Teaching Memories

Last week Toby and I completed our last English classes here at Enlace Quiché. Our final grades and exams are all finished, so we thought it was appropriate to reflect on our time spent teaching English to the Guatemalan people.


Prior to coming to Guatemala Toby and I didn't have experience teaching English as a foreign language. We had previous experience teaching lifeguards, swimming, and 1st graders (Brittany) and Search and Rescue courses (Toby), but this was new territory for us. At times this was a very frustrating process due to our brand new English program and lack of established organization and standards. Many times we started courses without the class texts or teacher's manuals because our coordinators weren't on the ball yet or simply forgot. We also had a shortage of English resources to use in our classes since those items can't be found in Quiché. One of our tasks while volunteering with Ajb'atz' Enlace Quiché was to organize and solidify the English program throughout the past year.


Our involvement in this program included teaching a variety of classes from fundamentals to level 4 for adults and levels 1 and 2 for children. Teaching each separate class involved extensive class preparation with lesson planning and creating materials and exams, grading homework and exams, and providing additional help and make-up exams for students outside of class time. The were no initial grading standards, so we created an evaluation standard for the English classes and wrote a syllabus for classroom standards. We also administered English placement tests (over 20) so that students could skip levels to save time and money. In order to amplify our supply of materials we coordinated the donation and purchase of English language materials including books, magazines, videos, and other resources (thanks to LeAnn Piering for some of these!). Fortunately we were also able to attend three different English teacher training workshops/conferences (March, July, and November 2007) where we learned strategies for evaluating, pronunciation, games, classroom management, and more.


Teaching English has been a challenging but very rewarding experience for us both since we learned a lot and saw such great improvement in our students throughout the last year. Some of our greatest memories teaching English include co-teaching an intensive vacation class for 5 weeks that included about 15 high school bilingual secretaries (Toby loved the attention) and 1 older male teacher, and my class giving me a surprise birthday celebration where they locked the door during our break and only let me in when the candles were lit! We are also very grateful to have met some neat English instructors and experts along the way like Cris Elder, Dr. Bailey, Dr. Oprandy and Jessica (and Joel) Schumacher.


In conjunction with this English Program, we have also created a Volunteer Program at Enlace Quiché, with hopes that these English speaking volunteers can keep our classes rolling. We hope that our partnerships and stable program will maintain these courses for many years into the future. We'd also love for our past students to continue studying as well since they've put so much effort out already. If you'd like to make a donation to provide a scholarship for the under privileged Mayans and public school teachers please click here. Anything can help continue to make this a successful learning experience!