Today was my first day teaching English without any Portuguese speaking help- at Somando, the class specific to people who work at restaurants and hotels. I'm sure you could imagine how difficult it must be for me to lead a Portuguese speaking class for 2 and a half hours.
I gave them a test today because I was concerned that they weren't actually learning the words, and rather, just attempting to repeat words that I say and maybe read out loud from their packet. So, during the last class, I told them to prepare for a test on the topics "Food and Kitchen".. I made a word bank with 30 English words and then listed the words below in Portuguese. They were instructed to choose the correct English word and write it in the space next to the Portuguese words. I kept it fairly simple with words like "fish," "shrimp," "dinner," "spoon," and so on. The test took them about 45 minutes and they kind of worked on it as a team (I guess they don't know what "cheating" means in Brazil.) When they finished, I corrected the tests while they worked on a dialogue that I wrote on the board for them. It only took me a few minutes to finish correcting the tests, so after they took turns presenting the dialogue, I reviewed the test with them. Most students got 26 or 27 correct, out of 30. Not bad at all (actually, better than I expected).. but one thing really disturbed me. I wrote at the heading of the test, as well as on the white board "Test: Comida e Cozinha" then, under it, I translated it to "Food and Kitchen." I figured that I would give them a freebie by translating it for them. One of the words that they had to translate on the test was "comida" (food) which every single student got wrong. Most people translated "comida" to mean "Plate." I couldn't quite figure that one out, but other than that, it was a pretty good day. I spent the rest of the class doing dialogues with them, and then when I ran out of ideas for the last 15 minutes, I asked them what they did over the weekend (the most common answer among them involved "drinking"), then I asked them what they wanted to do during the next class to which they all replied- "Bingo!" I told them that I would bring Bingo, but under two conditions: (1) we cannot play Bingo for the entire 2.5 hour class time, (2) they have to bring chocolates.
Tomorrow- back to Baixa d'Alegria! I assigned them homework during the last class to bring in family photos and describe their family members. I hope that some of them actually do it... in case they don't, I have a lesson plan on Weather ready as backup. Wish me luck!
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