teaching

Having been teaching classes for almost a month now, I thought it was time to wax some philosophy on the subject.

Teaching is hard. As much as I thought teachers (and all educators) deserve high salaries before, now I believe it even more--and I don't even mean myself, I mean teachers like those who taught me in pre-school, elementary, middle, and high school, and all the teachers who teach at other levels in public, private, and other schools. Teachers who have maybe five or six classes each day, often teaching the same thing in each one, and having to grade all that homework each night (if they don't have the kids do it in class) and then making sure the kids can pass all the tests and, depending on the subject, divide by i or speak the foreign language or not blow/melt their hands off with chemicals or competently discuss what the glasses on the billboard sign mean in The Great Gatsby.

I'm teaching maybe 3-9 kids at a time; some teachers, I'm sure, teach upwards of 30. I currently teach no more than two classes a day. (That will change in about a week when Amelia leaves, I'm sure.) Some teachers teach one class for every period of the day except lunch. (And some probably don't get lunch.) Most, if not all, teachers probably have some kind of government school board breathing down their necks all the time about whether the kids are going to pass whatever standardized test is in the pipes that week.

I'm not saying my job is easy, but man, I think about my job and I realize how much more other teachers have to do.

So teaching is hard. I can't tell you if it's rewarding yet; I simply haven't done enough teaching to see if any of my efforts are proving fruitful. Granted, my CEI01 class full of 6 and 7-year-olds picks up stuff like sponges, but they also come from families who expose them to English and want them to learn it. On the other hand, some of them still add prepositions where they aren't needed, so I wonder if, as time goes on, their having more language will simply give them more grammar and vocabulary to mess up on, somehow proving I haven't taught them anything at all.

I seriously worry about not doing well by these kids, even the annoying ones who won't talk or won't stop talking, or make fun of other kids or ignore everyone. Despite the fact that they are all a bunch of monkeys, I want them to learn English. Being able to speak any second language is a valuable skill that can help you later in life. And I want them to feel like they're succeeding. I want them to feel like they can make big accomplishments when they try hard and put their minds to it. I often wish I could give each one of them a private lesson to help them in the places where they struggle, but it's not possible, so I do the best I can teaching them in many different ways to appeal to different learning preferences.

I've had a few successes, enough that I can start to feel like a legit teacher and get me through the other days where I feel like utter fail. I had what might have been the first successful CJ04 class of my life this past Saturday, and there were only two kids in it. That was nice, though; I felt like I could take the time to get to know them and talk to them and see what their strengths were.

I also felt like I did a good job today with the CEI01 class, the one with 8 kids, half of whom can't stay in their seats for more than two seconds. I feel like they respect me now, which is weird to even type. I feel like they're starting to look to me as an authority figure. I'm not Teacher Dennis (who is, I swear, a teaching genius), but I'm not "the n00b" anymore, even though that "not" is only "just."

I feel that I'm barely out of that "I'm a n00b" stage and setting foot into "I'm new" territory. It's the difference between being a nervous wreck with no sense of how to (or how I want to) run a classroom to being able to ask myself what I want to accomplish in a lesson and how I want things to go down. (I'm not saying I always accomplish that, but I'm able to ask it of myself and sometimes get answers.) I'm also learning to be a realist--because not every class is going to go how I planned it, and I'm learning to be okay with that and compensate for when things go wrong. I'm learning to do what a smart teacher is supposed to do: When the activity is failing, don't force it, just move on.

I think that's enough waxing. I'm still in the learning stage. I don't think I'll be much of a BAMF until I've got almost a year under my belt. But hey, it's a process. Some people love these stages in their lives. I don't. The learning curve stage is a necessary evil that I push myself through every time because I know eventually it'll lead to me being able to take advantage of some new skill.

And I'll see where life takes me from there.