School, once again
My school is Escuela Las Canteras — a public school with 1st to 8th grade and almost 500 students. The school premises are better than a couple of comparable public schools I’ve seen in India.
My welcome
My Directora (Principal) doesn’t speak any English, so we just communicate with plenty of smiles, hand gestures and my terrible Spanish. She is a very warm lady who is excited to have me in the school. On my first day, she got the students to perform Cueca (National dance of Chile) to welcome me. The students also got the vice-principal and my head teacher involved.
My head teacher’s name is Carolina and she is from southern Chile. I’ll work closely with her the entire semester.
In the local newspaper
The Directora was very keen on creating some buzz in the local newspaper that the school has an international volunteer to teach English. Here’s the coverage in Diario Chanarcillo. That’s good publicity before taking even a single class!
More about the school
The school runs from 8 AM to 4 PM (and 1 PM on Friday) and every class is 45 minutes. There are 3 breaks: two for 15-mins in the morning and a 45-mins lunch at 1 PM. This way, there is a break after almost every 2 classes, which I think is good. Still remember how it was painful to endure 4 consecutive periods in the schools I studied in. Another interesting thing is that students study a very wide range of subjects, including Religion and Gardening. The students have the same number of classes in a week for Religion, Gardening, Music and Physical Education as there are for English and Maths!
Here’s the school garden:
And the adorable school dog, Lankita (She was an abandoned dog and now stays in the school, getting more chubby every day)
Chilenos love and care for street dogs a lot. In Santiago, we saw couple of injured street dogs who were given a nice, cosy cushion and people would feed them regularly.
My classroom
I have a separate room for my classes. The good thing is that when students move to my classroom, they don’t have to carry anything with them as it is just a spoken English class. Carolina is responsible for the reading and writing part. I spent almost an entire day decorating my room with colorful posters to create a good learning environment.
More about teaching experiences in future posts.
