I Love Chelsea

As I was walking through the rows of desks, monitoring the annoying class of 40 16 year-old boys, I noticed one of them had written a whole notebook page of “Chelsea” “Chelsi” “Chelsey” “Chelse”. Awkward city. Population: 1. Then later on in the same class, a student had to say a sentence, any sentence, using the word love. Guess what it was. Yep. I love Chelsea. Maybe that will be the name of my new sitcom, starring an uncomfortable gringa who finds herself adapting gracefully to a new and different culture. In my dreams.

So teaching has been going pretty well. I’ve been doing my best to incorporate at least one game into every class, even if it’s just something little. Trying to bring the motivation up and make English class seem slightly more interesting. And I finally had my first English workshop with the teachers at my school. We have the rotating workshops that I posted about before, but those involve teachers from all the high schools in the town. I’ve been trying to get started on training just for my 4 teachers, but planning has been nearly impossible. So today I got 3 of the 4 to show up, reluctantly, after I promised we would only work for 50 minutes of the scheduled hour. It ended up being so much fun, but unfortunately, I think the only new vocabulary they walked away with was “smart ass”. One of my teachers is really funny and has a high level of English and likes to be right. So I was explaining that the phrase, “tomar el sol” literally translates to “to take/drink the sun”, but in English, we say “sunbathe”. Ahhh okay, they enjoyed this concept. Then I said “you also don’t say ‘take the coffee’ like in Spanish, ‘tomar el café’, you need to say ‘drink coffee’” and he argues that he is going to TAKE the coffee cup from someone else. Thus, the lesson about being a smart ass. Then I taught them the word “fart” and we called it a day. I swear there was some productive stuff going on there too.

This week, I also started teaching a children’s English class. My host mom asked me one day if I would be interested in doing this- getting kids prepared for English classes before they get to high school. I said that sounded good, but things like this usually take forever to get started so I was super surprised when she said “okay, let’s start next week”. So I met with 3 parents and thought I would have about 8 kids around the age of 9 years-old. Tuesday rolls around and 32 kids show up to class! Ages ranging from 7 to 18.Holy moly. So I had planned for an easy first day, just making decorative name cards with “Hello. My name is _. I like _.” And translated some activities for them. But the second class, I was feeling a lot of pressure. It’s going to be hard to appeal to such a wide age range and make sure everyone is on the same page. So I did classroom commands today like “stand up”, “sit down”, “open your book”, etc. I played 3 games and all of them were super fun! I was super jazzed, but it made me realize I really have my work cut out for me. It’s going to take a lot of planning to keep this momentum going and because this is completely voluntary, I feel obligated to make it extra fun so that they don’t give up. I guess it’ll be a lot of work, but that’s what I signed up for. Plus, I’m sure it will make for some good sitcom material.

And tomorrow, we’re celebrating Mother’s Day by finishing classes at 10:30 and heading to the restaurant to eat and drink (we’ll probably have guinea pig again. Sigh). And then I’ve gotta head to Latacunga for more teacher tutoring. It seems as though my life became very busy overnight, but I’m grateful as it makes the time fly by. Can you believe I’ve been in Ecuador for 4 months? This is officially the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing my family. Heavy boots.

Bed time. Thank you for reading. And thank you for tuning in. Until next time, I Love Chelsea, signing off.