Miscommunication

Today has been a day of a lot of miscommunication…I took the school bus and arrived to the instituto on time so that was fine. However, when I got to the school, my counterpart and I went to the classroom that he was supposed to be teaching, but he realized there was an error with his schedule (the one he copied from the master copy). So, he left the classroom and told to talk to the students for awhile. Hmmm. So, I introduced myself and asked them a couple of questions and told them they could chat amongst themselves. Several students came in and asked me if they could take some chairs for their classroom so I said yes since we had extras and then there was a flood of students coming in and taking chairs and our students were saying they couldn’t take them all because we were missing some students…All of this and my counterpart was nowhere to be found. I stood outside the classroom for a couple of minutes to watch for my counterpart and to prohibit other chair stealers from entering. Another teacher walked up and asked if I was teaching the class and I told her I was with my counterpart. Then, another lady (I think the secretary) came over and said there was an error with the schedule and that this teacher was teaching this class and my counterpart had another section. She looked it up on her schedule and showed me where his real classroom was. Oh, and guess what? My counterpart was there sitting in his desk. Apparently he thought I would figure it out on my own that he wasn’t coming back to tell me where he was. Nice.

Well, once I got into that class, they did the national anthem and then he left and told me to talk to the students while he was gone. Ok, why was he leaving this time? He came back a few minutes later with another chair so I could have a desk and he could have a chair. He got started by writing the verb “to be” on the board with all of the conjugations (I am, you are…) and told the class to copy it. I was a little upset because he had told me that he wasn’t really going to teach anything, but now he started into a lesson that we could have planned together and developed better. He had the students copying and repeating things after him. He wasted so much class time going around and checking EACH student’s notebook to see if they had copied everything and there were probably 40 students. I gave him suggestions while the students were copying and he just dismissed these and continued on with what he was doing. This made me very upset because he wanted me to be there in class, but didn’t involve me in any of the process. I tried talking to him at the end of the class to explain what my suggestions were in case he didn’t understand them during class, but he was in a hurry to get off to the next class so he wasn’t really listening and therefore I don’t think he understood me either. Ugh! This was very frustrating!

I already arranged a time to meet and plan with both of my counterparts tomorrow afternoon for the next week, so hopefully we can get things straightened out. I’m just afraid that this counterpart in particular won’t listen to my ideas and let me participate in the planning and teaching process. Vamos a ver (we’ll see).

There was something good I wanted to share though…last night I had dinner with the visiting doctors and they told me more about what they are doing here. They are performing surgeries for women to be sterilized. Apparently it’s what a lot of women want here, but are unable to afford the surgery and/or travel. They are also teaching the doctors here the new method of performing this surgery in a safer way. It’s interesting. They were very nice people and they treated Veronica and me to dinner :) They asked me about other restaurants in town and I told them about my favorite—pupusas. It’s Salvadorian, but they have Nica food too. So, we have plans for dinner tonight too. It should be fun! I got to do some translating for them last night which was fun and they said they’ll be coming back in September and could use some more translators. I’m excited!