Elev yon an klas la

I hesitate to write much yet about kids in class because it’s only been a few days, and I know that these are just first impressions. So as school progresses, I know I’ll write more when I know them better as students and as people, but here’s what I see so far.

First of all, these kids look so good in their uniforms. Tuesday morning as I came downstairs and saw them all walking around outside, I just smiled to myself. The boys where dark green pants and light yellow button up shirts, and the girls where the same shirts with green plaid skirts, white socks and black shoes. To be fair, this particular color combination would look pretty terrible on most white people, but these kids look gorgeous in it. They wear their uniforms with a certain pride and care and wouldn’t dream of sitting on the floor or getting their uniform or school shoes dirty. In a country with so much dust and puddles, it amazes me how clean people generally look.

In class on that first day, kids were excited and nervous and chatty with each other, and realized quickly that teaching here will require all of the same kid management skills that I have collected over the years teaching in the states. They want the adult in the room to be in charge, and they very much want to learn, but they’re also kids and will take any chance a teacher gives them to do the things that kids do.

I am incredibly impressed by their Spanish skills. I’m teaching the oldest kids who have had Spanish for three to six years already, and even the youngest of them are quite capable of asking basic questions, expressing simple ideas, and understanding me pretty well. I thought I’d have to review lots of basics with them, but I really don’t think I will. They know what they’re doing … on to the subjunctive! There were moments when I just had to laugh to myself at the sight of ME speaking my second language to a group of Haitian children speaking their fourth language. I’m so accustomed to the mistakes and broken accent of English speakers’ Spanish, but it will take me a while to get used to the grammatical challenges and unique accent of Kreyol speakers’ Spanish. In each class we mostly spoke Spanish, but when kids couldn’t express something clearly in Spanish, they used English, and when they didn’t know how to say it in English, they looked it up in a French dictionary first. And I threw around French and Kreyol when I could to check their understanding. The whole thing blew my mind.

I discovered quickly that my teacher personality seems to work here. A good mix of structure, insistence on listening when other people are speaking, lots of smiles and lots of jokes … by Friday I had more kids listening to each other and raising their hands to participate. But the actual stuff I do in class every day will be wildly different from what I normally do. My reliance on paper and print materials will not work here. I’ll let you know when I figure out how to deal with that.