Expatiperro

You can stop worrying: I am still alive and well, and I haven't "gone Spanish" and forgotten my prior life in the US. My lack of updates has less to do with being lazy (though I can't deny that I've been guilty of that), and more to do with a schedule that's hardly left me time to eat, not to mention reflect and write. But with my Catalan professor having taken ill this week, I have some free time to catch you all up on my life these past two weeks.

The main reason for my suddenly jam-packed life is the Teaching English as a Foreign Language course that I've enrolled in. Five days a week for between 3 and 8 hours a day, my 16 classmates and I learn pretty much everything there is to learn about basic ESL pedagogy, a task that's made much more difficult by the fact that no one has taken a basic English grammar course since 6th grade, if they've taken any at all. I'm one of the lucky ones who has some grammar background (thanks Mr. Tacke!), and having learned two foreign languages has been an incredible help, especially in comparing grammar forms to understand English. Still, to say that it's like drinking from a fire hose would be an understatement. Passive vs active voice, modal verbs, the seven different ways you can construct the future tense, adverbs of frequency- we're having to absorb as much of this as we can, and hope that we can regurgitate enough of it back out on the final exam to pass the course.

Besides the classroom section, we also have to teach 6 lessons to a group of English language students, who we affectionately, but appropriately, refer to as our "guinea pigs." Class sizes range from 4 to 17, and people's abilities range pretty widely, too, which makes for some tough teaching. This, combined with the our unfamiliarity with basic ESL teaching methods, has made our time in the classroom quite the rollercoaster ride, the difference being that we're paying significantly more for these classes, there's no safety belt, and the entire ride is inverted. Hope you brought your barf bag.

Anyways, all of these challenges bring me back to the title of the post. For me, the hardest thing about teaching has been making sure that my students are understanding what I'm trying to teach. Since we're all new teachers, it's hard to judge the difficulty of a lesson that we're planning to give. Since we don't have much knowledge of their abilities, even if we know how hard a lesson will be, it could be completely inappropriate for the students that show up. And since students want to impress their teachers, they won't admit to not understanding a grammar point or vocab word, and instead just nod their head and act like they get it.

What I've realized in my two weeks of classes is how vital it is to put myself in my students' shoes, and try to see what I'm doing from their perspective. Being a native speaker, it's hard to understand just how diffucult learning English must be and how different it is from other languages, and it's easy to assume that students are getting everything, or when they aren't, they're just not trying hard enough. But the reality is probably different, and to be able to get your points across, you have to understand what it's like to be on their side. In this way, effective teaching, almost more than anything, seems to be about empathy. Of course, teachers have to prepare materials, practice their delivery, and carry themselves in a certain way. But there's that other element that plays a big part too.