Practicum Week and Site Selection
Today’s Sunday but it feels like today should be a Monday, or at least a weekday. This because last week was spent outside of my training town and in the northern city of Matagalpa and therefore it has been a while since I’ve gone about my normal business.
That’s not to say that I haven’t been working. In fact, this past week has almost certainly been the most intense period of teaching training of the entire two months since arriving to Nicaragua (or before). Here’s how it worked: pairs of TEFL trainees were assigned to a teacher in a public school in either Matagalpa or Jinotega. I went to Matagalpa and was paired with a trainee who is also currently living in Masatepe (my training town) and with a teacher in the largest public high school of Matagalpa (INEP is the acronym although after “Instituto Nacional” I haven’t the slightest clue about what it could stand for).
Our counterpart teacher is responsible for the ninth and eleventh grades thus me and my fellow trainee were assigned to work with classes from these grades. Rather than co-teaching the classes—as is the norm for the PC Nicaragua TEFL program—, our role for the week was to ‘take over’ the various classes of our counterpart teachers and give them individually. The non-teaching PC trainee and the local counterpart teacher were to observe each class and at the end of the day a reflection session was to be held so as to provide feedback and suggestions for improvement before the next day’s classes.
All in all, the experience was extremely rewarding. Coming from a negligible education background, I appreciated both the opportunity to manage a classroom of my own, not having to mind stepping on the toes of a co-teacher, and also the insight, and critiques of my colleagues. For instance, the process brought to my attention the fact that apparently—I still can’t quite believe it—I ask ‘Okay?’ after 95% of all statements that I make during a class.
Still, I’ll admit that at times the process was somewhat overwhelming. After the first day of practice, during which I’d taught two classes that I considered extremely deficient in a number of regards (one of the most damning of which was my excessive usage of Spanish and translation during the first class), I could scarcely motivate myself to prepare the following day’s lessons. In fact, it was only an extremely motivating episode of Star Trek TNG that managed to rouse my verve.
“How was I in a position to watch Star Trek?” you might ask. Because I was staying in a hostel with Wi-Fi! Matagalpa is one of the more prominent cities in the northern region of Nicaragua and therefore a major thoroughfare for backpackers on the Central America circuit. Although right now technically qualifies as the ‘off season’, there were still a number of cheles (whities) wandering around town—I’m convinced that the term in Spanish comes from the word for milk, leche, although no Nicaraguan has yet confirmed my hunch.
The hostel itself, La Buena Onda, is owned in part by an ex-PC Small Business Development Volunteer and was very clean/comfy/had dependably running water.
In addition to all of the other goings on of the week, we also had our second round of site selection interviews. In our first or second weeks of training all of the TEFL trainee had preliminary interviews with the head of the TEFL program in the country (our boss). Among other questions about our professional and educational backgrounds, she asked us about our preferences in terms of our permanent sites. At the time as I couldn’t say that I had much preference, and while I don’t think that the situation has changed much between the and now, I do think that I’ve managed to figure out why.
When it boils down to it, there are only a few criteria on which my fellow trainees seem to be basing their site preference selection: 1) climate 2) size (from po-dunk rural to raging urban) 3) distance from Managua 4) the number of site mates (other volunteers living in the town) and 5) whether or not it is a first time TEFL site (whether or not there TEFL volunteers have served in the site before). Of the abovementioned list, the only factor for which I could clearly discern a preference was that I’d rather go somewhere where there has yet to be a TEFL volunteer.
Perhaps it will be the case that I’ll be miserable when I show up in the most rural, hottest, most humid, and most isolated site in the country, but at the moment I feel fairly comfortable in my ability to adapt to such an assignment and make the most of it. Indeed rural, semi-isolated sites intrigue me substantially as in my estimation they hold the best chance of being communities for which communal banking organization can be a side project. On the opposite side of the spectrum, If I were to be assigned a humongous and crowded site with four or five or six other PC Volunteers, while it might be a drag to not have the small town recognition and while it might be more difficult to form personal relationships, I imagine the bigger cities as teeming with NGOs and other interesting organizations with which I could become involved in my free time not to mention the dream of teaching in a—I shudder to mention it for fear of incurring misfortune—University(!).
Today being Saturday means that I will know my permanent site assignment in six days, this coming Friday. Consequently you will know my permanent site assignment in anywhere between seven and thirteen, depending on a number of variables the most important of which is my need to use the internet for another purpose and my ability to plan ahead and write out a note before trekking over the internet café. (Also important for consideration is your having subscribed to this blog in order to receive word immediately upon my sending it). For now I’m happy wondering about the possibilities and imagining the many opportunities that each site holds for me.
So, who made the baseball and who plays with it?
It was my host brother who made the baseballs (although I was ready to tacitly claim credit until you asked!!!).