English teachers for a week

Being a native English speaker doesn't qualify you to be an English teacher... or does it?

Our coworkers are certified in TESL and were just finishing registration for classes when they had some medical problems for which they decided to go back to the States for a while. Our team now had 2 groups of students signed up for classes to begin that next week and no teachers to teach them. So, speaking English being basically our only qualification for teaching English, we agreed to step in and teach in their absence. We had a day and a half to prepare, in which we looked over a teaching manual on TPR (total physical response- a fun and effective way of teaching a language), looked over Pam's lesson plans and began classes.

Classes actually went well, and we had more students sign up throughout the week. They seemed to be learning and enjoying themselves. After mastering commands such as "touch your nose" and "pick up the square" we moved on to "touch your right ear with your left hand" and "put your square in front of your triangle and put the circle in between." That proved a bit more difficult, but the students were excited to be able to rather quickly pick up on these more complex commands as well.

A week later, our other 'teacher' moved up her return date to the States to the following week, and it still looks like several weeks before our coworkers return. We had already spent some time praying about our long-term involvement in English classes here and felt that it wasn't something we were supposed to focus on more than just filling in on occasion. So, we, along with our leader Chris, decided to take advantage of the swine flu craze that has shut down all the schools in the entire republic of Mexico and has half the town wearing bright blue surgical masks, and cancel classes.

It was fun while it lasted, but we are a bit relieved to be done. We also hope that the classes opened some doors to some deeper relationships with some of the students. Nick is currently meeting with one of them, a chemist, to do some one-on-one English discussions with him, which we would love to see progress into talking more about the Lord.