Telesecundaria

Friday marked the first time I gave a ¨charla¨ (a lesson) in the school in my village.

Our village has a ´telesecundaria´, one of the three types of middle schools in Guatemala. As the name suggests, it involves watching a lot of television. In fact, the tv does the majority of the teaching. But not in a cool, hyper-tech futuristic Jetson´s sort of way. Just try to imagine those horrible low-budget educational videos you maybe had to watch in middle school. And imagine that´s all your day consists of.

The first time we went to the school, just to observe, I left feeling shocked. The students, in classrooms ranging from 30 to 40 students depending on the grade, watched a 15 to 20 minute video on a tv that was very poor quality. I sat in the back of the room and could barely hear. A teacher may or may not have been present at any given moment, and after the video, the teacher (if present) may or may not give a brief recap and answer questions. Otherwise, students were basically expected to work individually and unsupervised in their textbooks. The day we came, only two of the four teachers were at the school, and there are three classes (one for each grade level)... so obviously at least 30 students were unattended at any time. One of theteachers did very little to provide any discipline or structure (no recap after the video, no ´quiet down´ as students were chatting and laughing while others were earnestly trying to work). The other was a little more proactive, having students read along in the textbook. Still, quite depressing. I don´t know how anyone could learn much information in such circumstances.

Teaching the charla was very challenging. I co-taught with one of my teammates, but still, facing 40 unknown teenagers and having to engage them in a lesson about decision making for an hour in a language I barely have a handle on was extremely intimidating. More than once, I found myself at a loss, struggling to find the words for what I wanted to say, or knowing that what I had just said was blatantly wrong and made no sense (my teammate and I definitely got some snickers for ourSpanish). It was also very challenging to get them to participate...which was no surprise since they spend most of the school day zoning out in front of a tv or working directly from a text book. So we got a whole lot of the silent treatment. However, even though I was a bit shaken afterwards, we did eventually get them to open up and contribute some. And it can only get easier.

If anything, we got to break up the tedium of the day a little bit, even if it was just to entertain them with our bad Spanish. After all, it´s not every day two gringas come to class.