My First Teaching Experience

This week the education volunteers began model school. Essentially, model school is a crash course in teaching that each ed. Volunteer participates in before we complete our training. Students from the community recieve three hours of English instruction per day and we get teaching experience.

After observing host country teachers for the first part of the week, I taught for the first time on Friday. I had the most advanced students and I prepared a lesson on transition word between sentences. I began the class by having the students read a text containing the five different varieties of transition words. However, it soon became evident that they had no idea what I was talking about and the lesson was much too advanced. I had to think on my feet and redesign my total lesson plan as I went. At the end of the class a few of the students understood transition words and how to use them, so I suppose it was not a total failure.

I think teaching English classes to non-English speakers is going to help me in a number of ways. My own speech will need to become much more precise and I will often have to think of different ways to convey my thoughts. Furthermore, my ability to make instant changes to my lesson plan and still have a coherent presentation tailored to my audiences understanding will be good practice for whatever field I later go into.

I will be teaching for an hour everyday for the next two weeks and after that two weeks all of the trainees will be returning to Kaedi for the final phase of our training before being sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers. My French classes have been cut in half due to model school in the morning. The class has kind of changed into a strictly conversation class, which I am more than ok with. Yesterday, we discussed our favorite rappers, the importance of mo-town in the civil rights movement, and played a french game called loup-garous. My language teacher, Ali, is a super nice guy and I look forward to visiting him in Nouakchott during the two years of service.

In general, I am really eager to begin the transition into my site community and have a better feel of what my two years of service will be like. It seems like I did not get the entire picture of Akjoujt during my site visit. I look forward to exploring the city and beginning my work.