Unorganized thoughts on my first month teaching

Finally, I feel like I’ve started teaching. Since arriving here 9 months ago, I’ve gone through 3 months of training, preparing me to teach, and almost six months of general observation and practice teaching within my site. Though the time has been valuable in many respects, it feels good to finally get started with my main project.

I work in two high schools in Palacaguina. I have three sections of 50-60 students in the main school and one section of 18 students in a school about 15 minutes outside of the town. I teach a Junior Achievement type course called La Empresa Creativa to the rough equivalent of US sophomores/juniors. Throughout the year, the students work in small groups developing a business plan and managing their small business. Most of the content is very hands-on as opposed to general business theory or definitions. For instance, the groups do a market study to determine what business to open, they sell shares in their company to fund the necessary start-up capital, and they keep track of the business accounting while producing and selling their product. For the most part, I really enjoy the material and the idea of the class, but it’s certainly not easy teaching it in Nicaragua.

A normal class has around 50 students and one teacher. There are no books for the students and besides a general outline of subjects to cover, the teachers have no curriculum. Oftentimes, the teachers are left to find class material on their own in libraries or the internet. Though they try to match specific skill sets with what class a teacher will teach, it doesn’t always work out, leaving, for example, a teacher who has studied English in college, teaching high school math.

Photocopying books or homeworks is too expensive, so generally, the teacher will copy down in a notebook definitions and one or two examples which he/she can dictate to the students during class. The students copy the definitions into their own notebooks, memorize the answers to homework examples and regurgitate everything on a test. There’s very little discussion or critical thinking involved in any class. In fact, many times when the teacher begins to discuss a point during the class, the students immediately start misbehaving and talking because they know that all they need to know for the test is what’s copied down in their notebooks.

So, given what the students are used to, you can imagine that it’s hard to teach a hands-on, project oriented class in your second language. But, things in my case aren’t too, too bad. For one, Peace Corps volunteers, over the last five years, have developed a book to teach the class, so I don’t have to make things up on the fly. The book is nicely written and well organized which has made it easy to plan my classes and give my students a fairly good idea of what we hope to accomplish during the year. I’m also working with three Nicaraguan teachers, meaning we team teach the class during the year, with the idea that at the end of my two year service, there’s two or three teachers trained and prepared to continue teaching the class. Though I’m doing most of the teaching right now, my Nicaraguan counterparts and I plan the class together and they help me within the classroom. And finally, I only have one 90 minute class period per section per week. In other words, my counterparts and I plan one class on Sunday, and then I give the same class four different times.

But, though the book, my counterparts, and the schedule are indeed helpful, it doesn’t mean things go smoothly. Most of my initial classes have been spent trying to teach things that I expected my students to already know. For instance, when I tried to form six groups by counting each student one through six, the students blankly stared at me. After getting them to understand how it would work and telling them where each group would meet, we counted off. In the end, half the class had forgotten their number and the other half asked me where their number was meeting. It was a disaster. But, the next week we did the same, though this time I taped numbers on the wall where each group was going to meet. Besides the four or five questions I got at the beginning of the class of why there were numbers on the wall, the process worked much better.

In the second week I spent almost ten minutes teaching how we were going to turn in homeworks. Normally if they have homework to turn in, the students surround the teacher as he/she walks in the door, waving papers in his face, screaming “Profe, Profe!!” By the time the teacher has collected all the papers and navigated his way out of the maze of students, no less than five minutes of class time has been lost and every student is out of his or her seat. It bothered the hell out of me watching this last year. So, the first day they had homework to turn in I turned away all the students that ran up to me, telling them I would collect it at the start of class. They all sat back down confused. At the start of class when I asked the students in the middle to pass their homework to the corners and the students in the corners to pass all of the homeworks to the front, I got more blank, confused stares. After showing them an example of what I wanted, the homeworks were turned in correctly. I wonder if they’ll remember the process this week.

Class discipline is also hard with 50 students. As I mentioned, the students aren’t used to answering questions or discussing material, so when I’m in the front teaching, the classroom is horribly loud and half of the students aren’t paying attention. But, if I start to write anything on the blackboard everyone quiets down and starts to scribble. I could seriously write whatever nonsense I wanted and they would copy it down without questions. Though it’s much easier to give a class with just definitions, I try to ask questions and hold discussions even if it means, right now anyway, that I have to yell over the other voices. I try to get them to raise hands rather than yell out the answer, I call on the troublemakers and put them on the spot, I praise the ones that are listening or participating, but it’s a long, uphill battle to reverse what the students have learned over the last 10 years in their other classrooms. I wish I could more accurately describe what the class room environment is like, but suffice it to say that it’s horribly tiring and completely frustrating trying to teach the students in a more dynamic manner than the simple dictation they’re used to.

On the other end is my class of 18 students at the rural school who wouldn’t talk if their life depended on it. The class is dead quiet no matter what I’m doing. I could walk in dressed like Batman and they would stare at me with the same confused, blank looks they give me everyday. I ask a question and 18 pairs of eyes immediately fall to the floor.

“Ramiro, name a business you know from your community.” Ramiro, sits there nervously pretending to scribble something in his notebook. I wait for what seems like hours and what must seem to him like days. I try to help him, give him examples, re-phrase the question so that all he has to say is yes or no, but I get nothing until Nubia helps him out, bailing the rest of the class out, including me. She’s the only one that ever talks or answers questions. One student out of 18. So though it’s a lot easier and more relaxing teaching at this school, it’s equally frustrating.

Overall I think things are going well given what I’ve heard from other volunteers and how I feel. It’s certainly frustrating and even though my students probably don’t quite understand yet why we’re teaching this class, I think the class is important specifically in this country. According to USAid, of 100 students that enter first grade, 11 graduate from high school. So, arguably, the ability to create and manage your own small business is more important than many of the more general high school subjects. And even still for the lucky few that move on and study at the university level, Nicaragua doesn’t have and isn’t generating sufficient places of work for its rapidly growing population. The chances that a university graduate finds work within his or her field is low, meaning these graduates need to know, at least in a general way, how to create and run a business. Will my students actually walk away from my class with this knowledge? I’m not sure, but if they raised their hands more in my big classes and weren’t so shy in my small class, I think we’d be a lot further ahead. We’ll see where we are in a few weeks.