Day 8: Other Side of the Desk

Growing up, I certainly had very wonderful teachers and I certainly had very awful teachers. Happily, I've almost entirely forgotten the ones who sucked and think about the ones who shaped who I've become rather frequently: Mrs. Tinsley, Mrs. Ito, Mrs. Block, Senora Hinchey, Mr. Hardy, Mr. Morrow, Mrs. Kirschbaum, Mr. Snyder, Senora Duarte, Mr. Dysart, Mr. Blair, Mr. AND Mrs. Olsen-Dufour, Mr. Laconte, Mrs. Justis, Chad, Prof. Sweet, Prof. Purnell, Prof. Alcala-Galan, and, of course, Ernesto.

After being on the teacher's side of the desk for the past two days of school, I would like to say two things:

1) A HUGE THANK YOU to the aforementioned educators in my life who were so awesome and took a special interest in me and made me as awesome as I am today! ^_^ In a world where many are average or below average at what they do, you all certainly are in the top 5% of professionals who are amazing at what they do. I will certainly never be as dedicated as you are to being a teacher, but I will strive to influence as many as I can positively, as you influenced me, in my stint as an educator! <- whoawordysentence>_<

2) I now finally see I wasn't crazy when I would so often feel like a total waste of my time and (when there was tuition) money. Truth is, it was! I observed five classes today taught by very sweet teachers. After leaving each and every class I was faced with the glaring realization that those kids had learned absolutely nothing about English in the proceeding hour. ZERO. ZIP. NADA.

Some teachers speak in Spanish the whole time and either chat with the students IN SPANISH about English, but nothing concrete, or makes them do an exercise or two in their textbook, which honestly I even find completely confusing and often notice their pronunciation, definitions and corrections are totally and blatantly incorrect. For example, today's chapter was called "Against the odds." She asked the class what "odd" meant. They didn't know. She told them it meant either "strange" or "numbers like 1,3,5, etc." o_O Uh... so what exactly does "Against the strange" or "Against the every other number" mean? Nobody asked. But oh how I wanted to pose the question myself. ;)

My main annoyance as a student was that I knew I was not gaining the amount of knowledge I wished to gain, and that neither teacher nor student seemed at all bothered by it like I did. I remember being so upset in Italian classes in college because one day in THIRD SEMESTER Italian we were playing charades in English and drawing vocab words and writing their meaning in English when the teacher got bored of charades. I was 20. Are you serious? And yet everybody else loved that class. Clearly they didn't get we were paying a few hundred dollars to have our time wasted for us.

Maybe part of the issue is that students aren't motivated, so teachers don't feel the need to really teach anything, themselves? That's all I can come up with. I mean, if you're really interested in something, you're going to actually want to LEARN about it. Imagine sending a young adult to a bartending class and then never even pulling the liquor out of the cabinet 'cause you're too busy having an art project with the corks from wine bottles. Pretty sure they'd be pissed as hell.

And that's exactly how I felt.

So yes, my big, bad, naive plan is to find a way to make kids interested in English - even if I have to totally trick them - and then actually TEACH them something everyday. Every single day they will walk out that door with a new piece of knowledge - however small - about the English language and culture. And I want them to make a weekly journal/log as proof that they're actually learning something and not sitting there playing charades and talking about their weekend in SPANISH.

And in my pursuit of this lofty goal, I spent the whole day (including the every minute of the six hours I've been home from the school) preparing the the next 15 weeks of classes for 1-3rd graders. It's the only outline I was given, so I'm choosing to start with that one. If the other coordinators in the other levels give me their 15-week outline, I'd be happy to do the same all over again. I have written out my objective for each week, planned what the motivational factor is each week, written out a list of vocabulary words by part of speech or topic, spent more time than I'd like to admit on Pintrest looking up activities - videos, songs, dances, crafts, etc. - to pair with each week's theme, inserted an image of said activity, and come up with an 11-page, typed third rough draft plan for the semester.

I believe the primary school teacher will shit a brick when I come in tomorrow with it all printed out an bound, asking for his input.

He gave me the outline, saying last year's intern was disapointing and didn't really do anything with the kids, so he wanted to have the expectations a little clearer a little earlier this year.

Oh, you got it, mister. I'm all sorts of ready to show you what I've got. It's on.

My only real win of the day (besides buying a stuffed turtle on my way home to make learning introductions a little more fun tomorrow for the little kids...

thanks for that tip, Mrs. Tinsley! Yes, I still do remember Ringo the Raccoon, and I still remember how excited I was each morning to read the note he'd written us for the day! I always secretly hoped he actually was the one writing those notes... and I still kinda do - haha.) was convincing the English teacher to let me go first with the assignment of picking your favorite English song and presenting it to the class. After introductions today I realized how much the 16 year olds love dubstep, so Thursday I will be presenting them with my most favorite song remixed into an awesome dubstep version. That's right. They can thank me later.

And with that, it's almost already 1 am and I have to be up to do this all over again tomorrow at 7:45. Hopefully they have my schedule figured out when I get there tomorrow, so that I don't have to keep following my mentor around and wishing I could kick her out of the room and teach these teenagers some actual English.

XOXO