First week of classes

My first week of classes at CECAMI has ended. Thanks to the Easter holiday, my last class was Thursday morning so I have a wonderfully long weekend to relax and prepare for next week.

This past week was very interesting because in some ways my classes exceeded my expectations and in others they failed to meet them. I guess I should have done a better job of listening to our directors' advice about not having expectations.

As of right now I am teaching two classes everyday, one at 8:00am and another at 3:30pm. I'm supposed to have a 5:00 class as well but right now we simply don't have any students registered for that time period. (We're looking into possibly starting a conversation class at that time.) Both of the classes I'm teaching are Basic level with about fifteen students in each. They range in age from 13 to about 70 years old so there's quite a bit of variety.

I have found that my older students (30+ years) tend to have a much harder time with the language than my adolescent students. Overall, though, they are all at a much lower level than I had anticipated. All of the awesome lesson plans that I had whipped up over the weekend had to be altered and I ended up spending part of the week reviewing simple things like colors, days of the week, and basic introductions.

The great thing is that there are plenty of awesome activities that can be used to teach these things. And I have awesome students! After teaching classes of 40+ rowdy high school students for two weeks at Manuela Canizares in Quito, having a smaller, calmer class has been a breeze.

I do have two older students though, one from Colombia and one from the coast, that speak next to no English and are proving to be a bit of a challenge. They are clearly much further behind than the rest of my students and I'm struggling to find ways to bring them up to speed and keep them involved in classroom activities. In an ideal world, I would sit down with them and tutor them one-on-one. But, seeing as that is not an option, I need to go back and refresh my memory on how to handle multi-level classes.

Overall, my first week went very well and I'm very pleased with my classes. We were even able to celebrate a student's birthday on Thursday with Coca-Cola, peach & coconut cake and two rounds of the birthday song.

I think this is going to be a very good year. ;)