Well, I still haven't finished my second entry, but I guess I should move on since I've missed about a week's worth of stuff already! Maintaining a blog is much more time consuming that I anticipated! And there is just always so much going on here that it is always on the bottom of my list of priorities (Sorry, guys. Guess you'll just have to come visit if you want more details!). So now I am going to try to summarize what has been going on so that we can catch up a bit. If I can remember--each day here seems like about three or four days run together! Today should be a bit slower, though. All I have to do is go to my campus at 5:00 to meet the site coordinator.
Let's see... what have I been up to since I got my room (yes, I got it! I know I haven't gotten to that part in the story yet, but I don't want to leave you hanging!)? This week we have been in orientation/ training at the main DuocUC campus in downtown Santiago. They sure are packing a lot of stuff into six hours per day--imagine trying to summarize everything that goes into getting a teaching degree into a total of 18 hours of class time. It is pretty intense. We had almost two hours just of playing games and doing activities to give us an idea of what we should do with our students. The teacher that taught that class was so energetic!! It was truly amazing! We played a bunch of language games that she uses in her classes (although usually you only do one per day, not 10 or 11 like we did!). She made us do them in Spanish (instead of English, like we will be doing in our classes), so that we could understand what our students go through. Obviously, I didn't get the full experience because I already am fairly decent at Spanish, but it was really interesting to see how the non-Spanish-speakers reacted when she announced we were going to do it in Spanish. For some, it was a look of sheer panic. She told us that most of our students feel the same way, as most of them have never really been exposed to English before.
Before I get too much into the details, I should probably tell you more about Duoc. Duoc is part of the Universidad Catolica University system, but it is more focused on careers (probably about what we would call a technical school). Here, a university degree takes 5 years, but a technical degree can take 2-4 years. There are 14 campuses for Duoc, most in Santiago, but there are also some in Valparaiso, Vina del Mar, and Concepcion. The whole system has over 70,000 students and 3,000 full-time faculty. Duoc is the only higher education program in the country that requires that 100% of its students learn English and receive a passing grade on the TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) in order to graduate. This year, they have hired about 100 native speakers to aid in reaching their goal of ensuring that each of their graduates have functional English fluency, in addition to the 350 teachers already on staff.
Unlike many higher education institutes in Chile, there is no minimum requirements for entering DuocUC (other than having graduated high school), so the abilities of the students vary greatly. About 72% of the students come from the three lowest socioeconomic classes in the country, and for over 75%, they will be the first in their family to receive a higher education degree. Many of the students will have come from public schools in Chile (very different from the U.S.; these schools usually have extremely low academic standards. While it is a national requirement that English be taught in school, public schools simply cannot afford to have one on staff. Oftentimes, whichever staff member happens to know a few sentences ends up trying to fit in a bit of English here and there during Math class or whatever other subject they happen to teach). Anyways, so most of the students have basically no English skills whatsoever.
In fact, contrary to what most of us thought coming in, the majority of our classes will be very basic. We are actually encouraged to use Spanish in the early level classes, just to get the point across! I am super nervous about starting classes on Monday, but I am so glad that my Spanish is good. I cannot imagine trying to go into this without any Spanish at all. Although I guess it would make it easier for me to relate to the students! I am actually thinking about taking another language class while I'm here, too. Apparently Portuguese is the way to go; that could be interesting!
I have to go make sure I have everything ready for my meeting this afternoon, but hopefully I will have time to write some more later!
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