don’t even understand. Some teachers veer a bit from the lesson plans, which sometimes makes me nervous to the point where I literally force myself to sit on my hands and not say anything (since the point is that the teacher figures out for him/herself how to make the lesson work), but they always seem to know what they are doing and finish the lesson before the bell rings. One teacher, for example, asked the whole classroom to work on putting together a small skit that was only “meant” to be for two volunteers, and in another class gave the students 30 minutes to complete an activity that was “supposed” to take 5, but in both cases I think the students ended up getting more out of the lesson than if he had just followed the written plan. Being an established teacher and Spanish-speaker also does wonders for classroom management, and I find that lessons are going much faster this year now that I am not single-handedly trying to control 45 hyper 12-year-olds with words that surely sound hilarious coming out of an annoyed non-native Spanish-speaker’s mouth (aka mine).

The human-knot experts

                There are still some benefits to me being in the classroom with the teachers. For one, they actually do the lessons; if I just left them the curriculum (that they’ve never seen) and a schedule, they would likely not be motivated to do the lessons. I suspect that the effort that they put into the lessons is also augmented by my presence. Also, seemingly at least once a class period, teachers are pulled out of the class for one reason or another, often for only a few minutes but sometimes for several hours. In these cases, I can continue the lessons where the teachers left off instead of leaving the students hanging and unsupervised.

                Anyway, long story short: 2011 is starting out to be a great year in my Youth Development world!

Sunsets are always better in person, but you get the idea. (This picture was taken from my roof.)