English Classes

My English class on the day we wrote letters to the US!

I’ve started teaching English once a week to students in secondary school (about 13-17 years old) and it’s going pretty well. We have mostly been playing games to practice basic pronunciation, since as a native speaker that’s what I can help them with most. This week, though, I had them write letters to the Spanish class in Wisconsin with which I've been corresponding through the Peace Corps World Wise Schools Program, and I learned a few things about Peruvian students:

1. Every grade has English classes during the school year, but unfortunately they don’t learn much—the teachers don’t speak English and aren’t really trained in it, so how are they supposed to teach it? For this reason, I’m essentially starting from the beginning with my class, so I had them write the very basic form letter in English, but then let them continue writing more in Spanish if they wanted to say more.

2. Peruvian students are accustomed to copying things from the board exactly as written and having their notebooks graded for neatness and precision. I had heard this, but didn’t realize how strictly they follow this until this week. A lot of them copied the lines I drew for them to fill in the blank, and I noticed a few wrote “(name)” along with their signature—because that’s what I did in my example letter on the board. As I was spelling out the English for them, the board got kind of messy, which is why some things read a bit out of order—for example, “The Festival of San Juan Bautista” shows up after “Sincerely” instead of "My favorite holiday is..." They knew it didn’t quite make sense, but since I, the supposedly all-knowing professor, wrote it that way when I ran out of space for holidays, they copied it exactly. In the future I will have to be more careful about how I write things on the board!

3. In spoken Spanish, at least in Peru, there is no distinction between the letters B (“b/v grande”) and V (“b/v pequeño”), which accounts for some spelling errors. For example, “ceviche” is the correct spelling for a really delicious fish dish, but “cebiche” would be pronounced exactly the same way and is a common spelling even on some menus.

The only downside to teaching English is that I now have a lot of people asking me if I’m going to teach more classes or assuming that I’m an English professor, so I find myself constantly explaining that, no, I’m actually a water and sanitation volunteer and this is just a side project.