random thoughts on teaching English

So I've started teaching 12 English classes a week. Now as far as I can remember, being a teacher has never been one of my aspirations. But that’s beside the point. Only one of the two elementary schools in town has an English teacher, although English is a required subject from 4th through 6th grades. So, the director of the other school asked me when I first came to town if I’d help teach English and I said sure because I had nothing else to do at the time. Actually, as I remember, he told me that I was going to teach English (he’s an awesome person, btw, don’t want to sound bitter). It’s been a rather mixed experience so far in my first 2 weeks. There are probably about 400 students in the school, and I teach each of them once a week. My largest class is 42 students (26 of whom are boys). My smallest class is at least 25, probably 30. The students are extremely affectionate, especially the girls. They don’t have English books that I’ve seen, so common practice in general is for the teacher to either write down or dictate everything for the students to copy down by hand. In my 5th grade classes the other day, I realized they didn’t know the pronouns – and these students have supposedly had a year of English. Even the 6th graders were struggling with the verb “to be.” While most of the classes are fairly well behaved, in my largest class (5th grade), the poor teacher (a young woman) has absolutely no control over her students. I’ve never heard anything resembling silence in that classroom. I struggle with planning lessons without any materials, especially since I don’t want to be just another teacher that teaches by copying and memorization. This doesn’t always work so well. I tried to do a simple little activity in a 2nd grade class the other day – find a partner and greet them in English, then switch up and do it again. They didn’t want to do it, so I offered them the option, “Look, we can either do this activity, or you can copy down what I have on the board.” They told me they’d rather copy. What?! Other students have outright refused to do anything when I ask them to. I usually just ignore them and hope they get bored of not doing anything. I also wonder how in the world I’m supposed to teach anything in only 45 minutes a week. There’s no way they’re going to remember anything from one week to the next. And of course I’m sort of uncomfortable with the whole imperialism of teaching English in general – the director introduced me to my first class by saying, “Now you need to pay attention to Teresa, because who knows how many of you will go off to the States to work.” Now, I don’t have any problem with immigrants to the States, and I understand why they go, but I’m not teaching English to encourage it. I can just imagine how much more might get accomplished in Honduras if everyone put their efforts into working here in their own country rather than into going to the States. So then the question remains, why is it exactly that I’m teaching English? And I’m left without a good answer.
But at least I'm not bored....