Tuesday was our second day teaching at GASA. We got into the
swing of things with our classes and became much more comfortable teaching
English and interacting with our students. For the advanced class, teaching
went much better our second day than our first. We taught our students how to
say occupation names based on their own professions (plumber, agronomist,
accountant, and other professions students study at the school) and taught them
names of tools related to their occupations. Some students had told us on
Monday that they wanted to be able to talk about their professions in English,
so we hoped our Tuesday lessons would help them be able to do so. We played
charades with occupation words, and our students thought it was hilarious to
act out their occupations in front of the class. Each level incorporated
interactive elements in their classes. In the intermediate class, our second
day of classes enabled us to get the class to engage and participate even more
than the first, when we played ball-tossing games to help students learn occupation
words. We learned that the typical Haitian method of teaching is memorization,
so we hoped we could show our students some interactive methods of teaching as
an alternative.
Over our first week in Haiti, we met with community partners
and talked a lot about the importance of mutual cross-cultural learning between
ourselves and our students. Today was the first day we really experienced that
interaction, when we asked our students to teach us some Kreyol and share parts
of their culture with us. Our students were so excited to teach us while we
taught them, and we felt the energy and happiness of being able to learn from
each other and begin to understand each other more. We know that it is
difficult for blan and Haitians to form real relationships, but by beginning to
teach each other parts of our languages, we felt we were truly beginning to
bridge the barriers of mistrust and misunderstanding formed between us for
centuries.
-Annika & J.B.
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