2nd Entry –
5-30-2012
I’ve now gone through a
week and a half of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) classes. The first week we focused a lot on techniques
and strategies for teaching English and this week is all grammar. The techniques and strategies are very different
from the way you naturally want to teach.
We don’t do any translation, we talk only in Spanish, you try to have
the students talking 60% of the time, and you don’t explain much of anything. It is a difficult idea for me to grab hold
of. I’m not sure if that’s exactly how I
would run my classes, but apparently this method has research backing it
up.
Last Thursday, just a
few days into the program, I had to do my first small vocabulary lesson where I
just draw a word out of a hat and have to teach the word. I of course wanted to just translate the word
and be done, but we are taught not to do it that way. One of the reasons for that is if we were to
teach in a country that didn’t speak Spanish.
Then on Friday I had my first “mini-lesson.” A mini-lesson is a teaching session of 20
minutes. Our first assignment was
actually a “How to….” lesson where the students were meant to practice
understanding instructions and learn some new vocabulary. My lesson was “How to make a smore.” I think it went pretty well. The students seemed to like it.
My class has been
keeping me very busy, much busier than expected. Class lasts from 9-12 then 1-4. There is also homework every night, papers
that are due, and observations we have to do.
I had really hoped for more free time to get to know Cusco and practice
Spanish. I practice Spanish at my house,
but it usually totals to less than one hour a day.
On our first day of
class, we had orientation which didn’t last too late into the afternoon, so I
took the opportunity to go to Sacsayhuaman.
Sacsayhuaman is home to some incredible ruins just outside of
Cusco. There were several other sites
along with Sacsayhuaman that I visited.
It was very impressive. You can
see the site in my pictures. There are
really massive rocks that fit together like puzzle pieces and have been stacked
together for over 500 years, which is very impressive considering there was no
mortar used and there are frequent earthquakes.
Many of the stones look like they were almost melted to fit together as
cleanly as they do. I was very impressed
by the whole site. The site is located
on a mountain that overlooks Cusco, and I luckily caught a very impressive sunset
before leaving.
I am trying to take
full advantage of my time off on the weekends though to see as much as I
can. Last weekend Dominique, a friend
I’ve made that is also in the TEFL program, and I went to Lake Titicaca which
is located in the Andes on the boarder of Peru and Boliva. Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in
the world and is also the largest lake in South America by volume. The lake has a lot of history/mystery among
ancient cultures. There are Inca myths
that all creation started from the lake.
There are also ruins submerged under the lake and another culture that
arose near the lake on both the Bolivian and Peruvian side called the Tiwanaku. The Tiwanaku have some very impressive ruins
on the Bolivian side of the lake that I really wanted to visit, but the
entrance fee for United States Citizens is $130. If I had a few days to spend in Bolivia, it
would have been worth it. Some archaeologists
think that the Tiwanaku ruins on the Bolivian side may be around 12,000 years
old which would make it one of if not the oldest civilization in the
world. We also were able to see some
ruins from the Tiwanaku culture, but they were not as impressive as I had hoped
for. While visiting Lake Titicaca, we
visited three different islands: Uros, Amantaní,
and Taquile.
The Uros Islands are
actually floating islands that are made of reeds. The local people of these islands still live
in reed houses and have little if any electricity. It was fun to visit and learn a bit about the
culture there. The language they speak
on the Uros Islands is called Aymara , luckily most all of them also spoke
Spanish as well. After that we went to
Amantani. Amantani is about 3 hours by
boat from the main costal city, Puno.
The island has 8 different communities and about 5000 people total. We spent the night on the island with a host
family. There were three Americans on
the tour, Jason from Georgia, Dominique from New York, and me from Texas, so we
all asked to be in a house together. Our
host family was great; just an older couple with 7 kids that had already moved
out. We were lucky to get a house with
some electricity. The house had mostly
mud brick walls, no bathroom, and a kitchen where they cook over an open flame using
cast iron pots and pans. On the island
there are some Tiwanaku ruins called Pachamama, mother of the land, and Pachatata, father of the land. We climbed to the top of the Pachatata. Ruins
and saw an incredible sunset. That night
we went to a traditional style dance where we dressed in the typical clothes of
the island, listened to music, and tried to do some dancing. While climbing on the island, even in the
middle of the day, there was still ice in some areas from the freeze that
happens during the night so by the time we left the dance it was really, really
cold. Our house didn’t have any heaters
so the night was a little rough, but we that’s part of it. The next day we went to the island of
Taquile. Taquile is about an hour from
Amantani, has a population of about 2500, and has 6 different communities. We did a lot of climbing on this island as
well, ate, and learned about the culture of the island. To get back down to the dock from where we
were leaving, there were 536 steps that we trekked down. The native language on both Taquile and
Amantani is Quechua which supposedly was the native language of the
Incans. Also, there are many people,
especially in and around Cusco, that still speak Quechua, for example my host
parents in Cusco know the language but usually speak Spanish. We started on the 3 hour boat ride back to
Puno, spent some time in the city, and started our approximately 7 hour long
bus ride back to Cusco. We finally
arrived in Cusco at about 4:30 am.
This weekend I am going
to the Sacred Valley which has numerous Incan Archaeological sites and after to
Machu Picchu.
The link to my pictures should be below this post.
Joe
