The final day of school at Soledad was hilarious. There were classes running most of the day but they were just the final oral tests with students on what they have learnt. From early afternoon onwards the kids ruled. Children brought in there own decorations and food and drink to celebrate the end of school. Wyatt and I helped some of them string up party tape across the ceilings of one classroom while the children got the ghetto blasters going with reggaeton songs. The students for some unknown reason are allowed to start fires in the back playground and they used them to brew up a chocolate and milk concoction in giant pans. Several classes appeared to have done this and we helped with one of them. By mid afternoon the kids had the run of most of the classrooms and there were no teachers to be found.
Some of the kids and Roxanna
Cooking up a treat
Child safety at the school doesn´t really exist. Cast your eye across the back playground and it isn´t hard to see the bits of wood with nails sticking out or the pieces of concrete and the occasional piece of glass. One day several windows were smashed out due to the student’s ball games and the glass was just lying around on the ground outside the classrooms. Someone had cleaned it up by the next day though. From going to one of the other schools I know that they aren´t all as bad as this.
My time at Colegio de la Soledad has been fun and interesting. The school, as you can see from the photo´s is very poor and caters to students from less wealthy backgrounds. Classes generally start on time but have an influx of students during the first 15 minutes. I was helping to teach students from 12-17 years of age and each class would only receive an hour and a half of English lessons a week. This made it very hard to have a real impact on the kids we were with. Lessons involved teaching the kids basic things such as verbs, adjectives, as as comparisons, time etc. Sometimes half the class time would be taken up testing kids on what they should have learnt for homework. This could be quite frustrating sometimes as you knew there was little benefit you could add. The teacher I was with was called Nancy and she was really nice and very interested in expanding her English knowledge. I also worked with some trainee teachers which was fun as they were lively and gave something different to the classes. Kids really played up in classes and were allowed to walk around the classroom during lessons, chat to other students, throw things at each other and do other work in the class. I don´t however know if this is a reflection of the general school teaching culture or not. There were some good kids there though and you could tell the ones that wanted to learn and were engaged. Overall my experience at Soledad wetted my appetite for getting more involved in helping to teach. I have been more assisting than running any lessons and I would like to have another volunteer teaching experience which offered me greater responsibility to do this.
Professora Nancy
Outside of the school classes which ran from 1-6pm I decided to help out at some evening classes at The Language School. Both classes were a mix of students from the ages of 12 to 30. Percy was the teacher and he was really grateful to have us helping out. The second evening class was a lot of fun as the students were more our age and we went out with them on a few nights out in the evening. Again it was more assisting the students and helping with their pronunciation and lesson subject but you felt they really benefited from you being there.
One of the evening classes
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