Thoughts from my first week of teaching

This week has been my first week teaching on my own or with the help of a "co-teacher" here and its definitely been exhausting! Everyday, I have 3-4 classes that I have to plan lessons for and teach and they are located all over the city of Huaycan. I have a huge variety of classes and some of them are definitely more challenging than others. The Basic class for kids ages 6-9 is a huge handful- they are definitely in the "test the new teacher mode" right now. I am trying very hard to teach the classes only in English (this is what my program supports and has been proved to be best for language learning) but its difficult especially because the kids know that I speak Spanish! They are always saying "Espanol, Miss!!!" I will be known as "Miss" for the next four months, because that is the standard name for all English teachers here. However, I have had a lot of fun and inspiring classes and tutoring sessions. I have really enjoyed working one on one with the boys that I tutor in English. I work with a boy named Eduardo who loves to stump me at hangman and another boy Frankie who yesterday created a whole doctor costume out of paper and a plastic bag when we were playing vocabulary charades (the kids here are very independent and creative with limited resources!) Its really nice to be able to get to know the kids and cater the learning activities to what the kids really enjoy and benefit from. I also teach an intermediate adult English class which is really interesting because I am teaching students my own age; their English is very impressive and I love it because we can talk about cultural difference between Peru and the United States. Another benefit of having students our age is that it gives us a chance to hang out with Peruvians and speak Spanish with them during our free time. Yesterday, we had a volunteer-student volleyball game (I hadn't played for years!) that was a lot of fun! I has been really interesting for me to learn Peruvian slang because it is completely different from Mexican slang. As I get into the swing of lesson planning and teaching, I'm sure it will get easier to plan what kind of activities work well with each class. However, I'm already discovering new ways to engage the students and learning a lot about how challenging English is to learn! Sometimes I wonder what the benefits of teaching English are to students here and my whole experience here is causing me to reflect a lot about non-profits working in poor regions of the world and the role of education in these kinds of communities. I definitely don't have the answers, but I am very grateful to be able to be here and have this kind of first hand experience of non-profit work. My only conclusion that I have come to so far is that no matter what, establishing relationships with people from different cultures who speak different language and learning from them is eye-opening and life changing. Furthermore, my experience living in this community has not only made me grateful for what I have, but also aware of what may be missing or wrongly looked down upon in American culture. I am sure I will have more concrete observations to share about this in upcoming blog posts!