visit to a local schoolI

On Monday, I visited the school of two of my teachers. The most immediately apparent thing is the competence of the teachers I am working with. The school is more chaotic than what I am used to in the U.S. Students seem to have free periods and are wandering around during class time. The classrooms do not have walls and it is so noisy that it seems difficult to hear the teacher at all. The students in all of the rooms seemed to be respectful and on task, but there also seems to be a lot of sitting around everywhere you look.

It's obvious the challenges my teachers face. The diversity of skill level in one room makes it virtually impossible to educate every student. In one room, there were students speaking English at grade level and other students who could barely write their names in their L1. Still, the English knowledge of the better students was more than I expected.

Further, it seemed to me like both of my teachers have 4 preps each day. Each teachers 2 sections of 9-12th grade. Because they do not have time to collaborate, it would make sense to me to reduce their preps to only 2, which would give them more time to think and prepare and also improve their teaching because they would be repeating lessons every day. This may be because of the transient nature of the teachers in this region.

I was also curious why, in a region which only has 16 trained English teachers for 47 schools, they would choose to put 2 trained teachers in the same school.

The students were shy to talk to me and I had trouble getting conversations going. But they were also extremely interested in me and have been asking for me to return since I visited. One 9th grade class was listening to a story and answering questions, but it did not seem to me like all of the students were engaged. Another 12th grade class was learning about adjectives but the lesson moved pretty slowly. The classes are only 40 minutes long where I am used to 100 minute periods so it seemed like there was not enough time to get much accomplished.

I enjoyed this visit and learned a lot about the local context. I am convinced now that project based learning is possible and am optimistic that given the proper surrounding circumstances, these students can learn English in school. However, I am not certain how to overcome the substantial institutional barriers that exist.