To my readers:
I apologize for my blatant negligence in writing for the past month and a half. So much has changed that I find my life barely recognizable. My passions have changed, the reasons for coming to Costa Rica are now completely different than the reasons that I am staying and am glad to be here. It would be completely impossible to sum up how I feel and why without many beers, many conversations, and writing a novel. The next series of posts are stories of things that have had the biggest effect on me in the last two months. They are the biggest reasons and best examples of why I am thrilled to be doing what I'm doing.
Here is the story of "J" so far.
When I walked into my very first class, there were three students. My TEFL instructor had told me that the level placement test wasn't exactly fool-proof and to expect some discrepancies between each individual learner, but I wasn't prepared at all for what was ahead of me. The class was a Pre-intermediate I class, which is roughly the equivalent of English 201. In this class, students should be somewhat comfortable stringing sentences together. Their vocabulary will be lacking greatly, but the general concept of syntax in English should be pretty solid. There aren't many tenses that they don't know by this point either. The first class was basically a get-to-know-each-other type of class. The students had never had class together so I used the time doing introductions and getting a feel for their abilities. There was one student, "J," who was clearly behind the other students. He was having trouble stringing together simple sentences to express that his favorite color is purple. The other two were getting frustrated with him by the end and I struggled keeping the class moving and interesting when I had to stop every now and then to teach something that is learned in the first week of learning a language.
The second day of class, J was the only one to show up. I worried that the other two were already fed up and dropped the class. (One actually did: her loss, this class rocks now.) Within five minutes it became blatantly obvious that what I had planned would be way over J's head and no actual learning would get done in the slightest. On the fly then, I set out to more thoroughly diagnose his language needs since we had two hours alone together. He knew nothing. For the first hour I taught him basic verbs and how to conjugate them in the present simple tense, e.g. I run / Bob runs. Then we set out to learn how to transform a verb, "to run" into a person, "runner" into the activity, "running." The second hour consisted of learning the past tense and the future tense, "I ran" and "I will run." Although I was completely bewildered, it was a fun class and J enjoyed it thoroughly. We were both standing up at the white board with markers and taking turns writing and fixing sentences. It reminded me of a scene from Stand and Deliver, where I was left thinking, "How can I teach this J?"
I gave him homework to write ten sentences each in the present, past, and future. After class I immediately went downstairs to talk to the administration and to see his diagnosis test. His test was abysmal. He got most everything wrong and on the writing portion had one sentence which was mindless babble riddled with errors. Written in the space which designates his level was "Basic." It was then crossed out and replaced with "Pre-intermediate I," which is two levels higher. I have no idea what crack-head did his diagnosis test, but I'm pretty sure a monkey could speak more English than J at this point. A monkey also wouldn't add a T to the end of every word either. The administration told me that his level was switched because he studied English for a month at Maximo before and it had been a long time since he had studied English. That makes as much sense as saying, "I spread the peanut-butter on may face because it's closer to my mouth than the bread." At this moment I sympathized with my parents who would tell me stories about how the teachers are on the front-lines and the generals pulling the strings in the administration are purposefully making themselves defter and defter everyday.
Class three rolled around and ten minutes in, the inept administration knocked on my door. I had asked that J be bumped down at least one level and today was the day of the change. J was with my favorite boss ever eager to get back into my class. Apparently he had felt like he learned a lot in my last class and refused to go down a level. He looked determined and I stupidly felt like the powerful new teacher who wore a cape instead of a tie and so I said, "Challenge accepted." To my surprise after the painstaking two hours with J, in which 95% of his sentences were incorrect on the board, his homework was 100% correct.
Since we are a language institution and people are allowed to fail without repercussions, I am supposed to teach to the top 50% of the class, pulling the lower 35% up and leaving behind the bottom 15% to drop out or repeat a level. So even though I wanted J to succeed, I couldn't cater to him, and the fast-paced curriculum wouldn't let me lest I not cover everything and have to fail the whole class, which was steadily growing in size. However, every once in a while, J was the only one in class on a certain day. In fact, he has only ever missed two classes which is extremely remarkable for a Tico. If ever this happened, I would ditch my lesson, run downstairs and grab a book from the level below and improvise a lesson based on what I noticed his language gaps were. One day it was modals, e.g. words like Would, Should, Could, Must, Have to, Can. One day it was Like, Want, and Need. As time progressed the gap between he and the rest shortened, but I was still confident that he was in the wrong level.
The end of the first month rolled around and he scored a 68.4 on the quiz. A 70 is required to pass. He was bummed that he failed, but I made it sufficiently clear how impressed I was with his progress and how to me, that 68.4 was pleasant surprise. This strengthened his determination and the wait time between teaching and comprehension for any given topic for him began to decrease. During the next month he would absolutely floor me every now and then. When I taught the word "to hire" - which is inherently harder than most verbs since it requires the concept of needing a service done as well as the act of contracting someone to complete a task - J gave me this sentence: "I need to hire some peasants." I was laughing so hard that class could not continue for at least two minutes. In this last month he has not only caught up to the others, but surpassed a few. The class is now 6 people, and J is in the top 50%. Yesterday he was the first to get how the 'present perfect progressive' tense worked. If you haven't had any grammar in years, that tense goes like this: "I have been running in the park." It describes the past, present, and future simultaneously. I was floored. J is now watching Lord of the Rings in English. He has been watching the series for a week and brings me in lists of complicated words to teach him. All of this happened in two months.
Tomorrow he has another quiz. For some reason I'm very nervous about him passing. I want him to pass, but I'm nervous he's not quite ready. What's funny is that there are other students in the class who I should be even more worried about since J is now in the top 50%. If J passes this quiz I'm taking him for a beer after class.
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