Culture: The fifth Skill

Blog about: TEACHING CULTURE IN THE LESSON
By Lilliana Castro
Culture: The fifth Skill
For this homework, we did not only have the opportunity to plan a lesson developing the cultural component, we also had the chance to visit another school and see other way of working, organizing and teaching, other culture into a school different than mine. The first step of the task was sharing the lessons plan in order to enrich our points of view, in order words, to give a kind of feedback, and in my case was very useful because my peer teacher Angie Zeledón mentioned that I had problems with my objectives because they were focused only in English language and the cultural aspect was not relevant enough into them so I wondered “but this has been happening during all these thirteen years working as a teacher and one classmate can synthesis all my problems in just one skimming”. Wonderful! When I visited Teacher Angie Zeledón ‘s school YURUSTI the first thing that caught my attention was that this school is surrounded by green areas, where children can play soccer, have a picnic, take a walk or stay in the outside during the break. Another aspect that was very impressive was how teachers can work in the middle of those children. They are so young about four or five years old, twenty-one students in the same classroom at the same time? But Angie told me that everybody has its own ability because she can`t imagine herself working with teenagers because they are difficult to manage. But I was wondering the same with those little kids. She (Angie) is a pre- school teacher in a private institution located in Santo Domingo in Heredia. When she was doing her activities, the song, showing the pictures, the discussion in class and the closure of the lesson, at the end one student was asking to himself: “Where does his juice could come from?” After the class this little child got curiosity about his belongings; he thought that the things that surrounded him came from different countries (or other planets he said) and were people doing things for him. When I heard that big conclusion everything got perspective for me, I know that I do not have the enough knowledge and basics of English and research skills to be taking this Master’s degree, also when you got a tenure you are so conform and the result is that you get conformist! Then you say to yourself “I do not need to pass the TOIEC test, I do not need to get involved in educating because I just teach the ABC’s”. But always human beings’ generosity appears and during this course something has changed and I am starting to believe that I do not teach English; I am an educator and I teach culture.