First off, thanks Rob for the recent guest series on various volunteer and development opportunities. Your experiences and incites were concise and objective, great advice to the budding idealist in Latin America. While reading your entries and others on the site lately, I have been deeply consid[...]
Posts Tagged ‘teaching’
November 29th, 2011 - 6:00 am § in Careers, Ecuador, Looking for Opportunity, Tips & Resources, Volunteer, Volunteer Spotlight
La Vida: Teaching English in Quito, Ecuador
Modern Muse
Recently I have been torn between writing about my current city, Guayaquil, or returning to my favorite Inca town in Peru, Ollantaytambo. This week I decided to return in my writing to the Sacred Valley in Peru, in order introduce my source of renewed inspiration in my teaching craft. This inspirati[...]
Conquering Sexual Education Classes
What actually constitutes a teen sexual education class in Guatemala? This is the question I asked myself last month as I sat down with a group of four other Somos Hermanos participants as we prepared for our first class. We were going to be teaching a general health and sexual education class in a [...]
Pura Vida
Unlike a lot of volunteers in Latin America, I didn’t come down here specifically to find a volunteer position. Sure, I was planning on getting involved in the community and volunteering my time wherever I ended up, but the plan was to end up with a paid job, and then figure out the rest from [...]
Small Frustrations and Big White Elephants
Here’s one: The Chilean English professors use English-Spanish dictionaries pretty often in class. Unfortunately, the ones we have are old. When you pick some of them up, they fall apart. Pages slip out onto the floor, and students frantically run to gather and scotch-tape them together. Moreover,[...]
First, Do No Harm
There are roughly three stages of classroom interaction with a new group of students. First, the honeymoon period: a few precious weeks in which your students are in love with you. After that, the testing begins – exactly how much delinquency will be tolerated? Finally, if you can stay firm and co[...]
Those Odds Are Stacked: A Bit About Puerto Aisén, Chile
“You’re from the United States? Why did you come to Puerto Aisén?” has been a common theme in my conversations for the last six months. Folks are, understandably, fairly incredulous that I’ve rejected the Land of Plenty in favor of this rather dirty and depressed town known to locals as Mue[...]
Marketing Techniques
How do you interest someone in becoming a sponsor for a child in your program? How do you make your program more interesting to this potential sponsor than the tens of hundreds of other child-sponsor programs? How do you convince someone that the needs of your kids are great enough to warrant thei[...]
