Teachers Briefing

To the new Hacienda Merida Teachers:

Lessons at H.M. typically run from 9-11 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. Some kids come early and others asked us to do afternoon slots. This was a bit irregular and its pretty much up to you when you do any teaching outside 9-11 and 5-7 (when in doubt, check with Alvaro). We spent quite a lot of time preparing lessons during the day as we found this made the lessons more productive and run smoother.

In the mornings the class size tended to be quite small (3 to 10 kids). You get quite a range at this time, with some very young children who had just about mastered numbers and days of the week by the time we left and others (who are older and work in the hotel every day before coming to the school) who are pretty fluent. Finding useful material for these guys was hard but there are a bunch of online quizzes that are good and just talking to them about their lives worked well and proved to be quite engaging for them. The 'best' students are called Horacio, Darwin (who both comes twice a day) and Junior (who comes at night). Get these three on your side and they can help with any language issues and generally provide clarification for the other students.

Afternoons were a totally different thing from the morning. Here you can expect anything from 10 to 25 students, ranging from total beginners to the near fluent guys. Keeping them all entertained was a real challenge. We quickly learnt that if you are lenient, many of them will just take you for a ride. If you let them have computers in the school room, monitor them carefully as the second you look away they will just go on YouTube etc and blare music into the room. This then pulls away the students who actually want to work and its downhill from there. We found it best to ban computers from the room until after lessons. We also had a few students who would turn up and then refuse to work. As strict as it may sound, if you don't send these guys away your lessons will quickly deteriorate into a waste of time. Either make them work or get rid of them! Alvaro would agree.

I hope when you get here our posters are still up on the wall so that you can see what we worked on them with. Most of the students, particularly the girls, love to write everything down and not talk very much. We wrote long lists of verbs in various forms which was dull but they seemed perfectly happy to be copying them down. We then had them wrrite sentences using the verbs as well as the various tenses we had written up. We did not have time to cover many of the past tenses or any of the future tenses so this might be a good place to start. They also liked conversation, theme based volcabulary, for example tourism. Having the better guys answering ficticious emails or writing about life in Omeptepe was also useful. We did a lot of work on synonyms and antonyms which they all enjoyed, we even planned a treasure hunt that had groups of children running around the hotel finding clues and solving word puzzles which went down very well.

My best advice is keep them on a tight leash, the second you let them get away with messing around in class (obviously its ok for them to have fun but for us it got excessive) the value for everyone, including you, just plumets. They all love to play Uno and use the computers but that just leaves you wondering why you are here at all and means that those who want to learn don't really get the chance.

Finally, they steal EVERYTHING. From you, from the school and probably from each other. I don't know if its careless or malicious, a few or many, but it happened all the time. We lost about 40 pencils and 15 board markers, as well as our quite expensive Spanish --> English dictionary so be careful. Anything you put down or give them and forget about will go. Its sad but its true!

Its a great setup here and I found it very rewarding and was sad to be leaving. Many of the kids were desperate for me to stay which I found very touching, some of them really seemed to appreciate the teaching.

With many of them, it is necessary to go over material more than once as it really doesn't sink in first or even third time.

The biggest challenge you will have is keeping control, as well as finding material to suit both the less and more abled students at once.

Good luck!

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me on ben.thomas@hotmail.co.uk

All the best

Ben