Last week was tough. Really tough. After being on holidays for almost three months, going back to work was always going to be difficult. But I don't think that either Daniel nor I were prepared for just how hard the first week of school was going to be. By Friday afternoon lots of tears had been shed and I think we were both wondering whether we'd made a big mistake signing on for a second year.
Things began to unravel on Monday afternoon when the teaching timetable was released. Far from what had previously been discussed, the new timetable contained a lot of surprises. Daniel's schedule didn't actually look too bad. This semester he is teaching some English in all five classes, he's retained the Nature Studies classes that he loves and his PE lessons have reduced in number from 10 to 4. Awesome.
By contrast, my timetable is a complete disaster. I am not scheduled to teach any English at all. Zero. Zip. Instead, I am taking a lot of Freetime lessons, but only in the lower classes (Grades 1 and 2). Freetime is essentially a free class where you can teach whatever you like, but often you're expected to take the kids outside and let them play. So it's a bit like babysitting. I can't help but feel like all these Freetime lessons are some kind of punishment and it's really made me question my teaching ability. I thought that I did a fairly decent job last year, but now it seems like the school doesn't want me to be anywhere near the serious classes. I feel pretty embarrassed that I've been demoted so harshly.
The other problem with my timetable is that I'm spending approximately half of my lessons with the Grade 1s. These kids are very small and cute, but they are brand new to school and most of them are also brand new to learning English. Teaching them is incredibly difficult as they have such short attention spans and they don't understand much at all. And they talk allllllll the time. I just can't seem to find a way to get them to be quiet. Almost all of my lessons with them last week were a disaster. By Friday I was seriously annoyed with the whole thing and basically screamed at the kids to be quiet. It was not my finest teaching moment and I went home afterwards and cried because I just felt so overwhelmed and ashamed of my behaviour.
Fortunately, Daniel was also taking a break at home and he was able to trade some of his own Friday horror stories with me which made me feel a lot better. At least in my case I was the only one crying whereas Daniel had managed to move seven of the Grade 2s to tears by cancelling their PE lesson. He also had one of the Grade 1s burst into tears as soon as the student realised that Daniel was about to teach English. Apparently a day earlier this little kid had decided to hide under his desk during Daniel's lesson, so Daniel had playfully drummed his hands on the top of his desk to encourage him to come out. Unfortunately the little kid was terrified by this, and so when Daniel reappeared in his classroom on Friday, he became hysterical and had to leave the room.
All in all, it wasn't the greatest start to the new school year, but I'm confident that this week will be better. Yeah...
- Amanda
I find that staffing policies in mid-size organisations are so often dictated far more by politics than competence. Don't feel that you're being "punished" with these classes - more likely nobody else wanted them either, but other teachers had means to avoid them, and you got the short straw.
ReplyDeletePlay-teaching may work better with the grade 1's - use (simple) games that educate them on some words (eg, stand in a circle and throw a ball saying an english word (like 'hello (name)' or "ball" - you can build it up over the term) if they get it wrong, they have to sit down, last one standing wins candy.) to break up any more serious bits of teaching, so it keeps up with the attention span and uses up some of that energy.
Hey Sof, thanks for the advice :)
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, I used a ball in my lesson this morning with one of the Grade 1 classes and it worked really well. I then came home, read your comment and thought you were very wise!
Thanks again!