Teach English in Yongan Zhen - Linfen Shi

Last summer I ventured to Ecuador to participate in volunteer work to rebuild a house impacted by an earthquake. The volunteers all stayed in a camp near a small beach community on the Pacific. Our leader, Edwin, was not part of a large volunteer organization, but instead created his own from scratch. Instating green environmental practices was one of the goals, but he also wanted to create a stronger local community. This meant setting up English classes for the children of the town. While many of the volunteers spoke English, there were very few that were native speakers. My girlfriend and I said we would help teach English for the town kids, but what we didn’t realize was that we had just signed up to be “English Teaching Gurus”. Edwin knew we were from the U.S., and therefore assumed we were native English speakers. While these are both facts, he failed to understand that just because you are a native speaker of a language it does not mean that you know how to teach it. Edwin had obtained an English teaching book from somewhere and told us to use it as our lesson plan. He wanted this book to be the backbone of our whole curriculum. After taking this class, I now know the fault in this thought. Strictly using the book can throw a teacher off because actual classes have more nuance than a book plans for. If there is one thing to understand from my experience it is that nothing is certain. In fact we asked Edwin what the class would be like and he could not give us an answer because it varied so often. Therefore, we had no idea how many kids would be there or what age or level they were. My girlfriend and I looked through this book and found the activities to be fun and helpful for English learners. We then worked on some type of lesson plan. Of course I had no idea about ESA at this time, so it did not have a proper lesson plan structure. As I look back on it I am happy that we considered the fact that the class may have varying levels of age and knowledge. We constructed two lessons for each group, younger kids and older kids. Each lesson had some form of warm up (Engage), the lesson itself (Study), and a fun game at the end (Activate). For not knowing the ESA method, I think we came up with something very close. The problem came when we arrived at the class the next night. The classes took place at woman’s house located in the beach town. The space was outside the house, where family members were chatting and dogs were running around. We started to understand that this setting may not be the best for teaching. We stayed there however because we were the visitors and we did not want to cause any issues for the townspeople. We asked Edwin what types of materials were available to use and so he ran away to retrieve some teaching utensils. He came back with one white board and some dried out markers. We didn’t even have a table in the area. As we set up the chairs, some kids started to trickle in one by one. Already we could tell this was the most lax English class we had ever seen. It seemed as though the students came if they wanted to, but it didn’t look as if it was something they were truly invested in. We tried our best to go along with our lesson plan, but even the lower level plan was too difficult for anyone. We were way out of our depths, and had to scratch our whole plan. Instead we started with teaching them the ABC’s. We worked solely on the pronunciation of each letter, which took longer than we had anticipated. At that point we were so discombobulated that we ended after that activity. Personally it was really stressful for me because I felt responsible, despite the uncertainty. It made me feel lost and helpless. However, I made the best of it and decided to use this as a learning opportunity. What I know now can help with future situations where I may be thrown into volunteer teaching. We needed to do more research on the class logistics. Instead of settling for the little information we received, we should have gone to the woman who holds the space in order to obtain details. Despite this, we did a good job creating various plans, but we did not consider the fact that both plans may be too difficult for all the students. While we had little control over it, I now understand the importance of structured scheduling. Having a specific start and end time would have been helpful to ground the class into reality. In terms of our materials, we assumed there would be more provided for us. With this being the case, we could have planned to make our own materials for future classes. Unfortunately, we only attended one class after that because we were leaving on the following day. The second class felt like it had some improvement as we taught parts of the body using the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes”. The largest problem with volunteer teaching is the fact that you, the traveler, leave eventually. A lot of these children need stable teaching in order to ascend to higher levels of English learning. As teachers come and go, it makes it more difficult for the students to steadily improve. I advise against volunteer teaching, unless you know that you can truly help out for a significant amount of time.