What It's Like to Teach English in Ecuador

The river I cross every day

Teaching English in Ecuador is very different here than it was to teach at home.  Where in a public school in the US, you have to know exactly where every student is at every moment. Not so much here.  Absences and tardies are excessive.  When classes start on the hour, I usually have 3 kids.  I can't really do anything for 10 minutes until they start to wander in.  Many are absent 2-3 days a week.  If I ask, my boss, nobody seems to know if a kid has dropped.  If I get a new kid, nobody seems to realize that he's now on my roster.  So I've learned to stop asking and just deal with it.

The testing process is freaky.  You have one day for written and listening, and one day for oral tests which are one on one or partners.  Evidently, you can tweak it however you want to fit your needs.  If you do partners, they just copy each other though but most teachers do it that way because it's faster than one on one.

If a kid is absent on test day, it's my responsibility to schedule a room on a Saturday for the make-up test and tell the student to come.  If he/she doesn't come, I have to keep rescheduling until they decide to show up.  I guess this is indefinite.  Nobody seems to know.  I still have 2 students who are 3 weeks late on this test but they haven't been to school for 3 weeks so I can't talk to them.

Most teachers let their kids go on test day when they're finished, or they tell them not to come the next day if they're done.  According to my boss, I'm not allowed to do this, but I think I will anyway.  That's what I get for asking.  I need to keep my mouth shut and do whatever I want and I'll be much better off.

Observations are also very strange here.  I had one the other day and was feeling that the lesson went extremely well.  I had done lots of pair work and speaking activities, and kids were on task.  In the debriefing, I was told to use "something called Think Pair Share", which I obviously had used a few times during the lesson.  I pointed this out but she just moved on to the next point.  I was told not to use such hard vocabulary, that I need to dumb it down, but that vocabulary is the target language we're teaching.  So I'm not supposed to teach the curriculum.  Something like that.  She changed her mind after I mentioned this.  Things like this have made me want to walk out the door for good.

Here are some other things that have annoyed me to distraction:

• Having just finished my CELTA, none of the methods taught in the CELTA program are used here.  They claim to use the communicative process but that is not happening.  As I walk by other classes, I see very little partner or group work, or speaking.  Most of the time when I walk by a room, students are reading silently or doing independent work.  Teachers stay seated in their chairs behind a high desk and do paperwork.  In language school? 

• There is one elevator for 3,000 students and 60 teachers?  I'm on the 5th floor.  The little kids push and shove their way in, pushing me and other adults out of the way.  You have to push your way into the elevator and yell at the kids to get off and hope they listen.  Many of them just ride it up and down.  Then the kids don't even let people off -- they push and shove and sometimes you feel like you're going to go down.  I've been shocked by this rude behavior here.

• The building is very large and echoes more than any building I've ever been in.  Teachers play their listening tapes and music on full blast so between the noise from the other classrooms, the noise from the little kids who are allowed to scream and yell downstairs as loud as they can (this noise is amplified up through the center of the building), and the echoey rooms, I can't hear anything the students are saying, and they can't hear me.

• English levels are much lower than what they should be for the number of years students have been coming.  For example, Teens 1 is the first level for teens.  Each semester, they advance one level.  I've heard that everybody passes, whether they've actually passed the course or not.  Since my kids are Teens 5, this means that my students have been coming to the school for two and a half years.  One would think that this amount of schooling would enable them to ask a question in English, but truly almost all of them simply can not.  Many of us “native teachers” believe that this is because the local teachers here are not only uncertified (evidently anyone can apply), but they speak Spanish and not English to their students.  I've also noticed that many of them have very low levels of English themselves, so students don't have a role model.

• Also, since students are far lower than they should be at this point, their textbooks are far too high for them.  For example, a Teen 5 should be a low intermediate student.  I do not have one low intermediate student in my class.  They are all Elementary, some are still Beginners.  This is a huge problem, and as a result, many students advance through the school unable to speak, read, or write English.

• They tune the English language out.  I understand that it's easy to do when you're learning a new language.  When your brain gets tired, it's background noise.  And since they have such a small amount of knowledge of English, they don't even realize that I'm talking so they start random conversations during lessons.

On the positive side, although Teens are talkers and gigglers, they are more respectful of their teachers than teens in the U.S., who can be blatantly disrespectful.  They test you more lightly than their U.S. counterparts.  They are sweet and friendly and extremely innocent.  From what I can tell, most have never tried drugs or alcohol, and I don't think they're sexually active for the most part. It's refreshing.

I hope to see a difference in my students' English levels soon.  I'm using everything I've learned from the CELTA and trying to get them talking correctly as much as possible.

These are some of my 55 students:

As you can see, between the way things work at school and not particularly loving Ecuador in general, I've clearly had a hard time enjoying this experience up to this point.  I have been back and forth about quitting and going back to the US and finding a job.  My feeling about this changes hourly.  I've been writing in my journal so I can see my thought patterns.

Yesterday, I decided to continue the process of getting my cultural exchange visa just in case I do stay.  So 6 of us rented a van and driver to take us the 4 hour drive to Machala, wait for us, then drive us back.  Got the Visa with no problems, and started on our way back.  We all decided let's get drunk so we can get through the second 4 hour drive as if we're at a party.  We brought rum and coke, drank all that, then made the poor driver keep stopping for beers and bathrooms breaks, as well as for lunch earlier.  I must say, we were very bad kids.  Evidently, we were kicked out of a bar after we got home.

So today, in this moment, I'm thinking that since I have endured this process of getting the visa, paid the $140 including travelling costs, spent $250 furnishing my bedroom, and having just figured out how everything works here,  I'm pretty sure I'm going to stay.

  Off to submit my weekly plan...