How Literacy Classes Went

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, I covered the first half-hour of the adult literacy classes at the CTC. The first day, three students showed up in the first 15 mins, so I started class with them. I read the first two paragraphs of a newspaper article about how literature can introduce you to new, better worlds, and then dissected the word "mejor," and came up with other words that start with "me." One of the students was into it. She came up with words and sentences, and was excited and talkative. The other two lagged, but were able to come up with words.

Then, some other students started to arrive, and didn't know what was going on. Before long, I had 8 women, between 18 and 65 years old, most of whom were confused about what we were doing. I scrapped the alternative exercise, and returned to the workbook, but no one knew what page they were on. Good start.

Finally, the teacher walked in, and everyone cheered. She got them back on track, and handed the class over to me once again. We had 5 words, and we had come up with other words with the same beginning syllable, and make sentences with the words. They had been doing this for many days, but were confused by the directions I gave them. The teacher stepped in once again, and repeated what I said louder, gave them the first sentence to write, and they silently wrote it down. They knew how to spell the words pretty well, but swapped L/R, V/B, and LL/Y, and the teacher said not to correct them, since it would just confuse them. When they made other mistakes, she would erase the sentence, rewrite it for them, and they would copy it.

One girl, who was about 18, was 20 pages behind the rest of the class, and the teacher only paid attention to her for about 10 minutes out of the two hours. She was repeating the sentence the teacher read, and copying it in her workbook. It seemed like she knew what she was doing, and continued to work on her own.

The next day, I decided to keep to what the class was comfortable with. We all opened to the correct page, and read the words and sentences we had worked with the previous day. The teacher arrived, and stopped class while a student copied the previous lesson from another student's workbook. We couldn't go on until she finished. After she finished, everyone participated in reciting the new words for the day and copying them (I know, that's banking). Then, they came up with words that had the same beginning syllables, and they wrote them down without copying anything I wrote. Good. Then, we came up with a sentence using the words, and they wrote the sentence without copying. Great! Even for conjugated verbs, they seemed to be able to write the syllable that had that sound.

While they were writing another sentence, I turned to help the 18 year old. We started re-reading the sentences from the previous day, but she couldn't do it. I read it through once, and she repeated, just like she did with the teacher, and then copied it down in one long, unbroken word. I asked her to read the sentence, and she couldn't. I figured it was due to the lack of spaces, so I had her re-write it with spaces, word for word, and put boxes around each word, and she was able to read it!

The third day, I had my project partner and the teacher's husband to help out. We started class like normal, reviewing the previous day, and then came up with words for the new lesson. Instead of dictating a sentence for them to write, I had them each write their own sentence. They were able to do this will a little difficulty, but a few of them then went on to the next word, and wrote a new sentence by themselves. Great, they're doing it by themselves, at their own pace! Others got stuck, and started copying parts of their neighbor's sentence, even though it didn't make sense, or was for the wrong word. Soon, I couldn't get everyone on the same page, so the teacher's husband took over and dictated the sentences to copy, and I worked with the 18 year old.

We started a new lesson, and I quickly realized that she had no idea what was written down if I didn't read it to her first. I flipped to the previous lesson, and she couldn't read what she had written--not even a single word. I rewrote one of the sentences, and asked her to put a box around the word "trabajar," and she boxed in half of the first word. The entire lesson had been on the word "trabajar." She hadn't been reading, she had been reciting. She did not know the sounds for any syllables or letters or vowels. She was 140 pages into the workbook, and had been "writing" and "reading" entire sentences. All my hope drained out at that moment, and I wrote "mi, me, ma, mo, mu," and asked her to read it. "Trabajar?" I realized that she was embarrassed, and she just wanted to get out of the situation. Shit. Ok. I read the next sentence, she repeated it, and then copied it down. I felt sick.

Class ended. I went for a run.