Survived the second weekend of teaching. 9 hours on Saturday and 7 hours on Sunday. My feet haven't hurt this much since I worked in retail.
Both the lesson preparation and the classes themselves went a bit better this week. Only two classes felt like total bombs, and one of them was me teaching the same kids 2 hours in a row, as a make up lesson, and I'd never even taught them before, so even though I tried not to be too repetetive, the materials themselves are repetetive so by halfway into the second class it was feeling like a grind. Thankful that was a one time situation, normally I'm just with each class 50-60 minutes. The other tough class is a group of teenage girls who won't talk at all (huh???). I have asked the Chinese teacher of that class to meet with me next week to brainstorm about it.
As for the "reflective method" of teaching, that is practically impossible here; after 7-9 hours in one day, it's hard to remember one class from another, let alone make notes about each one when there is barely time to get from class to class. I feel happy just to survive each 3 hour block.
Learning the names of the students is much more difficult in a culture where everyone has similar hair, skin and facial features. Here in China the students like to have English names for class, so I'm usually asked to assign names to many of the students. Often I can come up with something based on how their Chinese name sounds to my ear, but sometimes I just can't think of anything so I just pick a random name. Some of the kids have really weird names they have gotten from previous teachers or who knows where... I have one kid named "chocolate".
Chocolate? Could be worse, I guess... like bulgy actions!
ReplyDeleteI heard there was one called "sharkbait", it took the teachers a while to talk the kid out of it.
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