Teaching

So, about the teaching so far. I've had and am still having a positive time teaching - I've had a lot of rewarding moments, and I absolutely love the feeling you get when you hear students using English in exactly the way you wanted them to by the end of the lesson. I love it when I see students really engaged in an activity, and I love the 'lightbulb moment'. It's also interesting what the students tell me about themselves and Ecuador in general.

There are a couple of things I found a bit strange at first, having monolingual/monocultural classes rather than classes made up of students from different countries being one. Not having as much time to plan for lessons as I did on the CELTA course is another, as is having fewer classroom resources, and having to prepare classes for unit and final tests. I also now fully appreciate how much of a pain it is when students don’t hand in written assignments on time (she says, shifting guiltily in her seat...)!

I'm tired today. Ever since I first arrived in Guayaquil I have woken up between the times of 4.30 and 6 am every morning almost without fail, and I very rarely manage to drift off again. Some nights I wake up at 2-2.30 am as well, just for a touch of variety. This is kind of OK on teaching days, but on days off, when I would love a lie-in, I cannot help but feel robbed of precious sleep! I think the humidity has something to do with it, and the fact that I have no glass in my bedroom windows; even with earplugs in I can still hear noise of someone’s air conditioning unit above my window, the TV and the voices of the family below us underneath my window, and barking dogs. Quite often I hear an alarm clock go off below my window at 5.15am and then again five and then ten minutes later.

I taught my first Saturday class last weekend. On Saturdays the only classes on are for groups of Ecuadorian teachers who teach English at public schools in Guayaquil and a wide surrounding area. My group is pre-intermediate level. It’s the largest group yet I’ve had to teach, but they all seem keen. During the week no classes are longer than three hours, but the Saturday classes are five hours long; this seems like a huge amount of time to fill but it actually passed quickly for me. Time flies. There was a break as well, so it wasn’t five hours solid. One of the two main parts of the lesson was about how to describe where places are in relation to others, so I brought in my inflatable globe and also drew a quick map of South America on the whiteboard to use as teaching aids. I wished I had more than one globe to be honest!