1. You need to win the respect of your students. It might be a slow, long process, but hang in there. In some cases, they may have experienced teachers who didn't know what they were doing, didn't try to connect with them, left them partway through the year, or even partied with them on the weekends. That is what they see when they get a new gringa teacher. Stay strong, do what you think will work, and they will settle down eventually. There will come a day when you hear a glimpse of silence while they write, they will start to ask you questions, and you will notice that everything you do is no longer una pelea (fight). When the class starts to laugh together instead of at each other, you just may have won. That feeling makes the whole thing "vale la pena" (worth it). It is a pride that is unexplainable when you experience something that you were so close to quitting, going well.
2. You will not understand the framework in which you are working. There will be expectations and rules that nobody will tell you about, even when you ask them directly - "What exactly do I need to give the students when I assign this project?" In fact, you might walk in the morning you were giving out the assignment and find out you have to follow a certain procedure. You rush in those 10 minutes before the bell rings to follow the procedure so that you can assign the project which MUST be assigned that day because you must give them exactly one week to complete the assignment and you are not allowed to give work during exam week which is coming up after the day off that you didn't know existed.... (Are you out of breath just reading that sentence? I wanted you to feel how I feel). You also have more pressure on you than any other teacher because you have a student in your class who's mother is on the assessment committee of the Ministry of Public Education. So, even though you are the one with the least experience in the system... your work has to be flawless.
3. Relationships are more important than tasks. It is more important to greet someone and ask about how they are doing than to ask them a work related question. Always relate to the person first. Then, you can talk about work.
4. As far as I can tell, Tico teachers don't complain very much. They laugh a lot, work well together, and seem to enjoy what they do. Many of them have a lot of different teaching jobs (working at the HS in the day and a night HS at night). They seem to be grateful for the work, even if it is very tiring or very from from where they live (up to an hour and a half drive in a car).
5. Student behavior that we may consider super weird is actually relatively normal. For example, I thought it was extreme when a student started sweeping the floor near her desk so that she could lie down on the floor during the middle of class. When I told the story to another teacher after class, she didn't seem surprised at all and told me that was a common happening in schools. I was just supposed to not let her do it... but it wasn't out of the ordinary. Here I was, thinking I had never seen anything like that in all of my schooling.
Another example - I used to think that this one sound that students would make when they didn't like something was disrespectful towards me... but then I started doing impressions of it to some of my Tica friends. They told me it was just a sound that meant you didn't want to do something or didn't like something. I started asking friends and the teenagers in my improv group to help me practice the sound... because as weird as it sounds, I couldn't make it correctly. The more I was aware of it, the more I watched interactions between friends or family members; with each interaction, I began to understand this sound more. It really wasn't a big deal at all... The thing that sounded SUPER disrespectful to me, turned out to just be a mild and completely common expression of a desire not to do something. And while this might sound like a weird thing to be excited about, the understanding and acceptance of this one sound has really started to make my classroom a more pleasant place to be. And now, I hear it less and less :]
6. You might have a work meeting that will be located in a pool, talking about hiring a "guapo" swim teacher (hypothetically), and drinking Imperial. This is a good work meeting and is very important in order to build a strong teacher community. This is also when the Tico teachers learn that the Gringa teachers are not "aburida" (boring) like they thought they were before they knew them.
7. Even though the rules of the school system seem almost militaristic (which is ironic because the country has no military), things will still be disorganized and will happen at the last minute. That is ok. At least I have decided it is ok. For example, not all of your students will have books until after the second month of school because the copy store ran out and the supplier won't send more. It then becomes the students' responsibility to take a classmate's book to the copy store to illegally copy.... but that's ok, too. You'd understand that if you bought the DVDs that are filmed using someone's cell phone in a movie theatre. So, then the least proactive students who were without a book for a long long time have already failed the first test when they finally have the material they need. Somehow, though, everyone gets a copy of the book and the third month of school begins to go a bit more smoothly.
8. Even though life here is "Pura Vida" everyone is working really hard and many hours beyond what they are paid.... just like in the US. Even the students work really long hours and go beyond what they would be expected of in the US; students have to go to the copy store to print out their own packets... so that the school doesn't have to make copies and they actually do. I can't imagine sending my old students to Kinkos to copy their own language packets. It would have been a disaster and maybe one of them would have come to class with the packet. They didn't even come to class with the packet when I hole punched it and stuck it in their binders!
9. Costa Rica loves rubrics!!!! I thought rubrics were important in the US, but that is nothing compared to here. Even the tests have to be written by using a "tabla" of data which specifies how many class periods you spent on each topic... delegating how many questions you can ask about that topic. The students have to receive the "themes" of the test a week before so that they can study. There is a very specific cover page format to the test with rules and percentages, a place for the parent to sign that they saw the grade, and the school's crest. The percentage delegated to each test and each project, homework, etc is clearly laid out and can not be changed. When I had to give an additional test because the first one went so badly, the board had to discuss it and approve a change in percentage allotment for my class. Did I mention that it seamed a little militaristic?
10. There will continue to be more weird, surprising, funny, interesting, and amazing moments along the way. So, fasten your seatbelt..... wait, we don't use those here... and enjoy the wild ride that is working within a culture that you did not grow up in.... where you are a player in the game who thinks he knows the rules, but actually doesn't. Once you accept this, you can breathe, learn, and enjoy the best you can. I think that "poco a poco" you will learn the rules of the game and "va volando."
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| They're working together!!! Well, mostly. ;] |
What a great mini-manual for new teachers.
ReplyDeleteYou should leave a copy in the teacher's desk drawer.
That is if you have a desk and it has a drawer?
You are a really good writer.
ReplyDeleteYou could write a book about your life in Costa Rica.