I changed my site to: Englich as un Second Language

About 7 weeks ago, my friend Paul and I began teaching English classes to the kids in our neighborhood. First off, I have to say that it has been one giant experience after another. To put the entire situation into perspective, I studied Marketing and Finance in college, Paul is an Economist, and neither of us has ever taught a class in our lives, much less English. Our students are a group of about 8 Peruvian kids from our neighborhood, 8-12 years old, who are dying to learn English and are also dying to play all the time. An interesting combo…

Paul and our students on day one. That guy used to be an international economist...

"Informal Education", or just our expert teaching methods

English classes aren’t in my job description, but I think that they are something I can do to help my community and also to meet a lot of people. Peace Corps calls it an "easy win". The idea to teach English began after about two weeks in Peru. As I met the families in my neighborhood during my first weeks in Huascata, all of them asked the same thing, “Will you please teach the kids English”. And the kids wanted to show

me all the English words they knew, which about 90% were bad words and the other 10% poorly pronounced movie titles, and they all were dying to learn more. As it turns out, the schools only offer one hour of English per week, and it is usually only basic vocab without any p

ronunciation lessons. After hearing this, we decided that we wanted to teach the kids useful English phrases that they could apply in real life situations.

Example: How to pick up American girls. How to

Just kidding, we are professional in a professional atmosphere, who take our work very seriously as you will see in the pictures below.

Because this was sort of a make shift English class, we decided to use my living room as a classroom. We got all the benches and chairs in the house and packed them in the room for the students to sit on. If you look at the picture below, you can see where Arianna is standing in front

of the whiteboard. This is where we sat to teach the class…like I said, very professional.

Our classroom/my living room. My family was really cool about the screaming kids interrupting their afternoons.

Day one was straight out of a movie, and we learned a lot from those kids; about our teaching skills (or lack there of), children/wild animals, and English classes in general. I swear someone gave them Red Bull and candy before they showed up to that first class because they literally ran all over us for an hour. We had prepared a lesson plan on our bus ride home that day, and figured we would pretty much “wing it” or bribe them with candy…we did both and survived

Here I am resorting to animal crackers to save the day.

Here is a list of the Lesson Plans we had for each day. Like I said earlier, we usually went along with whatever problems showed up, so this plan usually changed pretty dramatically within the first 2 minutes of class.

CLASE 1: “Hello. What is your name?”

My name is _____________.

One candy please. (we set up a fake store where we gave them a candy if they said it correctly)

Thank You. Goodbye.

CLASE 2: Head, shoulders, legs, and feet…legs and feet (the song)

Eyes, ears, mouth, nose, hair, hand

Simple family tree words

CLASE 3: All schools in Peru were closed for about a month because of the swine flu, so only 4 kids showed up to class.

Animals: Dog, cat, bird, fish, cow, pig, donkey, monkey

CLASE 4: Soccer (Fútbol)

Pass me the ball, goal, shoot it, team, game, and field

We played soccer on my street after class for a “check for learning”

CLASE 5: (my first class without any help…yikes)

Reviewed everything covered in the past. Practiced pronunciation

Taught colors

How are you? I’m good. I’m bad

CLASE 6: (this coming Monday) Our final class

Games to apply vocab and phrases

Practice numbers up to 20

Play soccer (futbol) or volleyballs (volly)

We bounced the volleyball to practice the numbers. They are really good at 1-10, but they're going to have to practice their volleyball if they want to get good at the rest.

The time teaching classes has been really fun, and I am really glad I did it. I think the kids enjoyed it and learned quite a bit...I definitely know I have. My site already is expecting me to teach a lot of English classes when I move there, so I think this was great practice, and a good chance to make the major mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes, I made a pretty big one during one of my first classes when I showed the kids that I can “moonwalk”. They loved it and of course wanted to learn how to do it. At the time I thought it was such a great idea, I even promised my sister Stacey that I would film the kids doing it for her. But then as I was walking down my street the following day, saying hi to all the parents working in their yards, I heard a pack of kids yelling, “Hello Michael Jackson!”...Pretty cool in most situations, but definitely NOT when they are talking about their English teacher who holds classes in his family’s living room. If I were one of those parents, my child would have been out of that English class immediately, and I would have taught the “king of pop” a lesson myself and then moon walked his A#@ right out of town. Luckily Peruvians worship Michael Jackson, and I’m still alive and intact. I guess I can at least be glad that they were practicing their English when they said “Hello”.