Teaching...

Lately I have really been loving teaching. Many of us came into the education program in S.A. with little or no teaching experience, and I am still a firm believer that Peace Corps is a great opportunity to discover the teaching profession with limited experience. During my teaching English internship in France while I was studying abroad, I began to find that I just really really enjoyed planning lessons and being in a classroom. I was definitely still skeptical of doing it as a full-time career, hence why PC has been a great way for me to entertain this idea without committing long-term.

This came to mind today because of the particularly successful lessons in my English class I have had this week. On Monday I decided to give them a listening and reading comprehension exercise from their book on Nelson Mandela’s famous speech from when he was released from prison in 1990. It was a pretty difficult passage and I was worried it would be too advanced for the class (especially with a few learners who are still at the phase of sounding out their words in Setswana). It actually turned out great and the class ended up enjoying it a lot! I decided to stick with this for the rest of the week and do a similar exercise with MLK’s “I have a Dream” speech. It was nice to show them the parallel between the histories of South Africa and the US, and they were all really surprised to hear that A) black people live in America too (they consider Obama to be “coloured” and not black) and B) that we had a similar history of oppression and revolution.

One thing that’s really fun about teaching ESL is that you can incorporate a lot of other subjects into lessons depending on what you’re teaching. My lessons this week included new vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension, history of SA and the US, human rights, as well as a little geography (MLK’s speech references a lot of the southern states). Fun stuff!

One of the downsides of becoming more sure of teaching as a career for me is the recent increase in thinking about my post-PC future and making plans – and if you haven’t noticed already, I’m kind of an over-planner. With this has also come a recent re-obsession with French. I have been reading as many French books as I can (thanks to my fam for sending some!) and reading French news from lemonde.fr. I know, I’m a huge nerd… feel free to mock me as much as you want! I just can’t help it! Being in a country where I only really understand 1 (and a half, if you count my limited understanding of Setswana) of the 11 languages spoken makes me miss living in France, where I am continually challenged but can understand and communicate quite well. I guess I probably should have fought harder to be placed in Francophone Africa… but there’s no use in pondering the “what if” scenarios… SA is pretty cool too. I am really excited at the prospect of teaching French when I return though, even if it is a ways away… it’s nice to feel like I’ll have some direction after all this.

On a side note, I am going to Kuruman this weekend for a Peace Corps Cinco de Mayo party that will probably rock my whole world, and from there going to Pretoria for yet another week. This time it is for GTOT (General training of trainers), where a group of us will plan sessions for the incoming group of education volunteers who arrive July 15! Crazy to think that soon enough we will have been here for a year and meeting the new group of volunteers!

*** Speaking of which, any new PCVs headed to South Africa this summer... feel free to leave a comment! I know I was fairly fixated on reading peace corps blogs before I came to help with my packing, so i understand…