Bloggin Through My Placements

I got to know my teacher at Inmaculada a lot better than I’ve gotten to know my teacher at Fe y Alegria because its only been one day! At Inmaculada I worked with Carla who has been teaching for 16 years! This year was her first year as a first grade teacher, she worked in kindergarten for the rest of her career. She teaches English to all of the first grade students in classes A, B, C, and D. They each will have seven hours with her per week which gives them a good amount of time to focus on learning English. She was much more comfortable speaking to me in Spanish than in English, which I thought to be a little strange because she was an English teacher. She began teaching English when she was helping out her sister who was an English teacher, she has had no formalized education to be an English teacher. With that being said, it is no wonder she works somewhere as great as Inmaculada. She has all of her activies planned out way in advance, the students are constantly engaged, and her teaching style is inspirational. She makes learning incredibly fun for the students by incorporating videos, songs, workbooks, stories, and art into her lessons. She never gets tired of teaching the same things over and over, she somehow makes it interesting each time over. I watched her teach the same story to 4 different groups of students and each time she had just as much animation and dedication as the last. I would love to be as good of a teacher as Carla is, she knows exactly what to do to get her students back on track and constantly absorbing information. Obviously, it helps that they have the entire school day to work with the children, and resources are endless. She never has to worry about whether or not her students have had a meal, the last time they’ve showered, or how much time it takes them to get to school in the morning. The students come prepared to learn and when they leave, she can go home focusing on the next lesson instead of worrying about their health and safety. Of course, this is not always the case because there are health dangers risks everywhere, but most people are not as fortunate as these children.

At Fé y Alegría, I am working with students who are the same age as the students at Inmaculada. It’s a completely different experience here because the students speak no English, and spend most of the time playing and drawing. The focus is not so much on the content that the students are learning, instead it is on the attention to detail for each transition that they go through. The students spent half an hour moving from a large group into two different groups, which I thought at first seemed pretty wasteful of time. After thinking about what the possible reasons behind this could be I realized that they were working towards perfection, and taking all of this extra time was probably pretty helpful in the later grades. It seems like there was a lot of thought put into this! I then spoke with Kelsie about her experience and she said that the exact same thing happened with her group! So I knew at this point that this was an intentional decision made by the teachers. There is also a lot of emphasis on the student having ownership of their own work. The students are currently creating a book of poems that they have written together. They are coloring their own book of poems and will give these to their parents. They spend a lot of time going over the poems because the teachers want the students to understand why specific poems were chosen and how important it is that the students could come up with these poems on their own. They also came up with the name together and voted on it as a group so that the decision was theirs. Upon looking around the room, every decoration was hand drawn by the students, laminated with tape, and put on display. The teachers want the students here to feel proud of what they have done, because they were able to produce something beautiful. I think this is a great message for all of the students because it shows them how to be accountable for their work, take pride in it, and continue to pursue their dreams.