To School Once Again

I'm in my second week here at the CIS (Center for InterExchange and Solidarity) language school to learn and practice Spanish in a context that will teach me about the history, culture, and current events of El Salvador. I've had 2 big break-throughs in communication this week. I have a cell phone and just a few minutes ago I connected to the wireless internet at my school so I can communicate with you guys.

And that's only the start of the story of my communication this week. This week, I have been in a Spanish class with one other student and a teacher—yep, that’s right, a class with only 2 students. As you can imagine, the small class size is really great because I have lots of time to speak in class and time to ask questions—I can’t zone in or out, though, because there is a one out of 2 chance that I will be called on to speak. The classes at CIS are taught according to Freirian techniques of popular education. I’m not very well read-up on Freire or popular education, but I will tell you what I have learned about it through experience: instead of having a teacher that lectures throughout the class, the teacher prompts discussions about an interesting subject matter in which we have to use the skill (like a grammer tense or certain vocabulary words) that we are learning. Also, a large emphasis is placed on contextual learning—in this case, the context is Salvadoran history, culture, politics, and economics and worldwide issues such as globalization and the current economic crisis. A typical 4-hour class period goes something like this: discuss the events of yesterday and today (both personal and stuff that has happened in the news), review homework (which might be a discussion about a video we watched yesterday), and read an article or narrative about a Salvadoran or global issue and discuss it. Then my teacher might introduce a grammar topic or new vocabulary and then we would discuss a subject so that we can use what we learned (for example, on the day that we reviewed past tense verb usage, we discussed the previous night’s presidential debates). Afterwards, we sometimes sing a song in Spanish or watch a video in Spanish that helps us review what we are learning, but again, involves some important issue (you might have chuckled when I said we sing songs, but next time you turn on the radio, listen to how fast some singers sing and think about how good it would be to practice understanding their words if you spoke a different language).

You might be asking “Who are the other people at CIS?” There are 6 other students of Spanish, many of whom are also teachers of English in the evening program. Spanish school is from 8 to 12 in the morning and English school is from 5 to 7:30 in the evening. Many of the other Spanish students are also from the U.S., but there are also students from Canada and Germany. There are many English students in the evening classes, many (but not all) of whom are 20-something and attend one of the universities in San Salvador. If you were to be around the CIS building during the days, you might also run into some other non-Salvadorans who recently arrived to begin preparing for “observing” the Salvadoran elections in January and March. Past elections in El Salvador have involved a lot of fraud, so non-governmental organizations like CIS have recruited international volunteers to observe the elections to increase their fairness. Learning about elections and transfers of power in this country make me grateful for the ease with which elected officials take and leave office in the the U.S. The elections in January and March are equally as important in El Salvador as the elections next month in the U.S.