9.2.10
This past week of teaching actually wasn’t so bad. I was really worried about it because these are the oldest kids I’ll have to teach – 4eme, which is somewhere around 9th grade – and I was anticipating crazy discipline problems… I didn’t sleep the night before I taught my first lesson on Tuesday. Luckily, it all worked out. A couple of highlights:
- Kept my class quiet for 2 hours – yess!! Maybe because they were older and lazier (I had more of an issue with kids falling asleep this week), but still. Score.
- Have been working on my teacher glare, and I think I have it down now. I silenced three children on Thursday just by whipping my head around and glaring at them. That’s right, punks.
- Am learning that I’m just naturally a pretty strict teacher – I demand and expect silence, and I have no problem kicking you out of class if you’re bad – but my students usually get the lesson by the end of the day. I’m hoping that’s something I can carry over to post… we’ll see.
- The past couple of weeks I’ve been working on discipline and lesson plan organization, and I’ve gotten better at those two things. This week, I’m going to continue to work on discipline and organization, but I’m going to add “energy and smiling” to the mix… Because I want to be able to motivate through both scariness and positive reinforcement.
- One of my brilliant fellow TEFLers said something like, “Model school will be awesome to have done. Not to do, but to have done.” That’s absolutely accurate, I think.
- My main motivator this week was the fact that this Saturday (tomorrow), all of TEFL gets to go to Benin’s resort town Grand Popo. We can’t wear bathing suits or shorts, but no worries – sun-and-sand fun will be had by all anyways.
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