Day 5: Teaching Sorpresas!

So many people asked me before I left "Are you teaching in English or Spanish?" to which I laughed and said "Oh English, thank goodness" Well, tengo una sorpresa (I have a surprise!) ... this turned out to be false!

On our first day of teaching yesterday, we quickly realized that the levels of English fluency and interest were quite varied amongst the students. Therefore, we decided to adapt on the fly and restructure groups the next day. Additionally, we felt that teaching in pairs would create a better learning experience for the students with two different teaching styles available. Today we repartitioned the students into one group taught in English by Bryan and Jo and two groups in Spanish, one taught by me and An and the other taught by Sebastian. We figured he was best fit to manage his classroom solo as the only native Spanish speaker in our group. His Puerto Rican Spanish is awesome to listen to as it flows off his tongue so quickly and smoothly. We are very grateful to have him in the mix!

An and I are excited for the challenge that is entailed in us instructing in Spanish. We both have exposure to Spanish from years of classes in school, but we would not consider ourselves fluent at this point. We have needed to rapidly learn some more technical vocabulary, and we have certainly made some silly grammatical mistakes. I just hope that our little mistakes aren't too distracting or annoying to the students. If they find them funny, they manage to keep a remarkably respectful straight face :)

It is hard enough to explain things well when teaching in one's first language, but teaching in a language in which you are not fully confident is a good test in determination and "fake it 'til you make it." As the curriculum gets harder and we move from data types and if statements to loops, functions, recursion, and more, communicating the concepts in Spanish will also be more difficult for us. However, we are eager to take on this challenge and will work to improve our Spanish each day to keep up. I've already learned a lot, from some Chilean slang to some computer science words. Thanks goes out to Word Reference (a truly essential internet source) and our teaching assistants, Eduardo and Sebastian for answering our translation questions.

The chaos from the first day was drastically reduced once we organized the groups by their desired language of instruction. Below is a photo of us leaving for "the first day of school," excited to teach but not sure what to expect.

Now that we have these fixed groups of students, it will be really nice to get to know our students and hopefully have can become comfortable with us. I've really really liked our students! They are so focused, engaged, gracious, friendly, and kind.

Beyond editing the groups and language of instruction, we also have shifted our curriculum after getting a sense of what the students will most benefit from. At this point, we have a plan to do Scratch for the first week with our younger group of students and then move into Python whereas the Universidad Mayor students will be doing Python for all three weeks.

It has been quite a cool experience building our curriculum, from syllabi to slides. While I have built curriculum in the past for workshops, math tutoring, and my one day Spokes workshop about Scratch, I have never before made a multi-day curriculum. It really makes me appreciate how difficult it is for teachers to estimate how much time various lessons will take. Also, deciding the order and structure in which we will present the material involves a lot of thought. It's good that there are five of us so that we have various perspectives to weigh in.

So far, the curriculum has been fairly successful. This is subjective on our part but also based on the survey results that we've collected from students after class. We want to know how they're feeling to improve class each day!