Teaching For Days...

Wednesday marks two weeks that Kels and I have been here in Cuenca, but it already feels like it’s been months. We are in our second week of teaching, and I must say, it is a lot more work than either of us was expecting… We are the only teachers in our room, planning our own lessons based off of a curriculum, coming up with our own activities, and grading our own assignments and student participation. It’s a great introduction to the world of teaching, but yes, it is still much more than we were expecting. As I said, earlier, I have three 101 classes during the week, which are both easy and extremely challenging at the same time. They’re easy because the grammar points are easy, but difficult because my students know very little English, so I find myself pointing in the book and making a lot of gestures. I have caved a couple of times and clarified in Spanish, but I’m trying to do that less and less. It is nice knowing Spanish though, because I can anticipate the kind of sentence structure and pronunciation errors my students will make. Teaching takes up quite a bit of our time, and I feel like we have been doing little else besides teaching and living. We have successfully gone to the American grocery store, twice, have returned to the mercado multiple times, found bread stores, notebook stores, pizza, and even yoga mats. Slowly, we are learning our surroundings and figuring out life in Cuenca. We have not, however, had time to be tourists yet. I have not taken a single picture here in Cuenca, and I hope to remediate that soon, but for now, photo posting will have to wait. Our weekends are cut short by four-hour Saturday classes as well, meaning our “free time” is limited to Saturday afternoon and evening, and Sunday afternoon (before it’s time to start planning on Sunday again). Summary: Teaching is hard, but great to learn now, and I am still happy to find myself in Ecuador. :)