I taught a week long BEGINNER English class during school vacation to four teachers. (I don't have a picture of it or else I would have blogged about it before). We just covered the basics like: the alphabet, simple greetings, colors, body parts, and conjugating verbs in the present tense. I really enjoyed it and I think that the teachers did too. They especially liked the "head, shoulders, knees, and toes" and alphabet songs. After our last class they took me out to lunch at the new small fast food fried chicken and French fries place in our town as a thank you. I am hoping to replicate this class again, but in the meantime I just help some of the teachers and my host siblings with their English homework when they need it.
The problem is that most teachers are obligated to teach English but there is not a single teacher that I know of (I work in 10 schools) who actually speaks English - or can have a simple conversation in English. So what they are teaching the kids I have found to be sometimes incorrect, if not grammatically then at least in pronunciation. It also puts me in an awkward situation with my host siblings when I see that they got a question marked wrong that they really got right or when their teacher's sample answer is completely off. I took a picture of my host sister's English book. Her teacher had written out the answer to question #1 which I have written below:
Q: What date does your school year begin?
A: I am my class the 2/24/14
Oh boy.
Another thing I noticed was how strange the questions in the book are. It made it very hard to answer. I.e.:
Q: What does the Principal wish to you?
What on Earth? This makes me wonder if my Spanish books back in the day were this bad. Probably.
Picture disclaimer: this is one big mess and she later realized that she wrote the answer to #5 in #4s spot. My other host siblings are much better at English.
This pretty much describes it in GIF form:
This is probably what my Spanish looks like to a native Spanish speaker. Of course, I don't hold myself out to be a Spanish teacher.
ReplyDelete"What color is your school" is such a latin american question. I've been going to my school for like 2 years and I don't know if it's grey, white, or off-white. I'm going to check on Monday :)
ReplyDeleteI give everyone an A for effort. Everyone's English is better than my Spanish.
ReplyDelete