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Today, we finally got details for some of the projects that we're going to be doing! One of the first things that we've been told about is our ESL classes that we'll be teaching. A local sales company is sending several of their employees to SENDAS to learn the basics of English. We'll be putting together an eight week course covering a pre-arranged set of English language topics. I've seen the list and it's very manageable. As you may have already been aware, before we started this trip to Costa Rica, Liz and I took courses for TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). Liz also has quite a bit of student teaching experience from college, so we're not starting out empty-handed. But all that being said, this will be our first time teaching an English class completely on our own, so it's pretty intense. Shelley has training in teaching English, so she's going to help us by going over the lesson plans that we put together with us.
After hearing about our ESL classes that we'll be leading, we found out about some of the technical things that we'll be helping out with as well. SEDAS is a central hub for classes throughout Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of South America, and several of the countries have their classes through videoconferencing. They'll have a machine on one end in, for instance, Puerto Rico, and SENDAS will connect them up to a professor in Columbia or elsewhere in the Americas. While there are teachers that work directly at the seminary, the majority of teachers work from other locations. Videoconferencing lets the seminary connect students to high quality teachers from all over the place. And one of my responsibilities that begins tomorrow is helping to test and organize the videoconferencing equipment.
Andres, my supervisor, took us over to the room where we will be teaching English. After the instructions with the videoconferencing equipment, however, that room was locked. So, I got the fun opportunity to go find the guard and asked her to please unlock the room for me so I could check some things out in there. We had a conversation on the way to the classroom, so it was good Spanish practice. I've recently made it my goal to try to have at least four substantive conversations with native Spanish speakers, in Spanish, every day. That guard was number three for today.
Lots more to discuss, but I waited until too late to start writing this, so I'll finish another time.
Fun Spanish Word of the Day, "Aula" (pronounced, owl-uh) It means "classroom" We'll be teaching English in Aula Seis. (Classroom number six)
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