The First Session

Yesterday was my first face-to-face seminar session. I attended the previous sessions through Skype, so being able to physically see people and interact with them was great. Our sessions run for two hours and they prepare us for what to expect in the classrooms in Ecuador. Once in Ecuador, we will make trips to three different schools - America Latina, Bicentinario, and Quitumbe - and spend one week teaching in each of them. The themes of our lessons will be “confidence” and “giving,” two of the virtues that we learned about from the Muhammad Ali Center last weekend.

My assignment is to teach 5^th graders about confidence and giving while teaching them the grammar concept of “to be” in English. In Spanish, there are two ways to say “to be”- ser and estar – and in English, there’s only one way. My teaching partner, Alex, and I will need to clarify this to the students and somehow incorporate it with confidence and giving. Our assignment for the next session is to come up with different ideas, games, and interesting ways to teach this material. We received our assignments for the first school, America Latina, and Alex and I have to teach four sections of 5^th graders and 3 sections of 10^th graders. Don’t worry, we won’t be teaching 10^th graders, but we’ll be conversing with them, helping them to improve their English while we work on our Spanish! Within our conversations, we will talk about confidence and giving and hear what they have to say about these topics.

Besides getting our assignments, Dr. Herdoiza taught us about the proper ways to interact with and teach students who are learning English as a new language. She gave an entire lesson on Simon Bolivar in Spanish to help us experience what it feels like to learn a topic in a new and different language. From her lesson, I learned that the use of visuals, gestures, and repetition are essential when I step into my Ecuadorian classrooms.

We ended our session by eating some delicious Spanish food made by one of the participants, Brent, and his father. They made seco de carne (beef stew), tostada (popcorn-ish), and a fruit juice that tasted really good. If the food in Ecuador tastes anything like the food we had in class, then I know I’m going to enjoy it just as much in Ecuador and eat a lot of it!

Update on The Voice: All of Team Adam’s girls made it to Top 10! Can’t wait for next week’s episode!! Competition’s getting tough!