In this post I am going to give you a little tour of the school where I work! My SENA center is located in Itagüí, a bustling city/suburb to the south of Medellín. (For all intents and purposes Itagüí really is a part of Medellín – they are connected by metro and there is no space […]
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If you’ve been following my blog, you might be excused for thinking that I don’t actually work, but just spend my time in Colombia drinking coffee, relaxing on the beach, and hitting the tourist spots of Medellín. And, well, until this month you wouldn’t really be wrong! That is because I just finished up my first month of […]
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One of my main goals for my time here in Colombia is to become fluent in Spanish. Before I left home, I was at what I would call an intermediate level, and I worried a lot about how much Spanish I would actually be able to learn while working as an English teacher, and whether my goal […]
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I came to Colombia thinking that I knew how to order coffee in Spanish, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was dead wrong. I came to this realization on my first morning in Medellín, when I woke up early and decided to head out to get coffee for me and […]
Read MoreAt the Volunteers Colombia orientation in Bogotá, we were given a lesson on culture shock and how most people supposedly react to living in a new culture. It included a snazzy graph that looked something like this: While that may describe many people’s experiences long-term, having been in Colombia for six weeks now, my graph, […]
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The most daunting thing I’ve had to do since arriving in Colombia is finding somewhere to live. My program provided us with free housing for one month from our arrival, but I spent my first two-and-a-half weeks getting oriented and traveling to the coast (I know, poor me!), so I didn’t actually start my search […]
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I arrived in Medellín on Thursday, June 16, first visited the school where I’ll be teaching the following Wednesday, and during the visit learned that the next time they needed me back was nearly two weeks later on July 5th. Of course, the obvious thing to do was take a vacation. (Tough life, I know!) My […]
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After four days of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) training, today was our big test: teaching a class to real SENA students. Two days ago we were put into pairs of co-teachers and had an afternoon free in which to plan our lessons. This was a real challenge because we had very little […]
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There’s not a lot to say about the last few days, in which we’ve been hard at work studying TEFL (teaching English as a Foreign Language). Our big group was divided up into two smaller groups, and in those groups we’ve been going over all the TEFL basics, including lesson planning, classroom management, games and activities, […]
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The plan for today, our fourth day of orientation, was for all the volunteers to take a trip to the Cancillería (immigration office) to register for our cédulas (a Colombian identification document that would make us eligible to teach and use the Colombian national health insurance). We hopped on a bus in pouring rain at 6:30 am […]
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¿Qué Tal Colombia? 