Teach it, sister.

As I cannot boast any concrete teaching experience, I am lucky to work as a substitute teacher, especially at an international school in Honduras. Since arriving here, I have taught Kindergarten, sixth grade, seventh-grade English, and high school Bible classes (no giggles, please). Every time I subbed for a class, the teacher expressed immense gratitude, not because I am so talented, but mostly because subbing usually involves finding 5-7 different teachers to take various hours of each day. This requires exhaustive planning and transforms into a big hassle. Finding one person who can sub an entire week, or even a whole day, is dynamite.


As an amateur teacher, I am learning on the job. However, at International School Tegucigalpa, it's pretty normal for teachers to lack experience in the classroom upon arrival.  Every year, IST recruits at specific private, Christian colleges in North America including Taylor University in Indiana, Calvin College in Michigan, and Judson University in Illinois among other colleges in California and Canada. Thus, many of the North American teachers are newly-graduated from university, green in life and unversed in teaching. IST also hosts numerous student teachers for a few months at a time. Not every new recruit to IST has a teaching degree, either. The ratio is maybe half-in-half, the non-certified teachers comprising the teachers who specialize in certain subjects (chemistry, biology, algebra, etc) and do not teach elementary skills such as writing and reading.


Like schools in the States, bilingual schools in Honduras run from September to June. A public Honduran school will begin the school year in February and end in November. Besides IST, there are a number of bilingual schools in Tegucigalpa including Mayan School, American School of Tegucigalpa, England School, Discovery School, Hamilton School, and of course, Happy Land School, among others.  Native Hondurans inform me that IST is among the best, if not the most prestigious, of the bilingual schools.  


At International School Tegucigalpa, each teacher signs a contract; the school requires North Americans to stay for at least two years.The school provides furnished housing, cable, internet, and bus transportation to and from school. Normally, only third-year teachers can request one of the school's personal vehicles. However, this year the school bestowed a Ford Escape upon the ladies of Casa Amarilla (yellow house) despite their second-year status. We pay for gas while the school pays for all repairs (at least those not accrued while crashing into other vehicles or inanimate objects). Health insurance is provided, as well as a land line phone to call the U.S. and a cell phone for each teacher. Like IST teachers, I buy minutes from Tigo (the cell phone company) to maintain enough saldo (balance) to make calls and send messages on the cheap phone I purchased myself. 


Last week, Mr. G traveled to the States to recruit for IST in the Midwest. He asked me to teach his three sections of 7th-grade English for the week. I readily agreed because I'm looking to get experience in teaching numerous grade levels to see if I might like to pursue education as a career.


Now, Mr. G prepared some top-notch plans for me. I proctored quizzes, I enthusiastically taught a lesson about adjectives (even the positive, comparative, and superlative forms), I reviewed vocabulary, I reminded them of their assignments and assessments, and I made coffee for the other teachers (as Mr. G usually does). I did many teacher-ly activities.


Most of the time, however, I used the infamous Stink Eye, I yelled over noise, I started my collection of banned objects used while I talked (balls of playdough, personal notes, art projects, scissors, glue sticks, magazines, food, toys, etc), I repeated myself, I bestowed detentions, I ordered kids to the Recovery Chair and then to the hall and then to the principal's office, and doled out other strange and unusual punishments.  One kid decided to eat a hot dog during class, condiments and all. Several of the students who asked to get materials from their lockers didn't return for 15 minutes. Two students received my wrath when I noticed the swastikas, or the "nasty signs" as they called them, drawn on their notebooks and hands.  I caught numerous students talking and cheating on quizzes; I grabbed the papers without a word and wrote big, fat zeros in red pen with comments like, "Talking to neighbor" and "Passed note to Carlos O."


Two kids cried on Friday. The first boy passed notes during the vocab quiz. He cried for most of the hour while his fellow classmates consoled him and directed dirty looks my way as if to say, "How could you do this, you witch?" The second crier spent lunch hour with me. Earlier in the day, when I asked the students to pass their quizzes forward, he had taken the quiz from the student behind him and quickly copied all of the answers. After I informed him that he was in more trouble than he realized, he leaned on my desk until his face stopped about six inches from mine. I watched the evolution, impressed by his showmanship, as his eyes turned a pitiful red and big, fat tears rolled down his face: "Please, mees," he pleaded, "do not do this." I had threatened to send an email to Mr. Atkinds, the vice principle charged with disciplining unruly middle-schoolers. Hiding my laugh in my hands, I attempted to end the melodrama with comments like, "Go on, Carlos" and "Ok, Carlos. Time to go," and finally, "Please leave, Carlos."


I must say, the situation got a little crazy and I got a lotta mean. Turns out, sub-time is go-nuts time.


Lessons learned:


- You cannot make friends with your students. Most teachers go with the motto, No smiling until Christmas. Discipline first, even if it means your students look at you like they want to punch you in the larynx.


- Follow-through (the double-edged sword). One teacher recently told me that her students never enter the classroom quietly as she has instructed them to do. One day, she became so frustrated, she threatened to make them exit and enter the classroom correctly ten times in a row. Of course, she was forced to go ahead with this plan, despite the time consumption and the confused looks from the other staff members.


- Fake it till you make it. Even if you have to make your students exit/enter the classroom 10 times, you should pretend like everything is going as planned. Yes, Carlos Enrique, I MEANT for this activity to fail miserably. In fact, I knew you were going to eat that hot dog in class just now. Students smell timidity, hesitation, and indecision.


- Do not believe students when they insist that the teacher normally allows them to eat in the classroom or gives them "free time." I subbed an hour of sixth-grade last week and when the middle school bell rang, about 70% of the class insisted that this marked the beginning of a daily "five-minute break." They behaved so convincingly that I conceded and announced that the "five-minute break" had started. Later, when I mentioned this to Esther (the actual teacher) she had no knowledge of this said "break." 


- Do not ignore bad behavior. It never works. Address everything, unless it's crying. I ignore that.


- Shut down situations completely and right away. For example, one student (who is typically a nuisance) complained last week, "Mees, my cheek is swollen. I need to go to the school's doctor." Uh huh. I assume she hoped to wander the halls and to "bb," or Blackberry, her friends. I admit that the excuse proved clever as anyone would hesitate to hinder treatment in the event of a health issue. However, I decided to answer her with, "If you can talk, it must not be that bad. You can go after class." When she complained about it later, I responded with, "You can either stay here and stop whining, or you can visit Mr. Atkins' office but you are not going to visit the doctor during my class." She didn't ask again.


- Learn names. No kid responds to, "You in the purple, why are you singing Justin Bieber songs right now?"


- If you tell students to stop talking, they will begin to whistle, mumble, rustle, and make noise in any other way possible and in such a way as to make it impossible to track.  Mostly, I deal with this by demanding, "Who is whistling? Who is it?" in an angry voice because . . .


- Students will rat each other out. Use this to your advantage.


- If a student succeeds in punching you in the larynx, abandon ship.


To conclude, I want to share a YouTube which shows more of the school grounds and the classrooms at IST. Tashina, Paula's sister, makes an appearance as the teacher in the teal sweater. I attempted to embed the video directly in my blog but it didn't work, so please click on this link.


There. Now you are aware that IST supports dark orchestral music, Yummies, Frutilicious things, Coca Cola, Oodles of Noodles, Vienna sausages, slow motion, gymnastics, men who stare, and walking backwards.


I hope everyone enjoys an ecstatic, delicious, food-filled Thanksgiving tomorrow! I will stay here in Tegus: reading, watching movies, and, I admit, venturing to the movie theater to see The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (hopefully in English). Currently, I am in the process of planning solo trips to touristy places around Honduras like Roatán and the other Bay Islands.