meish dot org: life, unfolding

After three months living in La Paz, someone in a bar convinced me to take a job with the Centro Boliviano Americano, teaching English as a Foreign Language for a couple of days a week. Research was going slowly, so it didn’t take much to convince me at all.

The interview for this position basically consisted of a brief chat with the principal of the CBA, a formidable Boliviana with a degree from some midwestern college and an accent to match:

“Oh, are you English?”

“Yes…”
“Right, you can start on Monday.”

In at the deep end, teaching four classes of students ranging in ages from eight through to adult. With no teaching experience whatsoever, a slim grasp of grammatical concepts - or at least, how to explain them: using them was no problem, it was just tough to remember the difference between verbs and adverbs, dangling modifiers and the like - and a stack of textbooks and lesson plans to prepare, I got ready to teach.

Actually, it was kind of a doddle. Teaching your own language is as hard as you want it to be, frankly, and I decided early on to abandon the carefully-prepared lesson plans and textbook conjugation tables in favour of more spontaneous, freeform lessons. We talked about an enormous range of topics, from football and travel, to being embarrassed on dates and cultural stereotyping of Bolivians - even the little kids, who couldn’t get beyond their pop preferences at first. (Whigfield - Saturday Night. I’m embarrassed and yet strangely proud to admit we spent one lesson translating the lyrics and teaching the students the dance. I may very well have single-handedly introduced the Andes to that little shuffle. Oops.)

I was a good teacher. I had more patience than I anticipated (always thought I’d be the kind of teacher that ended up going “What do you call that? A house? No, it’s a big brown squiggle. Come back when you’ve done it properly”), and gave more creative assignments than the kids had hoped for. I didn’t dwell on the finer points of grammar – not least because I had trouble explaining it clearly myself - and encouraged students to talk in class - in English, but about whatever they wanted. Ditto passing notes. Feel free to ‘fess up to fancying that boy in the back, but it’s got to be grammatically correct.

I developed a knack for deflecting troublesome queries with panache. If someone piped up with a tough question – one which had no immediate and obvious answer, like needing to know about radical changing verbs or the English translation for tengo ganas, I’d ask the rest of the class “does anyone else know the answer? Anyone?” and hope the question got answered that way – it’s always better to learn from ones peers anyway, I reckoned.

If the answer wasn’t given, though, answering the question became that night’s homework, for me as well as the students - I’d run home and bury my head in the textbooks, hoping I could come up with the answer before they did.

I remember how boring learning a language can be - especially if it’s not relevant to what you do when you walk out the classroom door. So we improvised, and learnt together. I taught them the difference between pants and trousers, though their textbook insisted that they learn to compliment each other on their pants. Wrong, wrong, wrong. [mental note: remember to tell the story about the dreadful pants/suspenders mixup sometime]

They looked bemused at me when I used funny English expressions and contractions.

“Now then,” I would start to explain, “this is what we’re going to do today - break off into pairs and talk about what you did last night for three minutes. Any questions?”

A number of hands rose from the class in front of me.

“Yes, Gustavo, what’s your question?”

“Meeess, what doss eet mean, ‘now then’? Presen’ tense, pass’ tense? What doss eet mean?”

He had a point. What does it mean?

What languages do you speak? Who was your favourite teacher? Have you ever taught anything?