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stormsewerIn some ways, I think I'm starting to hit my stride as a teacher. I've just gotten a feel for lesson planning and how to work a class. Last time one of the preschool teachers asked me if I had been a teacher back in the US before I came, because I seemed to handle the kids so well. That felt good. (Though, I guess I had worked as a teacher, kind of, yeah.) Today at the elementary school was parent observation day. I had quite a crowd in my classroom by the end, and all the parents were smiling. (Last year's parental observation class was a total bomb, incidentally.) I think it was a smashing success. I busted out some of my Super Secret Techniques which are guaranteed to get any elementary school class frothing at the mouth with the desire to practice speaking English. If I used them every lesson they'd stop working so well, but if you just unveil them every once in a while for special occasions they work like a Mystic Spell of Genki.
I don't know how much of this newfound wisdom would benefit me if I went back to subbing in Vegas, though. That's just a completely different situation. That was like trench warfare, and this is more like chess (or perhaps Go).
Recent victories aside, my last lesson with the high school kids made me feel like a total failure. This was their last lesson, period, actually. They've got a test on Friday, but for some reason they won't have any more classes until they graduate in early March. My goal was to set up class such that we could have a conversation about their future goals and whatnot. We even spent the whole class before laying the grammatical background. Yet still they were fiercely resistant to the idea of doing anything but writing down their answers to the questions beforehand and then reading them aloud. When I then said they had to do it without their paper they took that to mean that they should MEMORIZE their written answers. They were horrified when I informed that there would be a conversational part to their final test, and that it would involve one question they would know beforehand and one which I would make up on the spot. They insisted it was absolutely not possible. I was pretty disappointed. (I'm still going to make them do it, though.) I gave them a big long speech on the POINT of all this, these "conversation classes" they've had with me, how it's not to memorize vocabulary and learn grammar and speak perfect English but how to COMMUNICATE, how getting your message across is more important than saying it perfectly right, how you need to learn to TRY and say SOMETHING rather than to just sit there in confused silence as you try and fail to compose a grammatical masterpiece in your head. But all the speeches in the world don't change the fact that I haven't been making them practice these principles over the last eighteen months, and that this is too little too late. Part of it is that I've let Japanese attitudes on language education infiltrate me without realizing it, and part of it is that perhaps I didn't have a clearly defined philosophy on and approach to this problem for a long time. The kids have come to have great listening comprehension, and in my humble opinion I've done a superb job of teaching multiculturalism, but somehow it never occurred to me to teach them HOW TO SPEAK ENGLISH. Gah. Oh well. It's not like they're ever going to use English again after this test, anyway.
[You may notice a trend that, generally speaking, if I do a longer entry here it's because I consider it too boring and/or ranty for the other place.]
I don't know how much of this newfound wisdom would benefit me if I went back to subbing in Vegas, though. That's just a completely different situation. That was like trench warfare, and this is more like chess (or perhaps Go).
Recent victories aside, my last lesson with the high school kids made me feel like a total failure. This was their last lesson, period, actually. They've got a test on Friday, but for some reason they won't have any more classes until they graduate in early March. My goal was to set up class such that we could have a conversation about their future goals and whatnot. We even spent the whole class before laying the grammatical background. Yet still they were fiercely resistant to the idea of doing anything but writing down their answers to the questions beforehand and then reading them aloud. When I then said they had to do it without their paper they took that to mean that they should MEMORIZE their written answers. They were horrified when I informed that there would be a conversational part to their final test, and that it would involve one question they would know beforehand and one which I would make up on the spot. They insisted it was absolutely not possible. I was pretty disappointed. (I'm still going to make them do it, though.) I gave them a big long speech on the POINT of all this, these "conversation classes" they've had with me, how it's not to memorize vocabulary and learn grammar and speak perfect English but how to COMMUNICATE, how getting your message across is more important than saying it perfectly right, how you need to learn to TRY and say SOMETHING rather than to just sit there in confused silence as you try and fail to compose a grammatical masterpiece in your head. But all the speeches in the world don't change the fact that I haven't been making them practice these principles over the last eighteen months, and that this is too little too late. Part of it is that I've let Japanese attitudes on language education infiltrate me without realizing it, and part of it is that perhaps I didn't have a clearly defined philosophy on and approach to this problem for a long time. The kids have come to have great listening comprehension, and in my humble opinion I've done a superb job of teaching multiculturalism, but somehow it never occurred to me to teach them HOW TO SPEAK ENGLISH. Gah. Oh well. It's not like they're ever going to use English again after this test, anyway.
[You may notice a trend that, generally speaking, if I do a longer entry here it's because I consider it too boring and/or ranty for the other place.]
