English Classes

I taught a very non-formal English class to a group of Cantel kids last year, but this year I'm getting them started in a bit more organized way. The Muni bought me a whiteboard, the market is giving me one of the store areas to use as a classroom, and today I went and promoted classes at Cantel's biggest middle school. Giving the same speech 11 times made me really appreciate the intercom system for announcements that I very much took for granted throughout grade school and high school!

The most interesting part of promoting classes today was how many times I got asked questions like ¨What color pen should I bring?¨, ¨How many pages need to be in the notebook?¨, and ¨Should it be spiral or not?¨. After finding out where, when, and the symbolic sign-up cost of 5Q (about 75 cents, so that kids keep coming) these were the things that worried them about learning English. It's interesting to see how much emphasis is placed on details like these in the educational system here and less on critical thinking skills. I'm very excited about starting teaching next week and I hope people actually come!