This thing called teaching

After a brief intermission, I am back on the blog and underway with my regular teaching schedule. Although many wonderful things have happened since I last updated (before my computer broke), I want to forego all the travel-y, touristy stuff for now and write specifically about how my classes have gone this week.

Just to remind everyone, I am working at Universidad Tecnologica Emiliano Zapata. My students range in age from 17-26, plus an outlier in his 30s. I teach English to two advanced groups, on Monday and Tuesday respectively, and two intermediate groups, on Wednesday and Thursday respectively.

Here are some views of the campus (the UTEZ buildings are the close-by red ones):





I love all my classes. Each day has a totally different feel to it, but I leave the Univ. every day feeling revitalized and assured that both I and my students are learning. Yesterday and today I went to class a little irked, for no reason other than hormones or something, and experienced a complete 180 during class time, so that by the time I was leaving campus I felt on top of the world, albeit exhausted (teaching is EXHAUSTING! I appreciate that so much more now!). I guess it’s definitely better to be entering my work day bothered and leaving happy than reverse, right? That says to me that I am on the right path in life!

As part of the Fulbright program, we are supposed to teach culture of the United States in addition to the English language. So how we decided my schedule will work is that each month will have a different theme. Last month (although we only had one week of classes) was geography. This month is politics and history.

Last week I stumbled across a website while lesson planning: historyisaweapon.com. Here I discovered the full text (!) of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I decided to use chapter one, “Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress,” for this week’s lesson (I have been using the same material for each class during the week, and deviating slightly based on interest and skill level).

Sample lesson plan from yesterday

My Monday and Tuesday classes (advanced) were assigned to read chapter one for homework and this week we discussed the chapter in class. I hadn’t assigned my Wednesday class (yesterday) to read it for homework because they are intermediate and I knew it would be too challenging on their own. SO.

For homework everyone in class had written one page on any Mexican historical or political topic. I split them into pairs, had them exchange papers, read their partner’s, and then I had each pair come to the front of the classroom and explain what his or her partner wrote about. When they had done that, I drew attention to the topics they had written about: Mexican Independence, Mexican Revolution, various presidents, revolts and protests, etc. I asked them what the earliest topic was that we had covered, and when we concluded that Independence from Spain was the earliest, I pointed out that we had collectively ignored a whole epoch of history (before the European conquerors arrived). I then told them that the U.S. tends to do the same.

I proceeded to split them into new pairs and each pair was given a page that I had extracted from chapter one of Zinn (there were seven pages total that I printed). Each page was a compilation of blurbs and paragraphs on one specific topic covered in the chapter. I gave the class about 10 minutes to read their respective page, taking notes on the topic; there were many individual words that they didn’t understand, but I told them to read for the main ideas.

Each group then explained to the rest of the class what their page was about. These are what we concluded the seven topics were: Columbus and Spanish Kings/first sighting of American land; movement of Indians to North America over the Bering Strait; Iroquois society and lifestyle; Puritan/Indian warfare and disease; Columbus’ 2nd expedition to Haiti; Spaniards and Christianity in Hispaniola; and Pilgrims/Puritans’ murder of Indians and taking of land in New England.

As a class, our task was then to put the pages in chronological order, like a jigsaw puzzle, which required incorporation of speaking, debating, and discussion skills. It was a great exercise. They were each able to practice their reading and speaking. They also had practiced their writing for the homework assignment (though I rejected about 5 of them which were clearly taken from a website-written vocab and grammar better than even I could pull off). AND we were able to confront a complicated historical topic: treatment of indigenous peoples. I congratulated them at the end, writing the Zinn citation on the board, and explaining that it is a pretty radical book, and that many Americans don’t even read it because of the advanced writing and complicated topics. And they had just held a full-fledged discussion/lesson on it!

I felt great about the class! Next week I’ll be showing a movie in class. I would like to ask my blog readers for ideas for an American movie that depicts either a U.S. political or historical event. I want a good movie! One that represents/portrays a significant moment in American history or politics. I was initially thinking Forrest Gump because it shows many historical and cultural epochs, but I am open to suggestions. Suggest away!