Monday, August 23, 2010

First Day of Teaching: The Not-So-Graceful Plunge

8.19.2010You guys, teaching is hard.


My first day of model school was today, and I will just straight-up tell you that it did not go excellently. I started out pretty well – good entrance and intro, and the students were paying attention (even though I’m female!)– and then it slowly fell apart. Learned: when the kiddies get confused, some seriously epic distraction sets in. In my defense, the lesson I taught was really tough (I probably should have taught half of the material, then had the next person teach the other half), and I’ve learned a lot from failing so fantastically.


Tomorrow’s my next lesson (“How old are you?”), and I’m going to focus on classroom management: the goal is to keep them quiet using a blend of loud, sudden noises (slapping my hand on a desk), personal space invasion (hovering really close to a rowdy kid), and targeted humiliation. These are all tactics that have been recommended to me by current PC volunteers.


Best/most hilariously awful moment from today: for the last activity, I asked the students to write one sentence using the negative form of “to be” and one sentence with the interrogative form. It took 10 minutes for everyone to understand the instructions, and though everyone wrote stuff in their copybooks, only one kid was willing to share his work. I called on him. He stood up, and in a loud, clear voice, he read his sentence: “You are not a teacher.”




Optimistically, he got the tense right.

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