NicaTESOL

This last week we went to Managua for a conference of all English teachers in Nicaragua! And the best part, the conference was all in English, so I understood exactly what was going on. It was amazing. Anyways, it was 2 days of presentations by English teachers and professors from the Universities. Some were...better than others. There were over 800 teachers that came to the conferene and it was really well organized. Each day included 1 or 2 all group sessions, and 3 concurrent sessions. The conference ended with, what else, some typical dances, oh and a reggaeton dance as well, which always makes me blush and turn away. (there is a lot of thrusting)

My counterpart and I presented at the conference on, what else, English games! I think I will stick to always teaching about games because its easy and fun! We presented once each day, and it went well....until in the 2nd presentation I was showing how to play Tic-Tac-Toe as a review game with English. One of the participants, who had been participating a lot, screamed and I mean SCREAMED (okay maybe she didn´t scream, but it felt that way to me) that those WERE NOT the rules to the game and that I was being UNFAIR. It totally threw off the rest of my presentation. I calmly explained that those were my rules and she did not have to use them. And she probably won´t use them. Fine. Anyways, here are some pictures, but my camera is totally sensitive to light and doesn´t work well anymore. But here ya go.

Here is a picture of me and my 2 counterparts. Frank, Henry, me.

Here is Henry giving an example of Memory which we use in our class to teach vocabulary. I swear this picture is not posed.
Henry and I before we presented.After the conference on Friday evening, we had a going away party for our boss Deepa. She is married to a guy who works for the embassy so they are moving to Africa for his next assignment. Our TEFL group is really a bunch of nerds, us included, so we put on an Acto which is what all schools do for each holiday. It always starts with the national anthem, check, sometimes a poem, we had that too, a reggaeton dance, yep we had that!
and we included some skits for enjoyment. It was fun. Here is our entire, minus one, TEFL group with Deepa and the Nicaraguan flag that we signed.