The first week we arrived in Valparaíso, there was a large fair where people could sign up for various and assorted activities that the University had to offer: basketball, soccer, dancing, ping-pong, and the like. One option was a very official looking program called "El Ingles abre Puertas" (English opens Doors) and I put my name on the mailing list, just to check it out. Turns out the program is in some way connected to the Chilean government, and is designed to get native english speakers (me) into Chilean public schools. The hope is that by sending a foreign university student into the classroom it will make the language more accesible and real to the students, which in turn will make them learn. Like many government programs, it looks great on paper and has little basis in reality. Now lets take a look into the classroom and see how it actually works.
I went for the first time last Monday, at ten in the morning. The school is located in Miraflores Alto, which translates into a 10 minute walk and a 25 minute micro ride from my house. As instructed, I rode the micro until I saw a Lider (chilean for "Wal-Mart") and got off the bus. The high school is called "Liceo Industrial Miraflores Alto". In Chile, students choose their specialty earlier than in the US, hence the "Industrial" in the title. Most of the students at this school will not go to University; only about 2-5% of students in public school study post high-school. (To give a more accurate picture of the educational systemAbout 40-50% of high schools are private, and almost all of those students go to university.) Unlike the title of the school makes it sound, these kids aren't being trained to be engineers. Most of the will work in very low paying jobs that require little formal education. Did I mention that it's almost exclusively a boys school? About 98% of each class is boys, and I'm not sure if it makes the class worse-behaved or more well-behaved because there are no distractions.
The building itself is a reasonably sound facility. It has a cafeteria, classrooms with functional desks, chairs, and whiteboards, a teachers lounge, and is generally clean and well-kept. The entrance to the school is closely guarded; it is a strictly closed campus and there is a locked gate permanently watched by a doorman to make sure that no students leave. Every day a few street dogs sneak past the doorman into the school grounds. According to the teacher I work with, they grow fat and lazy during the winter and during the summer they starve. Teachers have a permanent classroom and the students change classrooms every period. Unless the teacher is in the room, the door is shut and locked. When class starts, the teacher enters the room first, followed by all the students. They remain standing by their desks until they are explicitly told by the teacher that they may sit. What I'm getting at is that on the surface the school looks very functional and the students appear reasonably well-behaved.
The first day I went to volunteer, I had no idea what to expect. I didn't know how well the kids spoke english, how the classes were taught, how many kids were in a class, what I would be expected to do, or pretty much anything, for that matter. Here's what I saw. The class is taught entirely in Spanish, which was a suprise. Even in very basic Spanish classes in the states, the teachers try to speak very little in English. These students have been taking English for 2-3 years, and still the class was pure Spanish. Here's what we did in each class. The teacher began with a paragraph in english (about tattoos, which I unfortunately have heard enough times to commit to memory). Here's the first part:
----Nowadays it is very common to see someone with a tattoo or piercing in their ear, nose, or even eyebrow. With us today in the studio is Jarek Warren. Tell us, Jarek, what exactly is a tattoo?
The students copied this from the book into their notes. Next, the teacher writes the paragraph in a strange pronunciation format to help the students speak the text. It bears no resemblance to English, but is designed so that if pronounced like proper Spanish it sounds like English. It look something like this:
----NAuadais ets`Veri Comun tu sei SAmwon wid a taTU` or Bodi ....etc
In actuality what I just wrote bears a much closer resemblance to the actual english spelling. When the professor writes the pronunciation on the board, it is unrecognizable. If I didn't know what it was, I would think it was Swedish or something. (Actually the first day I thought it was another language...I thought they had put me in the wrong program: "Swedish Opens Doors".) After the pronunciation, they copy the translation in their notebook.
----Hoy en día es muy comun ver alguien con un tatuaje .....etc.
Now, the students were supposed to have done all this work the week prior. Of the 40 students in the class, about 10 had done the homework. One student came up to the teacher's desk to turn it in, and the teacher asked him to read what he had written aloud. He began to read, and I could sort of make out what he was saying. When he finished, to my horror, the teacher looked at me and asked, "out of 7, what grade would you give him?" Not wanting to be the bad guy, I gave the kid a 6.5. I don't think it was what the teacher had in mind, because he didn't ask me to give any more grades. Thankfully. Next, he asked me to give a short introduction about myself, which he proceded to translate for the students. After my introduction, he shocked me again by saying "ok, you have 20 minutes. Do your thing." Huh? It's my first day!!! Anyway, I proceeded to do a really easy question and answer. I wrote this on the board:
What's your name?
My name is....
Easy, right? Think again. I gave them 2 minutes and instucted them to ask this question to the people around them. After two minutes, I walked around the classroom putting people on the spot. Absolutely no one could answer me. I had ask, translate, translate, have student repeat. The bottom line is that the whole class is taught in Spanish, and no one in the class has even a basic proficiency in English. What's more, the dynamic of the classroom (ie nobody wants to learn) prohibits almost any other style of teaching. And that, dear friends, is what the teacher and the Chilean government want me to change. Perfect.
After class, I ate lunch with the teacher and he told me a lot about the demographic of the student body. Many of them, he said, live high up in the hills of Miraflores (the farther away from the ocean and the higher up you live on the hills the poorer you are). Some of them are squatters and consequently are incredibly poor and have no plumbing, running water, or electricity. He also said that the reason that many kids come to school is just to get away from the house for the day. To make a point, when I was in class this Monday, a student handed me his notebook and asked (in Spanish) if I knew any tags, or graffiti. Since growing up in the relative wealth of the vanilla valley is not a good way to learn a lot of graffiti, I don't know any, and I sure wouldn't have told him if I did.
I don't want to come off as being too pessimistic about the whole thing though. There are some students in every class who really want to learn the language, and just haven't been given the tools to do so. These students copy everything I write, and really appreciate it when I speak with them to help them learn. The teacher, although he is very weary from seeing so many students go nowhere, speaks good English. He keeps the class under control, and if the students put a mimimun of effort into the work, they could easily learn at least the basics of the language. I hope that what I'm doing will eventually help at least a few students out of their current situation. Thanks for reading, and I hope all is well at home.
ya me voy, Andrius
P.S. I also see a lot of stuff that would NOT fly in a classroom in the states. For instance, the teacher told a student "¡Oye, siéntate gordito!" (Hey, sit down fatty!) I had to try pretty hard not to laugh. Poor kid.
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