First Day of School

Yesterday was my first day of school!  I was taken around to every class that I’ll be working with and introduced as their new English teacher.  In every class, when the students were told that I was from the U.S., there was a collective gasp and round of applause – it was pretty hilarious!  I felt like quite the celebrity at the school.  I’ll be teaching 4^th through 8^th grade, and each grade has 2 classes of 45 students.  The current English teacher and I will be splitting the classes in half, which means I’ll have classes of about 22-25 students.  And, I only get each class to myself for 45 minutes once a week.  45 minutes is not a lot of time at all, but I have to remind myself that some exposure is better than no exposure to English.  Also, the idea of having 400+ students is a little daunting… what have I gotten myself into?!  The school’s English teacher, Pamela, is really nice, although she’s only here for a month while the “real” English teacher, Alejandra, is in Ohio.  They both seem like they’ll be great to work with, though, and I’m ready to get into my own classroom and start up some fun activities with all my students.  The fun begins Monday!

In LA!

I am once again living in Los Angeles, although this time I’m on the other side of the world!  Friday night the ministry threw us a big goodbye party and Saturday morning we embarked on our 7 hour bus ride down South!  We arrived in Concepción, a city about an hour or so Northwest of Los Angeles, expecting to be greeted by our Regional Director and then shipped off to our towns.  To our great surprise, though, we were greeted by our host families!  My host mother and her sister had a sign saying Kelly, Bienvenidos a tu casa! (Welcome home!) that I saw the minute I stepped off the bus.  We all went to the Ministry of Education’s headquarters in Concepción where we had a great big Chilean lunch and got to know each other’s host families a bit.  From there our WorldTeach group of five was separated – Jake and Hal went off to Chillán and Ryan, Katie and I headed towards Los Angeles.  On our way to LA we stopped off at a beatiful waterfall, called Los Saltos del Laja, and hiked over to take some pictures and enjoy its beauty.  Ryan, Katie, and I were pretty excited, to say the least!

Since I arrived yesterday afternoon it’s been a whirlwind of meeting people, eating lots of food, and speaking only Spanish!  My host mother, Vicky, and her son, Claudio, are wonderful.  They’re so nice and amazingly patient when I don’t understand something, and I couldn’t ask for two better people to live with.  Vicky works for the city and lives in what I think is comparable to government-subsidized housing (although there definitely could have been some words lost in translation).  The house is cozy, and I’m staying in Claudio’s room, which is a work in progress (the paint in the room was still drying when I moved in, for example).  My room’s relatively big, though, and they have cable and internet, so no complaints here!  This is definitely a more urban experience than I was anticipating, but I think I’ll experience my fair share of culture-shock nonetheless.  Vicky’s sister, Yane, is the Inspector General at my school.  She’s the one who anyone and everyone goes to when they need to get something done in the school – basically, she’s the best connection I could have.  She has a wonderful 8-year-old daughter named Coni who is already studying English at her private school.  Tonight I helped her practice for a quiz she has next week – she’s going to do great J

Tomorrow is my first day of school!  I’ll spend this first week observing classes and getting to know the students, and I’ll start teaching my own classes in a week.  I’m super excited and will probably have many stories to come!

My WorldTeach Group

Ryan, Hal, Me, Katie, Jake

In front of La Moneda, similar to the White House

Ryan, Katie, Jake, Me, Hal, Thomas, Meghan

Our last day of WT Orientation, after our fabulous dance

Heading to Los Angeles

I found out my placement!  I’ll be living the next 8 months in Los Ángeles with a woman named Vicky and her son Claudio.  Vicky’s sister works at the school where I’ll be teaching, which is a K-8 school with about 700 students.  I’ll know much more about the school and my own students once I get there, but I do know that I’ll be teaching 5^th through 8^th grade and that the school is very excited to have a gringa from the U.S. come to teach!  My host mother and I have been emailing each other this past week, and she even added me as a friend on Facebook… not quite the experience I was expecting to have, but I’ll take it!  She continues to express her excitement about my arrival, so all looks good so far.

Our WorldTeach orientation ended last Friday and we are now in the final days of our Ministry of Education Inglés Abre Puertas training.  WorldTeach’s orientation was great – we had two directors training only five of us, and our sessions on lesson planning, behavior management, teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL), and speaking and listening activities, just to name a few, will be so beneficial and gave me a huge boost of confidence in my ability to lead my own English class.  This current Ministry orientation involves a much larger group of volunteers and has been a bit repetetive and less fulfilling, which has frustrated us WorldTeach volunteers a tad.  We’re all so antsy to take what we learned from WorldTeach and apply it in our classrooms now, so we’re unfortunately not enjoying this week as much as some other volunteers might be.  However, the Ministry definitely has some valuable lessons to teach, and they’ve also provided us with a couple hours of Spanish class every day which has been a great review.

Being volunteers for the Ministry of Education also means that we’re kind of important!  Monday morning we went to a kickoff event for this year’s volunteer teachers at the United Nations building, and we felt pretty special once it was over!  There were lots of reporters and important people there who were extremely interested in meeting us, hearing our stories, and taking our pictures, and the experience definitely reaffirmed my decision to do this and the fact that my help really is needed and appreciated. 

While this past week has been even busier before, we have had some time to do some more exploration of Santiago.  Last weekend we went to Cerro San Cristobal, which is the tallest hill in Santiago.  You can hike up the hill, which takes a couple hours, or take the funicular, which is like a single box car on a track at a 45 degree angle, up to the top.  My WT group and I took a funicular up to the top and, thanks to a fortunately clear day, were able to have an amazingly beautiful view of all of Santiago with the Andes off in the distance.  A huge statue of the Virgen Mary stands at the top of the hill keeping watch over the city, and there was also a church, a small art gallery, and some shops up top.  If you are on Facebook, check out my pictures there - the internet in our hostel is really patchy so it's hard to upload pictures.  Here are a couple:

Santiago!

Today we were also able to explore some great, huge markets in Santiago thanks to a Ministry-sponsored “cultural excursion.”  We went to the main seafood market, the Mercado Central, and had ourselves a taste of some sea urchin.  Most of us were not too pleased with the taste or texture, and our reactions were quite entertaining for the fishermen.  We also walked through La Vega, which is the big produce market and was pretty much heaven for fruit-lovers like myself.  It was like a farmer’s maket on steroids, in terms of size and quantity, and we took some great, cheap fruit and delicious avocado back to the hostel.

Alright, one funny story for you before I go.  Last week, before our WorldTeach orientation ended, my group started brainstorming ways to thank our two amazing field directors, Thomas and Meghan.  We concluded that a dance was the best way to sum up our appreciation, and we shamelessly choreographed and performed a dance for them, which they loved.  We rehearsed this dance in front of our hostel staff the night before our big performance, and by the next night word had spread throughout the hostel that we gringos had quite the dance to share.  So, last Friday night when our group returned from the hostel we were surprised by a group of  15 or so chileans chanting “Per-for-mance!  Per-for-mance!” when we walked in the door.  After some begging by the chileans, the song was put on, our dance was performed, and a huge chilean/gringo dance party ensued.  They then came up with their own dance moves to the song in return – a cultural exchange like no other.  Anyway, Meghan recorded the dance when we performed it for Thomas and her, and she kindly put it on Youtube for all to see.  If anything, this video shows how fun and awesome my group members are and how great our two directors were as well.  Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2tpgYW1TDQ

Orientation

The past week has been filled with full-day orientation classes covering a range of topics. We started off with an overview of Chile and a talk on health and safety, and then we jumped right into learning how to teach English as a foreign language.  While the days have been long, I already know that the methods and activities we’ve learned in such a short period of time will prove to be extremely useful.  We still have over a week left in Santiago before we head off to our towns, and we’re all getting pretty excited to get into our own classrooms and start implementing some of what we’ve learned.

While these classes have been taking up most of our days, we’ve luckily still had some time to see some historical places and meet some interesting people.  Today we went to the U.S. Embassy and met the Ambassador.  He spoke about the increasing importance of English education in Chile in order to help the country continue to move forward - only 3% of the country speaks English fluently, and this number needs to improve greatly if Chile is to continue advancing.

We also discussed the current economic state of the world, which was interesting.  Chile has yet to really be affected by the financial crisis, in part due to deicions made by current President Bachelet.  Copper exports have been huge in the past couple decades, and Chile has actually had a surplus.  When Bachelet came into power she receieved a lot of pressure to spend that surplus – she decided, however, to save it.  An economics official at the Embassy (I don’t remember his title) went into more specifics about how she saved the money, but the point is that Chile is currently doing well.  The country is extremely interested in helping get the U.S. economy back up, though, since so much of the Chilean economy is tied to exports to the U.S. (fruits and veggies) and Asia (copper).  Vice President and Dr. Biden are actually coming down to Chile next month for a summit with a bunch of other “progressive” countries to talk about their common concerns (mostly discussing the environment, I believe), so the Embassy was very busy and excited getting ready for that visit. 

Another interesting visit was to a complex called Villa Grimaldi, which we stopped by as part of a human rights tour around Santiago.  This complex was used for detaining, interrogating, torturing, and sometimes killing prisoners during the early Pinochet era.  It was pretty intense to see the small, cramped sheds that prisoners would be locked in, or the trees that prisoners would hang from as they were interrogated.  Over 5,000 people went through Villa Grimaldi, and a few hundred never came out (known as desaparecidos, which refers to everyone who was killed or disappeared during the Pinochet era).  Pinochet ruled Chile until 1990, and his reign still has quite a lasting effect on Chileans.  It’s still an extremely sensitive topic among Chileans, but important to be aware of as a teacher because our students’ parents and our fellow teachers would have experienced it.  In our region we’ll possibly encounter people who had a family member or friend disappear yet also come across Pinochetistas, or staunch Pinochet supporters.  Many people considered him to be the best option for Chile at the time, which is so hard for outsiders to understand given the terrible things that occurred during the time he held power.  It will definitely be interesting to hear stories and opinions from both sides. 

On a lighter and totally different note, completos are quite the thing here.  They’re hot dogs covered in mayonnaise, avocado, onions… you name it and there’s probably a completo that has it.  I’ve also had my fair share of empanadas already, and we’re quickly learning our “chilenismos,” or Chilean sayings.  Our WorldTeach orientation is wrapping up, and we’ll start our Ingles Abre Puertas orientation on Sunday.  Lots more to come!

Bienvenidos a Santiago!

After a long day of travel and a delayed flight due to some loose screws (that’s always comforting to hear…) I have arrived safely in Santiago.  I flew from Miami to Santiago with three other WorldTeach volunteers, and we met up with our fifth and final group member this morning.  I’m with a great group of people, all my age, passionate about helping out and enthusiastic about being down here.  The five of us will spend the next week and a half together doing WorldTeach training and exploring Santiago, and then we’ll join a larger group of Inglés Abre Puertas teachers for another week of training before we’re off to our towns!  I don’t have many updates to give you now other than I learned a new Chilean Spanish word, which is pololo.  Pololos are the couples that fill every park in Santiago cuddling and kissing and being overly affectionate, according to Megan, our WorldTeach Field Director.  We briefly walked through a park near our hostel and I can tell you firsthand that the pololos are out in full force during the summer.  Speaking of which, did I mention that it’s a beautiful, breezy 75 degrees out right now?  We’ll enjoy it while we can!  I’m sure I’ll have many more exciting things to write about soon... hasta luego!