Small fishing community seeks English teacher, comes up with inexperienced 18-year-old

(Who just had to look up whether it's spelled and pronounced "inexperienced" or "unexperienced"...)

The demand for English lessons around here is high and the supply of English speakers with time on their hands is low.  So when I showed up, incompetent as I may be, I was immediately signed on as the new English teacher in the village.

I am terrified and uncertain of my teaching capabilities, but also excited and eager to see what we can accomplish or I wouldn't have said alright, sure.  I'll be teaching adults - fishermen, mostly, since this is a fishing village, but they would like to learn English and get jobs in nearby tourist-infested Monterrico.

I have a pretty clean slate to work with.  Around town I receive the occasional "hello!", "how are you?", and "good morning!" (regardless of the time of day), but no one seems to know much more past that.

Last night I helped Sara the schoolteacher finish the homework she was given by her university English course, for which she travels to another town (rather far away, not sure how far) on Saturdays.  Her homework is to fill out sections at a time of her workbook.

The workbook is awful.  For starters, it is completely irrelevant to her life: Every single section relies heavily on the assumption that the student has lived in an American-style city his or her entire life and therefore knows the names and locations of bus stations, convenience stores, and restaurants.  Sara has lived in small fishing communities all her life, where everything comes from one or two stores run out of someone's house,  and if you want to go somewhere else you sit down and wait for the chicken bus to come by.  She can make things up to fill in the spaces, but the lesson is wasted.  Also, the setup just sucks.  Even I couldn't figure out what the book was trying to ask her to do some of the time, which is not acceptable.  I'm not dumb, and the instructions were in English (Sort of complicated, confusing English at that).


The level of the lessons she was working on were much higher than her actual proficiency level, which gives me further evidence that that textbook sucks and hasn't taught her a thing.  Of course, I have always sort of hated textbooks and workbooks.  They are tedious and just make me grumpy, which is not a good mood to try and learn in.


Furthermore, the people here in El Rosario aren't looking to learn how to write in English, they want to speak English.  So I refuse to teach English as if I were working from the confines of a public school system somewhere in the US.  I'm living in a sand-floor thatched-roof hut on the southern coast of Guatemala, Man!  I can teach as I see fit.  I'm in charge. 


First-hand personal experience (redundant?) with learning Spanish reveals that I essentially did not learn Spanish in a classroom.  When I got off the plane in Panama in February of 2009, I knew some basic vocabulary, some grasp of present tense, and your basic "hola, me llamo Ana."  It took me more or less four months to pick the language up on my own, by listening and interacting, shy as I was, with real Spanish-speakers.  I have memories of the moment I learned specific words and phrases "in the field", as it were, and those are some pretty awesome moments.  I still experience them occasionally, as my current level of Spanish is enough to have a good conversation and a good time but still far from perfecto.


So, with what I have seen and experienced in mind, I first turn to the "Where Are Your Keys?" project.  I think I stumbled across it quite a while back, a year or two maybe, while stalking around the internet investigating my brother's life on the internet, which sounds creepy, but really, google my brother's name and he's practically famous.  Somewhere in the mix was this "language fluency game", and now it's come back to me as my best idea for a means, or at least a supplement, to teach English down here. 

Introduction to WAYK from Willem Larsen on Vimeo.

My first obstacle is the fact that I am barely able to post blogs from here, with my dinky little Tigo plug-in modem.  It only gets reception where my Tigo phone does, and I only have... 3 bars right now.  It took an hour to load the above video, and the necessary tutorial videos available on the website run long - the basic overview is an hour and twenty minutes.  I am incapable of loading that from here - I can't leave my laptop out on the beach for three days.  I need internetz. 

So I hope to go into Monterrico this afternoon, or tomorrow, or Monday, or whenever to seek out fast wi-fi.  If I have to spend a night there, I will.  I am determined.  I need to learn the game, test it out and teach it to Trent, practice it, and then get on the whole teaching classes thing.  I imagine more than a few people are going to be a little dubious of my methods, so hopefully I can make sense of the game and present it well and make some progress!

There's my plan. 

If anyone reading this has any tips, ideas, stories, etc., to help me out, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you!  This feels like a very big endeavor, and I intend to do my best despite lack of any training whatsoever.

Wah.