Thursday March 4, 2010

If you had told me in May when I graduated, or even this past October, that my first teaching job would be at a bilingual school in Gracias, Honduras teaching not only kids history and geography, but English as well, I would have laughed at you. But here I am, sitting outside on a perfect 75-degree day in March staring up at the mountains waiting to go teach my nivalacion kids basic phonics and vocabulary and later World history to my 7th graders and U.S. History to my 8th graders. It is funny how life works.

Although I feel like I’ve grown personally through all of this it is also the professional growth I am excited about, which was also a major reason why I decided to come to Honduras and teach. This is my first teaching job, and it is a very unique one at that. I want to take some time to share some thoughts that I have had since I’ve been down here about this and a few other topics.

Being down here has further excited me about my chosen profession. After graduating last May I was hoping to find a full-time teaching job—it was something I wanted to do, not only for the pay, but to be in the classroom with the kids and begin to grow as a teacher. When this did not work out (I couldn’t land a teaching job) I began to look for other opportunities and was eager to find one that would allow me to be back in the classroom. Although I had begun to look into teaching overseas, I never thought I would have gotten a position so quickly, but here I am in Honduras.

Now, as many of you know, working with kids can be one of the most challenging professions, but also one of the most rewarding. Being down here in Honduras sheds light on this in a whole different way. In the United States you have the public school system, where every kid has the opportunity to get an education, with a larger and larger percentage of high school graduates going on to some sort of college or training. Down here that is not the case. Before I came down here I read that Honduras has one of the lowest literacy rates in Central America. Coming down here and seeing this for myself, and then seeing the unique opportunities that the kids at my school have to not only get a good education, but learn English as well, is an experience all in itself. Although I am not going to be back in Honduras next year, the kids I work with here on a daily basis will always be with me, and I am going to make my best attempt to stay in contact with as many of them as I can. Eventually I would like to support a student at the school. Almost 35 percent of the students here in Gracias are on scholarship—it costs right around $100 a month for a student to be enrolled at the school. It is something I want to do once I get settled down (whenever that will be…) and a worth while investment in helping a child gain an excellent education, go to college, and make a difference in his or her home country.

Along with thinking about the differences in expectations of education and what it means to be educated I have thought about what my role as a teacher is down here in Honduras. But that led me to think about teachers in general; what is the role of a teacher in the classroom? It seems like a simple question to answer, but is it actually as straightforward as most people think? This is something I’ve thought about a lot down here in Honduras. Here I am, thousands of miles away in a developing country, teaching native Hondurans in English. As a teacher who is looking forward to a long career in education this is something that must always be in my mind—what is my role in the classroom with my students’ and how do I make sure I know I am doing my job? But how do you know how successful you are if you don’t even know what your job is in the first place?

In my education classes we always talked about there being a fine line between being the teacher and the students’ friend. You need to be especially careful early on in your teaching career because of the smaller age gap. If you become too friendly you lose the students’ respect, and if you are too strict you can also lose the students’ respect. There is middle ground that must be found to have a healthy classroom environment. But how is that middle ground reached? This is all centered on classroom management, and for me this is just as important as content knowledge for a teacher in the classroom.

I want to use a book I finally read down here in Honduras as an example. A couple of Christmas’ ago my sister gave me Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man. McCourt was a public school teacher in the New York Public Schools for several years. He uses this book as almost an autobiography of his career in education and it is a phenomenal read. In it you see McCourt develop his classroom management around his ability to engage his students—engage his students in stories of his life growing up in Ireland or fighting in Europe during World War II or working the docks. Many (such as administrators and disgruntled parents) might view this as unproductive and not what a teacher should be doing during class time. But I see this as something so valuable in the classroom that is must be done. Many say the teacher’s role in the classroom is to teach the content, assign homework, and give tests. I disagree. One of the reasons why I went into education was to be able to work with kids and help them develop into young adults who think critically about their surroundings. Part of this is through engaging them in the classroom, even if it isn’t in the content. McCourt thrived on this and it allowed him to develop a relationship with his students that carried over into the influence he had on them as a teacher and their overall growth as a person. This then carried over into his ability to focus on the content and through creative ways work with the students. Although I believe teachers are responsible for teaching content and making sure school, state, and national standards are being met, I also believe that teachers must find ways to keep the students engaged and trigger their curiosity in different and unique ways, and this isn’t always through the content. It all comes together in the end and if done right can create a classroom environment where learning can thrive. The question is finding that middle ground, which is something I am looking forward to working on through my career.

So this has become a pretty long post so I think I’ll end here. Feel free to comment on it and I might follow it up with some more thoughts if you show interest.