Copy?

Being a language learner, you learn to pick up words you hear and incorporate them into your language. Working with one of the English teachers, one who has students copy information out of a book often, I picked up the word ¨copy¨, or at least I thought I had.

The first graders of 1st E, (primero E) , have alot of character. They are your typical 15 year olds and there are 45 of them in this class. The original set up was, I will take half the class for the first hour and the second half for the second hour. Class number one was a great success. Class number two, you could tell they were testing how long their leash was. And, class three...well, the electrical students came in to rewire the fixtures in the room...so, the class was a bit crazy. I thought, ok, next class, things will come around. I will teach them some basic dialogues, so I prepared a lesson for ordering food at McDonald´s complete with some key phrases and a little bit of culture.

Well, the first class went well, but by the end of the second class, I had a neck ache that spread into my shoulders and I thought my head was going to explode from all the heat building up inside of it. It all started when I asked them to take out a sheet of paper for copies.

They didn´t have their notebooks, the teacher was grading them. I said, well, take another sheet of paper and you can glue it into your English notebook later. They didn´t seem to get it. So, I said, look, all I want you to do is copy the conversation that is on the board. Well, the giggles and talking continued, so I walked around the room asking students if they had copied the material. If they hadn´t, I pointed to the board and said copy.

The laughing was getting to be too much. I wasn´t paranoid about what they might be saying, or if they were saying something about me...I just wanted them to focus for a moment. Finally, I told them all I didn´t want to hear a word out of anyone´s mouth for the next five minutes and in that five minutes they could sit and copy what is on the board....(and during that five minutes I could think of a new strategy for dealing with these students.)

Our five minutes were up and I said to them look, I like to teach and I think I am giving you the respect you deserve, but I don´t think you are giving me the respect I deserve. I am trying to bring you something fun to do in school instead of copy, copy, copy all day. Well, with that said, a student bursted out laughing. I looked at him and asked what that was about and he just shook his head and said nothing. With that, I just gave them a silent task for the rest of the hour.

Being in this class for only two hours, one day a week, is kind of like being the substitute teacher. Only, now, I have the language barrier. It is an English class and my focus is conversation, so it would be silly to have a silent class, but I didn´t want to battle the students any more. I thought, gee, this is my worst class. I was ready to just bail on them, but that isn´t me. So, I told the English teacher of this particular class my problem and that I would only take a small group of them. He apologized for the students and assured me that they were just young teenagers. I agreed with him that they would be rowdy at times, but I still didn´t want all of them at once. It just wasn´t efficient to spend all my time managing the crowd, especially when I am a volunteer here to specifically help students learn English. With that said, he said, ok, you take the top ten. Well...I didn´t like that either, because I don´t like to favor top students. So, because we were going into a long holiday weekend, I figured I would think about how I wanted to deal with the students...

I came back to school this week and told the teacher, I have decided to break the students into three groups and rotate them. I would have a chance to work with all the students in more manageable groups. He agreed that would be fine, but wanted to have a class talk before hand.

In the meantime, the jefe teacher of that class confronted me on her students. Oh Jami, they are so embarrassed that they behaved the way they did. They want you in their class. They told me all about it. You see Jami, you are using the word ¨copy¨and ¨copy¨to them, in their adolescent ways, means penis.

Penis! I have to admit I laughed and just shook my head....could you imagine sitting in a class and having a foreigner explain something to you in your language only to have them drop the word penis every once in a while??

At our class meeting, I told them that what happened last week was a good example of language and cultural barriers. Geez!