y'all speak English real good

I’m actually combining two assignments with this post—for one teacher I’m supposed to write about the English Language teaching I’ve seen at my placement, and for the other I’m supposed to write about my relationship with my mentor. I have enough work due between planning for eleven periods a day and the evil pre-post test assignment that I feel this small compromise shouldn’t kill anyone.


Let’s start with the English Language at my school. Teaching the upper grades at a bilingual school has its perks. Namely, the fact that the students essentially are fluent in English. Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about what ‘fluent’ entails. My students can talk to me in English, watch Glee in English, and write expressive and comical responses to assigned prompts. The problems arise when they are assigned random American literature texts. They either don’t understand the context (see like seven of my other posts) or they do not understand the flowery language of authors (I’m pointing at you, F. Scott Fitzgerald). However, I have to hand it to these kids- they power through the texts despite their language limitations. I actually have students that ENJOYED The Great Gatsby and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They thought the books were INTERESTING. Wild.


The English teaching routine goes like this—teachers are given an Annual Plan of objectives to meet throughout the year. Kind of like a curriculum, but it’s more like, “by the end of the trimester read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and go through chapters 1-7 of the Grammar Sense 4 book.” With those guidelines, English teachers march into the classroom and spend the day alternating between grammar activities and the text. Not exactly a party, but it apparently gets the job done. These kids know their modals and present perfect better than I do.


I can’t say that I spent a lot of time here in the observing position. We were told that we would have up to two weeks to observe before we started teaching. Apparently, ‘observation’ translates loosely to take over all instruction with no mentor present and no texts and no guiding Annual Plan (I finally was able to get hold of that Holy Grail document about a week ago). I think this is pretty standard fare for abroad, but it makes my whole post on ‘my relationship with my mentor’ a little interesting. Eventually we met and have interacted regularly since about the second week. I’m going to pretty much limit what I have to say on that topic to two main points. 1. She is very open to my ideas about how to run the classroom. She has provided no negative feedback towards any of my lessons, and supports my actions when I take disciplinary measures with students. She respects my space, but I know that she will back me up if I advocate for resources (um, the school said the books would be in over a month ago, where are they), and she’ll do weird errands for me like finding speakers. She also loves Glee and thinks it’s brilliant that I’ve decided to use Glee to work on conversational skills. I also indicate to students that GLEE IS JUST LIKE REAL AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL and as my mentor attended an American high school… well she thinks I’m pretty awesome for saying that. Main Point 2. She completely undermines what I am saying sometimes. I know she doesn’t mean to at all, but it happens. She is rarely in the room for a long period of time, but when she is, she will often engage in side Spanish conversations with students. My big thing is that this is English class, we’re supposed to speak English (unless you need help translating words or something), and also side conversations are just rude. I can’t really clear my throat or anything obvious, so I normally just tune it out. It bothers me though. Alright, enough of being a Negative Nancy. Point is, the students are in my class speaking English. Someone is doing something right.