The travelling teacher

Gita Krenek

In all my years of teaching, so much of what I know and teach today has been learned, adapted and incorporated from my teaching jobs around the globe. I have been faced with interesting challenges in countries around the world, and I believe that these experiences have shaped the kind of teacher I am today, and the skills that I use in the classroom everyday.

My first job was in an Austrian Middle School in 1973. I was 23 years old, and not a certified teacher. But in those days they were so short of English teachers that they would take any native speaker who had a university degree in anything (mine was in French and German, so at least I could speak the language.) I turned up at the school on the appointed day. They thrust a textbook into my hands saying, “Here you are, you start on Monday.” It turned out I was to teach three 6th classes and two 7^th – in other words, the beginners, as this was the age at which English was introduced in those days.

Well! Thrown in the deep end! Fortunately, the textbook itself was a wonderful guide. Each new unit was a dialogue – so the children got practice at speaking – and each dialogue introduced a new grammatical structure. So actually all I had to do was follow the textbook…. I also began using conversational questions and answers to practice structures, a technique which I have continued to use in later teaching.

As you can imagine, the learning on my part was huge – not just how to follow a programme of English instruction, but how to teach. These three years in Austria formed the basis of all the programmes that I’ve put together since then.

My next teaching job was 34 years later, in Ecuador. I had for a long time been longing to do some voluntary work somewhere in the world and chose (among other things) to teach English for three months in a little rural school in the Andes. The children were aged 8-12 and had never had English before. So no curriculum, no textbook, a blank slate. Other volunteers doing similar work in other schools just taught vocabulary; but after my Austrian experience I thought I could do a little more than that. So I tried out some conversational structures (“Is this a book?” “No, it is not a book, it is a pen.”) and wrote some very simple dialogues. It worked! Of course in three months the progress was not spectacular – but at least they could say a few things and talk to each other. Luckily English and Spanish are both written in Roman lettering, so I didn’t have to teach them to read a new script.

I had to do a lot of thinking for this programme. When you have no curriculum or textbook, where do you start? What do you introduce first, what must be taught before what? Ideally one thing should lead to another – but it’s not always that obvious. Gradually, a sequence of conversational structures emerged that seemed to make sense.

During this time I learned an enormous amount. In Austria I had been teaching city children who were used to a fairly formal method of education (“Here is your list of vocabulary to learn for homework.”) In Ecuador, the children came from poor families, living in straw-thatched huts – not too different from poor rural children in India. The whole approach to teaching had to be different. Homework was out of the question. The children’s approach to learning was more casual, they regarded the English lesson as a nice entertainment break from other dreary lessons. Keeping children focused was more of a challenge. I had to learn how to simplify things down for these younger and less intellectual pupils.

A few years later I found myself in India. Here, the circumstances were different again. I was to teach conversational English to 20-23 year old village girls who were doing a six-week residential life skills course. I had two groups of 12 girls each and each group was timetabled for two hours of conversation a day over the six weeks.

This programme was more of a challenge to put together. Again, no curriculum and no textbook. While it’s nice to have a completely free hand, an awful lot of thinking needs to go into how to fill in two hours of conversation a day over six weeks. Again, my Austrian experience – and now also the Ecuadorian one – helped me put some sort of sequence of conversational structures together. The little dialogues from Ecuador found a ready place. But one more thing came to my aid. I had known for some months, before leaving my home country that I would be doing this job, so was able to spend a lot of time exploring the Internet for ideas of activities to do in a classroom to add variety and interest. There are a lot of young people who spend time in countries like China, Japan and Taiwan, teaching English in after-school learning centres. When they have a good idea for a little activity, they often post it on the Internet on dedicated sites. I was able to collect a lot of great ideas for simple little games or activities, often involving no special TLMs.

And so I was able to draw on all my experiences thus far, plus my Internet research and a lot of deep creative thinking, and fill in the required teaching time. Because I taught the entire course three times with three separate batches of village girls, I was able to fine-tune the activities and throw out those that were not so successful.

My last (and current) posting was again different, and ultimately posed the biggest challenge of all. When the courses for village girls came to an end, I joined the small rural primary school run by the same NGO.

It soon became apparent to me that the English programme in class 2 was being compromised by an almost complete lack of library reading material of a sufficiently easy standard for independent reading. (In those days this was not being produced – I think the situation is a little better now). So I decided to write our own, in the standard way with one or two sentences per page and a picture to go with it. Finally, we ended up with 56 different little reading books.

Next, teachers complained that they found a huge gap between the textbook we use for class 2, and the one for class 3. The usual problems emerged: no continuity from one unit to the next, no coherence between vocabulary and structures in the text on the one hand, and the exercises on the other… in fact almost no grammar/structures practice at all. Austria to the rescue! I decided to write our own textbook for class 3 based on the Austrian model, incorporating the features that had helped me a lot: dialogues (alternating with stories), continuity between units, internal coherence within the unit, and introducing structures slowly in a logical sequence. Incorporated in the programme was also the technique of practising structures through conversation that had stood me in such good stead in Austria, in Ecuador and with the village girls. I incorporated also – in the teacher’s handbook – the games and activities that I’d used with the village girls, plus some more of my own devising. My experience in Ecuador helped me pitch the level at one suited to the kind of children we have in our school.

The book for class 3 proved very helpful, so in subsequent years books for classes 4 and 5 followed.

But another challenge presented itself: class 1, especially teaching reading. Now I was out of my depth, so took the opportunity while on holiday in my home country, to do some research with primary school teachers there. As New Zealand ranks fourth in the world for reading, I felt I was on firm ground. To cut a long story short, we now implement methodologies borrowed from several different sources and have put together a coherent package which includes letters/sounds with pictographs, sets of little reading books with Big Books, conversation, and games.

Through the diverse teaching experiences of my life till now, I learned much about what works in the classroom, and how to organize a curriculum that enhances learning and is still fun. Each experience has helped me solve the challenges of subsequent ones. Challenges and different perspectives help us grow and enrich what we can offer in the classroom.

After eight years in India, the author has finally decided to return to her home in New Zealand. She is looking forward to retirement and new challenges. She can be reached at gitakrenek@gmail.com.