Practicing my Teacher Face

Teaching English and Taking Names

This week the focus of our orientation shifted from "How to survive Ecuador" to "How to be an ESL teacher."  The amount of freedom we are going to have over our classes is a bit overwhelming.  For many of the WorldTeach sites, including mine in Ambato, there is no predetermined curriculum and we have to decide for ourselves how we want to evaluate the students and what kinds of assignments and tests to administer.  Good thing I'm a boss, so the only work I will have to do to gain the respect of my students is teach them enough English so that I can explain to them how big of a deal I am.

"You guys ever hear of America?  Yeah, I'm from there."

I start my first day of practice teaching at a site here in Quito where I will be part of a group of four volunteers teaching a twenty-hour free Spanish course.  I think it will be helpful to get some experience teaching in front of a free class filled with students who have zero expectations before I meet the class I am going to teach for a whole year in Ambato.  Luckily I am teaching at the Beginner I level tomorrow, so it will be pretty hard for them to not learn anything even if I just talk at them in English for two hours.

Otavalo

My wildest dreams are coming true in Ecuador

This Saturday I went with some other volunteers to a nearby town called Otavalo.  Otavalo is known for its market where the largely indigenous population sells goods.  You can buy anything you can imagine in Otavalo like scarves, jewelry, jackets, Panama hats, or... well I guess you can really only buy those kinds of things and most of the stands sell the same textiles and trinkets, but every now and then there was something that took my breath away— like a rug with a panda bear design on it made out of alpaca fur.

The only thing I bought from the Otavalo market was an Ecuador national jersey so that when I return to the States I can be that obnoxious American who roots for a sport he doesn't care about and a team that isn't his country during international football matches.  Yeah, I call it football now too.

From Otavalo we took a bus ride to a nearby city called Cotacachi.  There we visited a caldera called Cuicocha Lake.  We took a boat ride around the small islands in the lake and we could see bubbles coming up from the water caused by gas emissions from the volcanic activity below.  I am learning that there are lots of volcanoes in Ecuador, even in the lakes.

La Mitad del Mundo

Today I went to a nearby park with some other volunteers to play basketball.  None of us were expecting much because basketball is not very popular here.  In addition, we have heard from previous volunteers that the few Ecuadorians who do play basketball are atrocious.  I was fully expecting us to show up at the courts and be the only ones there, but to my surprise there were actually quite a few people shooting around.  After a quick warm-up we challenged the most promising group of players on the courts and started a game of three-on-three.  What ensued was an ass whooping that none of us could have predicted.

I should have sensed that it was going to be a tough match-up when while we were discussing the terms of the game the Ecuadorians proposed that we play to thirty.  We are definitely not acclimated enough to the altitude here to play a game to thirty points and we should have argued for a more reasonable number.  Our team was altogether about three feet taller than the other team and at the beginning we were doing so well that I started to feel sorry for them.  That came to an end quickly and after the first several points we were all embarrassingly winded and we straight got our shit wrecked.  Final score: 6-30.

After another bad loss to what we all agreed must have been the Ecuadorian national team, I took a trip with my host mother and some other volunteers to the place where the equator actually passes through the country.  The area is a very touristy city called La Mitad del Mundo (literally "the middle of the earth").  I tried my best to get a photo in a different pose than everyone else who was taking their picture there and my friend Will snapped this shot of me.

Straddling the equator is played out

 In my next post expect to hear more about how my first teaching lessons went and whether or not I was able to convince my students to call me Professor Surasi.