Today was our first day on the beautiful Tec de Monterrey campus, and the day was a whirlwind of introductions to staff, students, buildings, policies, and our new roles as Tec de Monterrey interns. Kristina and I were each assigned to a chemistry professor to work with, and we discovered that in our respective classes we will both be teaching a short unit on macromolecules, including proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates. We met our students today, and we start teaching tomorrow. If Tec de Monterrey will be hosting more teacher candidates in the future, I would suggest that they give the teacher candidates advance notice of the topics they’ll be teaching, as I feel very pressed for preparation time.

That being said, everyone here is extremely friendly and helpful. Multiple staff members have left us with phone numbers and the insistence that we call them if we need anything. In fact, the people of Puebla, in general, seem to be very friendly and polite. Everyone smiles and says hola or buenos dias when they pass one another – stranger or not – on the street. People always seem to be opening doors for us, and they are very patient with us as we try to express ourselves in extremely limited Spanish. For example, when we went out to try some authentic Mexican tacos (which, as you may note from the photo, are completely void of vegetables), the servers spent several minutes helping us distinguish between maiz and harina tortillas, giving us their recommendations, and warning us which sauces are picante. The professor I am working with, David, asked what the people of Vancouver are like, and when I told him how the people of Puebla have impressed me, he was thoroughly surprised to hear that we do not have the same mannerisms in Canada.

David is eager to collaborate with me and hear my ideas on teaching. He is open to all of my suggestions, and seems to trust my judgement wholeheartedly, which is both encouraging and a little surprising. After all, I am not a certified teacher yet. I was provided with PowerPoint presentations for the lessons I am teaching over the next two classes, which is somewhat helpful, but the presentations need extensive editing, as they are extremely content-heavy, have few visuals, and seem to leave no room for learning activities. To be fair, I do not know whether the professors here typically use such presentations to teach, but nevertheless I am excited to bring to Tec de Monterrey some of the pedagogical approaches I’ve learned at UBC. As a simple hook for tomorrow’s lesson on the functions of proteins, I‘ll be having the students savour a piece of bread in order to experience some enzymatic action (the breakdown of carbohydrates by amylase). Then, after going over the three main functions of proteins using some culturally relevant analogies based on my Puebla explorations from yesterday, I will have the students explore some of the effects of missing or dysfunctional proteins (for example, albinism, lactose intolerance, and sickle cell anemia). I’m interested to see how the students react to my teaching style. We shall see!