So I’ve had a lot of trouble getting consistent internet access and have been too overwhelmed to know what to write when I have had it. I’m just going to wing it and try and get something down now.
I’ve been teaching English lessons to students in El Porvenir. But before I get into that just a little background on the educational system in Honduras. It is an absolute mess, there’s really no other way to put it. The first two weeks we were here the public school teachers in the whole country were on strike so there were no classes at all. Since then there’s been school but every 2 or 3 days there’s none for some reason, either because its raining, there’s some obscure public holiday, or the teachers just didn’t show up. Its totally normal for teachers to show up an hour after class is supposed to start with a couple bags of groceries. Apparently the public schools all have something called shadow teachers, who are teachers that are on the books to receive a salary but don’t teach classes. The principal and the union get a kickback off this salary so everyone wins except for the students. At least the teachers who are 2 hours late with groceries show up from time to time!
There is absolutely no discipline in classes here. The students come and go as they want, and talk as loud as they want in classes. The 6th grade class is absolutely heartbreaking because it has students up to 18 years old in it trying to finish primary school. The younger kids are the smartest most focused ones who made it to 6th grade on time, and you see them trying so hard to pay attention in a totally chaotic environment, as kids twice their size will literally fight in the classroom.
There is absolutely no creativity or out of the box thinking in Honduran education. We have observed Hondurans teaching English and watched one teach the students to say “How do I get to the Social Security office”. Everything is by the book, and that is what her ESL manual said to teach. She didn’t have the flexibility to realize that there were more important things to teach a 10 year old in a tiny village where adults don’t even know what social security is.
Another example is a woman who was teaching me Spanish lessons. In the first lesson she was teaching me basic things like “como esta” and “como se llama” when I clearly was moderately conversational, and didn’t adjust the lesson when she realized my level. She had me copy down a matching exercise from the book she was using, so I copied the left hand side and then wrote the answer to each question next to it. She looked at the notebook and said it was wrong. I needed to draw lines connecting to the questions to responses! In her mind, even if I knew all the answers I was wrong because I didn’t follow the instructions exactly as given. And this was in a voluntary lesson being given to a paying 23 year old!
We have seen ESL notebooks from other classes taught by Hondurans that have had phrases copied 40 or 50 times as an assignment. Many of the students have memorized complicated phrases, yet have no idea how to formulate their own sentence. We are trying to make the classes fun and get them to think creatively, but when we put examples on the board they will copy them exactly as given. For example, we wanted them to draw a crazy face (3 eyes, 4 noses, whatever they wanted) and write sentences about it to practice body vocabularly and plurals. The students all laughed at our drawing, but then drew one exactly the same, not getting that we wanted them to make their own face.
Anyway, onto something positive. Our classes are going really well, and we’re starting to get the students to learn how to put together their own sentences, although most of them so far are variations on “Aron is crazy”, “Aron is a monkey,” or “Aron is a frog” (they can’t pronounce Aaron). For whatever reason the whole town is obsessed with the word crazy, and students I don’t even know will sit outside our gate chanting “Aron is crazy” for hours. I thought being a celebrity would be a lot cooler than that!
Children and adults alike are desperate to learn English. In Porvenir people who speak English on average make twice as much as those who don’t, and that’s not counting the oppurtonities English would open up in other more touristy areas like Roatan and Utila, islands whose economies are booming and the native population is bilingual. Obviously the oppurtonities English opens up for people who move to the States are even bigger. Whenever I bring my Spanish/English dictionary somewhere people will eagerly look up words for as long as I let them, and its clear that a lot of them had never seen one before. Its amazing that people here can’t even take something so simple for granted. I had a taxi driver pull out a notebook and he had a list of words he needed to know in English that he wanted me to feel in. Its amazing that in the States we take for granted having all the information we need, yet for him it was so difficult to even translate a few words. The gratitude the community has towards us has also been overwhelming. We have had families in mud floor houses with 12 people living in a single room offering us meals every day. Its clear that it has never even crossed their mind that they are poor and we are rich, they simply are so grateful that we are teaching their children that they are willing to share whatever they have with us.
Our neighbors across the street also live in a tiny house with more people than we can count, yet offered to somehow let us sleep there if our house floods (I honestly don’t know if there would be room for us all standing let alone lying down). Someone recently tried to rob a couple of the volunteers, the first incident of crime since I’ve been here, and they were chased off by the neighboors. The whole town worked together to track down who it was and we had people all over town offering vigilante justice against them. It was obviously scary but also comforting to know that most of the people around are on our side.
Anyway, I’ll try and get something else written down soon. Hope everything is well with everyone in the States, don’t get too jealous of life on the Caribbean Coast because its rained hard every day for the last couple weeks.
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