TEFL Con Ticos

One of the first things our Spanish instructors taught us during training was how to say the three goals of Peace Corps in Spanish. It turned out to be a very useful skill, as we’ve been asked by just about everyone why exactly we’re here. Here they are in English, in case you’re wondering too. 1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women. 2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served. 3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans. The Costa Rican school year runs from February to December, and during an average school week Kevin and I spend 15-20 hours at our schools co-planning, co-teaching, observing, giving feedback, and practicing the English language with our teachers. Teaching community English classes, planning teacher workshops, and getting involved in other community activities fills up most of our spare time. So we’ve pretty much got goal 1...

While I’d love to say the timing of this blog was meant to coincide with the Super Bowl, it’d hardly be the truth. But for the sake of the greatest day in Fútbol Americano and the life of my buddy Jim, a football freak who by now thinks we’ve dropped off the planet, lets say we did. So where shall this Super Blog begin? Well, let’s do this in chronological order and start where we left off: the end of October when we introduced our community class to pumpkin carving and Halloween. A week later Megon and I finished our prep course for students taking the English graduation exam. We began the 10-week course with 13 students and finished with just six, but the good news is all six who dedicated themselves to the class were rewarded with a passing grade. Whoop! Whoop! Though it was a long and sometimes stressful course to teach, we were successful and created a curriculum for it, so we’ll likely do another course next August. Later that month we traveled to our training community of L...