While you have just completed your first week of holiday (teaching colleagues and students in NZ) I have been going to two different schools a day. I know, I’m not sensing any sympathy over this.
For the past two weeks I have been going every day for a few hours to the CAE school which is a private school attached to a sports club with a rugby field and swimming pool. It seems most of the boys play rugby or football and most of the girls play hockey and most of the students are passionate about sports. The school is only about 8 years old and goes from kindergarten to high school. It has upstairs and ground level classrooms with an external staircase and a long verandah running the length of the school. As with all the classrooms I have seen in Argentina so far, they are smaller than those of NZ but the numbers of students are fewer and furniture is mainly desks and chairs so the need for extra space is not as great. There is a lot more echo in the rooms than I have been used to because the surfaces are concrete or other hard materials.
CAE is made mostly of concrete blocks, painted white, and concrete floors.
The school has a very wide door/gate which is locked and to get in I have to ring a bell. I didn’t see the bell the first time I went there by myself, so had to ring Marcela, my contact, to let me in. Sylvina, the secretary and English tutor elsewhere, was a fantastic help too, and was able to find classes for me to go and generally help me find my way around. I gave her a copy of Ellis´s 10 Principles of Second Language Aquisition and a copy of An Intercultural Stance - The 6 Principles of Intercultural Communicative Language Teaching and Learning so an intercultural and pedagogical moment was also shared .
I spent some time with English classes right throughout the school. One of the most confident speakers in English was a German exchange student (learning Castellano in a school in Argentina! – I thought that was amusing).
For the past two weeks I have been going every day for a few hours to the CAE school which is a private school attached to a sports club with a rugby field and swimming pool. It seems most of the boys play rugby or football and most of the girls play hockey and most of the students are passionate about sports. The school is only about 8 years old and goes from kindergarten to high school. It has upstairs and ground level classrooms with an external staircase and a long verandah running the length of the school. As with all the classrooms I have seen in Argentina so far, they are smaller than those of NZ but the numbers of students are fewer and furniture is mainly desks and chairs so the need for extra space is not as great. There is a lot more echo in the rooms than I have been used to because the surfaces are concrete or other hard materials.
CAE is made mostly of concrete blocks, painted white, and concrete floors.
The school has a very wide door/gate which is locked and to get in I have to ring a bell. I didn’t see the bell the first time I went there by myself, so had to ring Marcela, my contact, to let me in. Sylvina, the secretary and English tutor elsewhere, was a fantastic help too, and was able to find classes for me to go and generally help me find my way around. I gave her a copy of Ellis´s 10 Principles of Second Language Aquisition and a copy of An Intercultural Stance - The 6 Principles of Intercultural Communicative Language Teaching and Learning so an intercultural and pedagogical moment was also shared .
I spent some time with English classes right throughout the school. One of the most confident speakers in English was a German exchange student (learning Castellano in a school in Argentina! – I thought that was amusing).
This school runs right throughout the day with no early closing or siesta break but has different times for each section of the school to have breaks. I taught several classes “My Roadside Goat”, a bit of a silly song which I’ve done with schools for years and which I had previously filmed (había grabo en video ¿Did I get the pretérito pluscaumaperfecto correct, Adriana?) amiga Viv singing with the kids at The Gardens School to show how it should sound. It’s great for learning the past tense – I need a similar song in Spanish – and is easy to learn because every line is repeated after the teacher. They had a lot of fun with it and I have filmed one group singing along with my computer, joining in with The Gardens School kids and Viv. Another intercultural gem!
These students speak English so well, at whatever level they are learning. They loved the chance to ask me questions and it didn’t matter if it was the same question over an over again, they all got a chance to use English in an “authentic context’. I have been asked what is my favourite colour, my favourite animal, my favourite number, my address, age and family statistics. And then I ask them the same question back. When asked my age, I used my grandmother’s standard response, “ I am the same age as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth,” which takes a while for kids in any language to work out – and then I tell them I am 21 because they want to hear a number. Kids would come up to me shyly, often with a friend, and say, “Hello, What is your name?” or any of the aforementioned questions, and then I was swamped by a gathering mass of young students during recreo with the same questions asked again. They would have asked different questions but they, like me, were working on a limited set of formulaic questions, responses and vocabulary.
When I brought out my silver fern on black background flag, there was instant recognition and many of the boys just had to touch it, breathing “All Black Flag” in reverent and awe-inspired tones. There was no similar response when I showed them the official NZ flag, and I’m sure that must say a lot about the branding of NZ in Argentina, if not the rest of the world. I brought some stickers of NZ icons to give out randomly as we do in NZ and now I wished that I had brought more stickers of the All Black jersey as they are by far the most popular. Even in my adult English classes, when I gave people the chance to choose a sticker for their books/cellphone etc, the rugby jersey was the most popular, even if only to take home for a son or nephew who played or followed rugby.
I was able to sit in on some other lessons including geography, computer and drama (for classes the same age I teach in NZ), where the teachers spoke no English and explained to me what the students were doing and learning. I went to lunch with a group of students on one day, at the club restaurant, where I had two hamburger patties, some fried rice and an apple and a lot of interesting conversations. Some of the boys were pretty keen to talk to me because I tell them I like rugby- but then I am expected to tell them who my favourite All Black is. I usually ask them who theirs is first then reply, me too.
A drama class at CAE school . The boy with his arms out is a shower (and a passionate rugby player) and the one underneath... is showering.
These are some of the girls from CAE who had lunch with me. I brought with me several of Laura’s “Smoke Free – Smoking, not our Future” posters and these are now on classroom walls around Paraná exhorting the youth of this city not to smoke. We have had fun translating them and some students can now say “Aye?” because on DJ Sir-Vere’s poster, he says, “It’s just not a good look, aye!” For once it meant I knew something in English that the English teachers didn’t know. The teachers of English here are so proficient in their knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, and fluently reel off the names and parts of tenses or speech when referring to them in the course of a lesson. Just about everyone who is brave enough to speak English with me has a better grasp of my language than I have of theirs. But, I know that I am learning and today I was able to use the past tense correctly without referring to my book for confirmation. This has not stopped me from attempting to use the past tense previously, it just means that now I am starting to make sense. I was able to say quite accurately that “I bought (Compré)…..and then I needed to look up the word for socks!”
On one day, I went with a lovely young teacher (also called Mélisa) to her second school which was a public school back in the middle of the city. We caught a bus and then went to a school which is two floors up in a large building. I think another school takes up the first two floors. These students, about Year 11, had only been learning English for a while and were a lot noisier and boisterous than other students I had come across – they were also a lot more facially pierced and did not wear a uniform. In spite of this, they were not rude or disrespectful to the teacher at all. Their English was quite basic as they had not started at primary school and not many were keen to have a go at asking me questions.
Melisa -the-teacher (not the Melisa with whom I am staying) and her class of English students at one of the public schools in Parana. Mélisa brought out some of the Smokefree merchandise rulers and pens I had given her and if a student wanted one they had to ask me a question in English, or they had to say a simple speech about them self in Castellano and English for me to film for my students in NZ. All the merchandise went! These students were more inclined to follow football, and one was able to explain to me what Cumbia music was by letting me listen to his ipod which he found more interesting than me for most of the lesson. Teacher Mélisa, was absolutely lovely and I am so pleased I got a chance to meet her and go to a totally different kind of school.
Today, my host Mélisa took me to an amazing old school in the middle of the city. It’s like a cross between the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Auckland Town Hall and a bit of Harry Potter – except in need of maintenance as so many building in Paraná seem to be. It’s called Escuela Normal, and it goes from kindergarten to university level and has, apparently over 5000 students through it a day. It is about to celebrate its 135th anniversary and boasts the oldest kindergarten in Latin America, originally started by teachers from the US. There are some cabinets of historical artefacts and trophies of past students who have achieved significance nationally or beyond. There is a grand marble stair case as soon as you walk in the door and the steps have worn down over the years though the amount of traffic over them. Some of the furniture is incredibly old and has been there for many years. There is the most glorious stained glass window and an internal courtyard.
The kindergarten playground, on the roof top at the Escuela Normal. Spot the differences.
This is one of the Junior Classrooms at the Escuela Normal Public School - it is several flights of stairs up.This poster was on one of the notice boards - for any Oasis fans
This poster was on one of the notice boards - for any Oasis fans
This is some of the ¨antique¨furniture which is still used on some of the classrooms at Escuela Normal.
This is the view from one of the levels down to the ground level.,
This is the beautiful stained glass window.Random observations::
- Twink or white liquid eraser seems to be the graffiti medium of preference here.
- Twink or white liquid eraser seems to be the graffiti medium of preference here.
- Students wear a lot of jewellery or accessories if they want to.
- I am now able to cross a road with reasonable confidence and do not need to wait for someone else to cross before I realise it is ¨safe¨for me to cross.
- I´m pretty sure I can find my way back home from at least three different points in town.
- I am starting to bump into people I know - after one month!
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