Volunteering at the telesecundaria

In an earlier post I mentioned that Greg and I are volunteering at the local high school. Sadly, we're coming to the end of our time there, as Monday will be our last session before we return to Arizona on Tuesday.

In Mexico's education system, schooling is mandatory for primary and secondary (middle school) level only. What I didn't realize is that telesecundaria is the secondary level, not high school as I'd thought.

Students progress through three grades at this school. The telesecundaria concept of watching prerecorded lessons is not being followed for English. The students find the televised lessons too difficult and so work through the textbook instead. Unfortunately, the textbook is poorly designed, and poorly written by a native-Spanish person.

Zulema, the grade 3 teacher I coached

What further complicates things is the teachers themselves don't speak English. It also means the students rarely speak either. This is where the English volunteers come in. They coach the teachers for one hour, twice a week, working through the pronunciation for the upcoming lessons. We joined in and were matched up with teachers. 

Greg and I also chose to go into a class (photo below) to work with a teacher during a lesson, once a week. On the left in the photo you'll see Joachim, the teacher Greg coached. It has been both rewarding and fun. Greg now has about 10 hours of teaching under his belt, and is a natural. 

Regular class size of 13 students

We also prepared a photo slideshow and showed it to grades 2 and 3. We included various photos of our family, our home, Niagara Falls, and of course, the great Canada weather. When shown a thermometer reading of -20ºC, no one could read it. They couldn't imagine a reading below zero!

Here are two questions we found interesting:

• How many homes do you have?  Thinking they thought we were rich, I explained we have one, but some people do have more than one. What I'd forgotten is many of the homes here are second homes owned by city dwellers who use them just a few weeks of the year.
• So you don't shower in winter? The teacher had no concept of a home being heated. Understandable when you see many homes here don't have windows as they don't have a need for them.

Thanks for participating, Greg

The in-class experience was interesting for the both of us, especially as we'd never taught together. We both use humour as a teaching tool. When I was facing the class and they broke out in laughter, I turned to see what the teacher and Greg were doing behind me. The next word in the text was fatter and they were turned sideways, comparing their "profiles" (bellies). Hilarious!

Can you read the colours, not the words?

I learned many things by this experience. One was not to ask students to name the four seasons. They all looked puzzled. Greg had to point out they only have two seasons; rainy and dry. I made the mistake of thinking weather is universal, but it certainly is not.

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Location: Lo de Marcos, Nayarit, Mexico

Weather: The same every day - sunny and warm!

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Note: We received approval to use these photos on the Internet.