So, remember that whole post about… “Site Visit for Realsies,” is how I believe I put it…? Well, scratch that! The Monday after that visit, I told Olga, our wonderful amazing project manager, about my experience in order to talk through next best steps. Olga, however, took immediate action. Turns out the school was indeed on probation due to the former volunteers’ experiences. The fact that they never contacted me and didn’t have the wherewithal to even notify the English teachers I would be at the school seemed to be enough to convince Olga to take away its Peace Corps volunteer.
Having come to this conclusion, Olga notified the Secretary of Education in Bogota as well as the school and within the day she’d gotten a new school to commit to having me(!) I’m pretty sure she’s magic. After two months of coastal living, I had assumed this would take months rather than hours…but costeño time is a different topic entirely!
So, anyway, a brief rundown of my school is that it is…none other than the school I went to for my Field Practicum! So you can reference that post if you want to details. Highlights include that it is an all-girls school, the English coordinator is wonderful, there are seven English teachers to work with in addition to primary school teachers trying to start an English curriculum, and although the coordinator is wonderful there are many areas that can use improvement.
I never thought I’d ever say this, but I’m so excited to work in an all-girls’ school! Here, in a machismo culture where woman are almost uniformly expected to perform traditional gender roles, womanizing by single as well as married men is an open and accepted practice, small boy children are taught by their older relatives to yell disgusting things to women on the street, random men on sidewalks mutter things into your ear like “Que linda, oh que bonita” and much worse, and even nice, perfectly respectable host fathers say things like, “I know you’re thinking this, but I’m just going to say it: Colombian men are hot…and there’s a rumor that we all have big penises. This isn’t necessarily true. But there is a reason for this rumor.” (word for word, I swear)…well, needless to say, mixed-gender classrooms of hormone-filled 15-18 year olds was going to be a tough one. I feel like this simplifies classroom management a huge amount!
In keeping with the model of efficiency that Olga is, she arranged for me to meet with the teachers and La Rectora—the principal—on Friday. We met for an hour to discuss arrangements like host families, a little bit about the coming year, and a few other sundries. It was easy to see that the teachers were united if not in teaching methodology, then in their care and concern for the welfare of the students. Although I came out of the meeting excited, as the teachers were wonderfully nice, I also left a little daunted as well. Why?
I will be the first volunteer at this school. The teachers are all made up of the “old-guard” teachers—not new ones recently hired. There is no intrinsic push to develop a more holistic English program; instead, I will be interrupting momentum long-established. In the grammar v. conversational style of teaching, lines have already been drawn, and most ebb towards the grammatical teaching method, with no huge impetus to change. Oh, and did I mention I have only a little formal teaching experience?
Obviously, I will have to emulate the change in the schools, as well as be extra clever in my work with the teachers to make the change an intrinsically driven one. It will have to be gradual. Fortunately, we have weeks of observing at the schools built in so that we can plan strategies. I will have to get to know these teachers before I know more about how I will approach this. Either way, I think that, especially for the first year, I will be doing more in-class teaching than I’d originally planned. However, having an amazing coordinator as well as a strongly united school should be amazing!
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