Along with motivation issues, another surprising characteristic of my adult students is how immature they are. I am consistently stunned by how annoying and childish they can be, particularly the ones that are several years older than me. I imagined that a teacher with adult students would be free of disciplinary duties and would be able to focus on teaching, but I find myself having to resort to treating my students like children to get the response I want from them.
Any kind of punishment that creates more work for me is obviously out of the question, so I never even considered any kind of detention or extra assignments for students that misbehave. I remember in high school that students would get sent to the dean for class disturbances. That would result in detention, yes, but more immediately the student would be dismissed from the class and would have to make up all the work he missed. I remember how jarring it was to see someone have to leave, and I think it is a powerful threat to kick a disruptive student out of class because it is straight to the point and fits the offense perfectly.
Over the past two and a half semesters I have threatened many times to kick students out of class, mostly if they complained or were talking/texting on their phones. It has always managed to shut them up and I've never had to actually give anyone the boot... until last week.
One of my younger students was texting on his phone while he was supposed to be doing a group assignment. I normally don't care if my students don't pay attention while I am speaking or would rather text than do the practice work I assign because they are adults and if they don't want to learn they don't have to. Students should respect my authority and listen to what I say to them since they can learn a lot from me, but if they don't it doesn't really bother me too much because they are only sabotaging their own progress. However, one thing that absolutely infuriates me is when we do work that requires groups and one student doesn't participate, thereby ruining the learning experience of the other students.
I was mad that he was being disrespectful to his classmates who were trying to learn, so instead of just asking him to put his phone away like I normally would I told him to give it to me. He put his phone in his pocket and tried to reason with me, but I insisted that he give me his phone. I told him he could leave the class if he didn't want to give it to me, and it ended with me kicking him out and telling him to come back the next day.
Students' moxie continues outside of class as well, and just the other day one of my students whose husband is in my second class tried to get me to pass him to the next level even though he hasn't attended class in the last three weeks.
- Teacher, my husband can't some to classes anymore this semester because of work.
- And?
- Can you pass him anyway?
- Not if he only came to one-fifth of the classes this semester. That's absurd.
- Can't you give him a test?
- It's a conversation class. There's no way to replicate 100 classroom hours of conversation with a native speaker in one test.
- Then can you give him classes on the weekend or in the morning before our class?
- Are you seriously asking me if I can give private lessons to one student because he signed up for a class that directly conflicts with his work schedule?!
- Teacher, don't be a bad person, I know you can do it.
After that conversation I didn't know whether to laugh at the absurdity of what my student was saying or be incensed at her suggestion that I was in the wrong for not passing her husband who doesn't come to class. I don't know if my students say things like this because I am generally cool with them and listen to their suggestions for the class or if it a consequence of Ecuadorian culture. Either way, it is completely inappropriate and I will never cease to be amazed at a thirty-five year old woman who reasons like a child.
I have wondered if I will miss teaching in Ecuador when I am in medical school. After my experience with my class today I can emphatically say that I will not. The students in my first class always complain that we work too much from the book (we do like three pages a day, mind you), so I try my best to incorporate fun, non-grammar related activities into class. I thought a fun idea for today would be to write limericks. I understand that rhyming is harder in English than in Spanish, but it is only five lines and I gave them an hour to do it.
Well my class had a collective aneurysm when I explained the assignment to them, and they very disrespectfully shouted at me that it was impossible to do. Yes, a group of students with an average age of ~24 freaked out that they had only an hour to write a five line poem with a predetermined structure. It seriously took me ten minutes to calm them down and get them to actually start doing it, but more than the frustration of playing babysitter to a room of adults, it hurt my inner-writer to see people so opposed to even attempting to be creative using my language and the language that I love.
So future Krishna, if you are sick of reading textbooks and start thinking back fondly on your time as an ESL teacher in Ecuador, remember: being an English teacher was never just about teaching English.
Just Trust me on This One
An important skill for anyone learning a foreign language is to learn how to accept differences from your first language even if you don't understand it or it doesn't make sense to you. I am not particularly good at this, and I have incessantly argued things about Spanish grammar to native speaking Spanish teachers who think differently.
For instance, in Ecuador the most common way to express the passive voice is to use the third-person plural. "He was killed" would therefore read Lo mataron. I understand how this construction works for some cases, but I cannot accept this usage for instances in which the actor was one person. What I mean to say is, if it was one unknown person who killed the man, you should not be able to use a plural verb conjugation. Alas, whenever I have tried to use a different construction that makes more sense to me, every Ecuadorian in hearing range disagrees and I have slowly and begrudgingly accepted that this is how Spanish works here.
My students are also really bad at this and I frequently find myself just telling them to trust me. I thought that this semester I would speak a little more Spanish so I could give my students better explanations about the grammar topics. That turned out to be a bad move, because it has only encouraged them to try to translate directly more than ever.
When I taught the future tense this semester I explained to them that it was similar to the way that there are multiple ways to express the future in Spanish. This resulted in them trying to match up the different ways we use the future with their different ways, and they were probably more confused than if I would have just spoken in English the whole time and had them figure it out on their own. A lot of my students were trying to translate "I'm going to the mall" to Estoy yendo al mall, even though I explained to them that the present simple and progressive are used differently in the two languages.
It is not intuitive to leave behind what you know about grammar in your own language when you are trying to learn another, but bravery is rewarded and the best language students are the ones that have faith in native speakers and accept differences in grammar even though it sometimes feels uncomfortable.
Deployed
Normally when I come home at night on the weekends, all the lights in my house are off, everyone is asleep, and my family has inadvertently locked me out. This past Friday I was shocked to see that upon my arrive late at night, all the lights in the house were on and there were a ton of people walking around. I asked the housekeeper what was going on, and she informed me that my host brother José Luis, a UN Peacekeeper, was being deployed to Sudan the coming Monday.
 |
| José Luis and I at Ricky's wedding |
It took me another thirty seconds of looking around the dining room to realize that everyone was hammered. It was already 2:00am and most people were either passed out or about to leave, so within the hour it was just my oldest host brother Santi, my host dad, and some relative I didn't know sitting at the table drinking sugar cane alcohol and talking about José Luis leaving for a year.
I have never had any family member in the military who left home, so it was a completely new perspective of the military for me. It was sad to hear the stories my host brother and dad told about José Luis as a kid and how they were all very worried about his safety. It was the first time that any story about war was made real to me as well, since I know José Luis, his wife, and his three kids because they visit the house pretty often.
In the next few months Santi will also be leaving Ecuador for Australia where his wife and daughter live. I felt bad for my host parents who will be away from two of their children for a long time, but my host father managed to see the value in my host brothers' departures by stressing that they need to leave to fulfill their respective duties as a soldier and father. He even had some inspirational words for me and expressed his confidence in my decision to go back to the United States to pursue medicine and become a physician.
I'm not as close with my host family as some of the other volunteers I know, so I appreciated that they opened up and shared some of their family history with me that night, even if it was really sad.
Puyo
Last Sunday I went on a trip to a nearby jungle town called Puyo. I can't say enough about how cool it is that I live in the chilly mountains, but after a two hour bus ride east I can be in the hot and humid jungle.
In Puyo we visited a monkey rescue center where visitors can walk around and interact with the rescued and rehabilitating monkeys. The guy at the entrance of the center warned us that the monkeys like to jump on people and steal things, so we were all careful to zip everything up in our bags and I took off my glasses when I went in. I wish I would have taken more pictures of the place, but there really were monkeys jumping around on us and I was scared they would steal my camera.
 |
| Don't let my smile fool you; I was straight terrified of the baby monkey on my neck |
I noticed that a monkey was cleaning one of the dog's hair, and I joking asked if the monkeys ever ride the dogs. Five seconds later this happened:
 |
| The Internet would be proud |
 |
| Lis, myself, Pete, and Su |
Beginning of the End
This week I will be traveling to Quito to attend my program's end of service conference. After tomorrow's classes I only have four more weeks of teaching left, and with the United States of America and medical school in sight, I am starting to get anxious about going home. My plans to travel to Peru for the three weeks following the end of my job are also slowly coming together and I will hopefully be posting pictures of Machu Picchu by the end of the summer.
No comments:
Post a Comment