English Classes @ Hotel El Mesón del Marqués

So my classes at the hotel have commenced and they have been going well. We finished our fourth class today. I am enjoying the change of scenery and, so far, there are a few real advantages. First of all, there is wireless internet. Second, we have a small class size of only 10 students. Third, the students are really motivated and excited because they are getting free English classes. A minor drawback is the fact that our "classroom" is actually a small hotel room that has been cleared out except for two long tables and enough chairs for everyone. so while we have air conditioning, there is no whiteboard and there is nowhere to hang big paper. The size of the room means that our group work options are limited as well. But yesterday, for example, there was no electricity in Valladolid because they were working on some city project, which meant we didn´t have internet. I was so glad that I had printed out the part of my lesson that involved the internet (Plan B saves the day!) so I was able to present the lesson without any interruption to the flow. It also meant that we had to use the executive meeting room, but it was neat to teach in a beautiful room with beautiful oil paintings and a big wooden table and french doors!
Today we covered a lot of new hotel vocabulary and did an information gap activity in which some students filled in a grid with information about their "guests´" needs and preferences and the other students pretended to be guests making a reservation. These students are very interested in improving their pronunciation but seem fairly unfamiliar with task-based language learning, as many of them have not done any formal language study. Tomorrow we will talk about giving information and small talk.
Next week, I will be working with a different group, and the following week I will meet again for a week with the first group. It will give me a chance to fine-tune my lessons and get to know more employees at the hotel.
Needless to say, I am staying busy here. I am looking forward to the celebration of Hanal Pixan (the Mayan Day of the Dead) on Monday because it is a day off from work!

R&R

I had a really nice weekend in Cancún. I was there with my friend, Jo, who I just met recently because she came to Valladolid for my friend Erica´s wedding. (Jo´s returning to Colombia today to continue her travels there. Have fun and safe travels, Jo!!)
We stayed at a nice, inexpensive hostel in Cancún City (a short bus ride from the Hotel Zone). Saturday was a good beach day, and then yesterday a storm threatened but it never really ended up raining, so we just walked along the beach and I had a chance to buy some things that I can´t find in Valladolid. (I even got a latte at Starbucks!) On Sunday, there were dark clouds and a few light showers and lots of wind most of the day, but then it cleared up by late afternoon.
It was the first time I had been back to Cancún since the trip I made with my grandmother almost 10 years ago, and it seems to me that a lot has changed. It seemed more modern, bigger, and better! It was interesting to see Cancún fairly deserted and the beaches were totally empty. Tourism is really at a low point right now. I´m sure I´ll want to stay away during Spring Break, but it´s pretty cool to be able to hop on a bus, and 2 hours and about $10 US later, arrive in Cancún!
The storm that skirted the coast must have moved a lot of cool air through the whole peninsula because last night was very COOL in Valladolid and today is absolutely gorgeous - breezy and about 70-75 degrees (at least for now).
Well, I´ve got to grade some exams and work on developing the Hotel English course now. Hasta pronto!

Hello, Bonjour!

Today I tried my Hello, Bonjour! activity on a group of students that are generally less proficient. There are also a couple in the class who are decidedly unmotivated...but today I had everyone sit in a circle, and we read through the lyrics of a song I had prepared to have blanks where the articles (a/an/the) should be. They were not familiar with the song at all but they did very well with predictions! Then we listened to the song, which has a fun, upbeat, reggae beat. They read along with the lyrics and asked to hear it again when it was over. : )

This lesson worked well, I think, because I first elicited from the students what they already knew about the grammar that we learned in the last class, then I raised their awareness to the importance of listening to the first sound of a word to determine the indefinite article, then we went through the lyrics bit by bit and talked about the reasons why we choose a instead of the, or vice versa. And the fact that the chorus says "Hola, Hola" helped too! But I am glad they liked it, and it actually got them asking other, more global questions. Like, one student asked me, "Teacher, why in the lyrics of songs they don´t follow the rules?"

That´s the kind of discovery that you hope for as a teacher!

Unas noticias...

1. Last night my friends, Erica & Jorge, got married in Valladolid. Erica teaches English and French at UNO, and she just started this fall as well, so as long as I´ve known her, she´s been planning this wedding! Her family came from Montreal and Jorge´s from Mexico City. Everything was beautiful and we had a great night. There were piña coladas, mariachis, and a beautiful and delicious cake made by some of the Gastronomy students at UNO. Erica looked gorgeous and Jorge sang to her backed by the mariachis. Congratulations, you two!!





2. I´ll be developing this Hospitality English course over the next week and then it will start on Monday Oct. 26. It´s going to be four weeks long with 90 minute classes everyday. Each week, I´ll meet with different groups of the hotel´s staff to work on basic communication skills and pragmatics in the hospitality industry. It is a really exciting challenge and I´m looking forward to the chance to gain experience in English for Specific Purposes and to teach in an non-traditional "classroom."




3. Yesterday I had to kill a scorpion that was on my bathroom ceiling and the other night, I avoided a confrontation with a tarantula as I was leaving campus. The scorpion is not featured in the photo below, but you can imagine.....

4. After a long, arduous week, I´m going to Cancun tomorrow for a bit of R & R!

My 13th blog on October 13th

Whether or not you are superstitious, I hope you will read on! I am just writing a short update because I found out today that for my fourth English class, I will be doing something different than originally planned - I will not be teaching TOEFL; instead, I will be teaching hospitality English at a hotel here in town!
My supervisor wants me to design the course and I am really looking forward to it. I have a lot of work to do, obviously, but it will be really cool to be working with the community and getting some experience in English for Specific Purposes. And yet again, my coursework at MIIS will come in handy - for one of my elective courses, I designed an online Moodle course with two classmates in Hotel English! (Thank you, Natalie Nussli!)
Also, I will be helping the program coordinator this afternoon with some hiring decisions. We will be testing the written and oral English proficiency of a small group of applicants for a computer lab assistant position here at UNO, and I am anxious to put to use the valuable training I have had in assessment.
Well, back to work...There are projects to grade, exams to write, lessons to plan, and so much more!
Have a great day!

Doing what I came here to do...

Welcome to UNO!

The Language Department Office (in Spanish and Maya)

The office

A classroom

The main classroom building

UNO´s architecture

The campus pet: Una! She´s a sweetheart!

I told you I would talk about teaching in this blog, so it´s about time I include something about what really brought me all the way to Mexico: my job! So far, working at UNO is wonderful. I have a lot of freedom in terms of the material I cover, the way that I teach it, and how I assess the students´ learning. In other words, this university´s language department is a very comfortable place for a person like me to work! Without a doubt, I can say that the Monterey Institute prepared me well for this. I know what I believe about learning and teaching, and it is so nice to be able to put my philosophy into action.

I am presently teaching three classes (because there are still not enough people signed up for the evening TOEFL course). All of my students are in their first cuatrimestre (freshmen) at the university, and we are covering very basic English language skills. Two of the groups are studying Tourism and the other group is studying Gastronomy. In all, I have about 65 students.

For me, the biggest challenges have been logistical so far. Let´s just say I´m not a linear thinker.

I´m not very methodical. And OK, I admit it, I´m organizationally challenged. I´ve had to develop a system (and modify it as I go) to keep track of materials, lesson plans, quizzes, projects, due dates, GRADES, homework, participation, and attendance. We´re about halfway through the cuatri now, and I´ve managed to keep it together, but it´s not easy! Also challenging is that the classes are mixed level, and within each group, there is a pretty big range of proficiency. Not only that, but of the three groups, one is significantly higher, one is much lower, and one is somewhere in-between, so a lot of modifications are necessary. For my lower groups, I have to use a significant amount of Spanish, for both course content and logistical/management issues. Sometimes it´s just a matter of providing clarification on an assignment or task, other times it´s because I feel like my words are being met with blank stares. I also use Spanish to make cross-linguistic comparisons (aka contrastive analysis, for all you linguists out there), which I have found to be very helpful, particularly with the students who really like language. Of course, not all of them do, and there are occasional classroom management issues...but that is also something I am prepared for (thanks, Vitalistic!), and for those moments, often body language alone will suffice!

With beginners, I have realized, it´s important to establish some very basic rules and expectations of communication. For example, "If you don´t understand, tell me." They are finally catching on! I try to be transparent with my students a lot of the time, explaining to them about the skills I am focusing on in a particular activity, explaining to them why I have had them work together, etc.

For the most part, the students are wonderful and I hope they are learning in English class. They are coming to class on time, turning in their assignments and doing their homework, and participating in class. They are smiling and asking questions, and I take that as a sign that they are enjoying the class.

For a recent lesson on Imperatives, I had students create a Top 10 list of Classroom Rules in groups of 2 or 3, and then as a whole group, we voted and ranked our Top 10. To provide them with even more practice, I was able to RECYCLE a lesson I made at MIIS using Dear Abby letters. I had students come up with simple imperatives to give their own Dear Abby advice (yay for authentic materials!).

I´ve also assigned a first project for all of my students: a Food Journal. They have to keep track of all of the food they eat for a total of three days: what it was, how much of it, what time it was, where they ate it, who they were with, what they were doing while they ate it, and how they felt. I´ve received, graded, and handed back the first part of this project: Day 1. This is where the logistics comes in: balancing how long it takes to grade the assignments for a class, when the class meets and when their next assignment is due, and how long it will take in class to go over the information they need to know as they work on the next step (Days 2 and 3). Not to mention, keeping track of who hasn´t turned in Day 1, recording grades for everyone else, and handing back the papers. (I know, I know: "Welcome to teaching." Don´t get me wrong - I know it´s all going to get easier in time, but for those of you who think teaching is an easy, breezy lifestyle of summers, weekends, and holidays off - think again!)

Today was a particularly good day, lessons-wise. I came into work feeling ready for the weekend, but I managed to put together a pretty successful 2-hour lesson on Determiners and Articles. I did some language awareness-raising, some straight-up deductive grammar, and I read from Sandra Cisneros´book, The House On Mango Street, and had them tally the number of times they heard me say a, an, or the. I also did some individual and group work with a previous jigsaw reading on traditional Yucatecan foods in which they had to identify indefinite and definite articles as well as plural nouns.

Something I would really like to do more frequently is incorporating technology into my lessons. I find that it´s not as easy for me to do here, because I have to plan at least 24 hours ahead if I´m going to reserve a computer cable or CD player, and I also have to bring my laptop to work, which is not always feasible. But, I hope that with time and experience, it will get easier and I will improve in my abilities to look ahead and build it in more often. I´m planning a lesson with the Michael Franti song "Hello, Bonjour" for next week, so I´ll let you know how it goes.

Well, I am definitely ready for the weekend! Hard to believe that October will be half over by next week...Time is flying!