I’m sure a lot of you are interested in teaching and probably already have lots of experience. But for me I don’t have a lot of experience and this was a great learning moment for me!

Last semester I took a class that was about teaching theory, but was also a service learning class. Every week we spent one hour studying different philosophies about teaching and the next hour was spent making lesson plans for Saturday. On Saturday mornings we would go to a Brazilian church in Springfield and give Portuguese lessons to kids of the congregation (who were all heritage speakers). By far, one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome was motivating the kids. They were all wonderful kids, kind, well behaved, but they just did not want to be there. They would tell us bluntly that they did not want to be there and they did not want to do any work. As a teacher, I had no idea how to respond to that. I understood their sentiments and I felt bad for them–there I was, standing there in front of these tired 12 year olds on a Saturday morning, looking foolish with these worksheets and vocabulary lists in my hands. Of course they wouldn’t want to do them. What kid would?

This was a very good introduction for me to what we were learning in class from various excerpts of Paulo Freire. The theory of his that we were discussing revolved around power dynamics. Between teacher and student, there exists a presupposed notion that it is a one-way relationship. The teacher has knowledge which the student does not possess; therefore the student’s job is to be the grateful recipient of said knowledge. But this is a flawed system, as I’m sure many of you already knew. In order to be a truly effective teacher, there has to be a mutual exchange of knowledge between student and teacher. And in order to accomplish this, the teacher must make a concerted effort to put themselves into the student’s shoes. What I understood from Freire is that if you want to teach someone something, how can you possibly teach it to them without first putting yourself into their reality and understanding what that knowledge will mean within their context? Whatever you try to teach will be useless if it only applies to one person in one reality.

I thought about this a lot in regards to my students. How would I feel if I was a 10, 11 year old kid who went to school every weekday and Bible study every Sunday, and now I had to go sit in a classroom to learn about a language that I already speak at home (and maybe get fun of for it at school) on Saturday morning when I could be sleeping? Some of the kids had recently moved from Brazil. Is being surrounded by Portuguese speakers helping? Is this promoting some sort of community that will help me feel more comfortable in the states? And most importantly, what activities and lessons will be the most fun for me and will help me the most?

Slowly over the weeks my classmates and I learned that physical activities were the way to go. Even activities like drawing or crafts were not nearly as effective in capturing their attention as activities that got their blood pumping in the morning. And since this was not school (our goal was not necessarily to follow a set curriculum but to get them excited about speaking Portuguese), it was important that we tell them how speaking Portuguese will help them in school and in life, and to not believe any teacher or person who said that it would hurt them.

Overall I think we could have done a better job, but for the future it was an incredibly valuable lesson to learn: that it’s absolutely necessary to really make an effort to understand the situation of your student. Only then can you start to make lesson plans that will be of any help because otherwise, there is no way you will be able to teach them anything.