Biblioteca David Kitson, Costa Rica
Megan Nesbeth, 2011
The fact that I was able to have the experience of teaching English in Costa Rica as part of my college experience is singularly enough to convince me that choosing to attend Middlebury was the right choice. If you had asked me, when I graduated from high school, what I forecasted my future college career looking like I would never have expected teaching in Costa Rica to be a part of my journey, yet this experience has affected me so greatly that I am sure that it will play a large part in shaping my remaining time at Middlebury and my general outlook on life.
For a month I walked the tightrope between being a gringo (American ex-pat) and a Tico (native Costa Rican) as I lived in Nosara, a small town where everyone knew me as one of the Middlebury English teachers. In the most concise terms my responsibilities were simply to teach two English classes – one to children and one to adults each day. As simple as that sounds the preparations necessary to accomplish my duties and the stamina to carry out my plans were far from easy. Don’t get me wrong, eventually I got the hang of teaching, we all did, but as someone who has never taken a teacher’s ed course, had never had formal teaching experience before or even the desire to be a teacher this internship was a lot of work. Just teaching on the board is never enough, especially since the director of the program insists that no Spanish be spoken in the classroom. There is always something more that not should, but must be prepared. In addition to requiring hours of planning teaching is a constant performance for the duration of your class. Teaching is also a job that comes with a large amount of accountability because not only do you answer to a boss, and in our case receive constructive criticism from two mentors who would observe our classes, you are accountable to the parents who pay for their children to attend these classes and the adult learners who pay their own way, and accountable to the students who are giving you their time. All in all, it is very easy to see when a class is working or not because the students can either use what you are teaching them or they stare back at you with blank and overwhelmed expressions written on their faces.
Each morning I would wake up, have some personal time, get ready for work, review the lesson plan for my morning class with my co-teacher, Evan, and then go teach an hour and a half class to twelve high-schoolers. Due to the number of students who signed up for the Colegiales (High-schoolers) course and the group dynamic between those students we decided with our on-site mentors that it would be best to teach a larger class together than splitting the students into two smaller groups to teach smaller classes. The main challenges of teaching the Colegiales class was keeping the students engaged and having fun during what was essentially voluntary summer school and always remembering to account for the differences in cognition levels between our youngest students aged thirteen and fourteen and the oldest who was twenty-two years old. Team-teaching is wonderful because it gives you another person to lean on when you encounter difficulty explaining a concept, another person’s energy to build off of, and even just someone to keep the class moving if you need a bathroom break during the class. Yet like any form of collaborative work, team-teaching presents its own set of challenges. You have to learn how to transition seamlessly from a section that you are teaching to that which your co-teacher is teaching and vice versa. You have to learn how to respect each other’s time in terms of deciding when to plan your lessons for the next day. You have to learn how to adapt your own teaching style, which is itself constantly evolving, to work with that of your partner and you have to learn how to see what your partner is seeing so as to help each other successfully execute the activities that you propose.
For both the children’s and adults’ class we prepared a daily lesson plan for the class. In the case of the children’s class we made many posters and visual aids to teach our lessons, we prepared flashcards, bingo boards, pictures for concentration, and the materials for a variety of other activities depending on the day. For the adult class in addition to preparing my lesson plans I spent a lot of time using the resources available at the library to teach various grammar points and finding the best activities, references, and worksheets that I could to photocopy for my class. With them I made posters as well. In both classes, but more so with the kids, we played a lot of physical games to keep them moving and energized.
Whereas the children in the morning were divided by age into the class that Evan and I taught and two other classes that Kelly and Pat taught the adults were divided based on their skill level in English. As the Midd student with the least amount of Spanish I took the most advanced group of adult learners. Ironically enough the biggest challenge that I ended up facing with my adult class was their high skill level. Once you get past the point where all of your students are functionally proficient in a language each person has unique things that need to be fixed so you run into the problem of trying to teach to those specific needs and in the process forcing the other students to sit through review. Eventually I got into a rhythm where I learned how to plan multi-level activities so that all of my students could practice the same skill at the same time, but each at the level that is right for them.
Now that I am back at Middlebury I can see how far reaching the effects of my time spent in Costa Rica are on my life. My time in Costa Rica wasn’t only about teaching. It was the whole experience of living on my own in another country and taking in Costa Rica. Really this wasn’t just an internship experience, but a mini-semester abroad. New senses of confidence, self-assuredness, and calmness have all entered my life since returning from Costa Rica. For the first time in a long time I am trusting myself and doing what I want to do instead of what I think that I should want to. My month in Costa Rica will easily rank as one of the best experiences of my life for years to come. It taught me that I can live on my own, that maybe one day I will teach adults again, and that life doesn’t have to move at a New York pace at all times. Sleep has value as does waking and it is a beautiful thing to allow your body and life to once again be dictated by the rhythm of the sun.
Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship!