Come se dice "You have no idea what I'm saying"
Well, I have to say that I am at least alive after today. It wasn't that bad at all, except that I feel that I'm really going to reevaluate the techniques that I use in the class tomorrow. We had WAY too much time with the students without any breaks. It consisted of 2-3 hour blocks of time where I tried to guess what level of English the students were at. I found that my worst expectations were pretty much true. They don't speak that much English at all.
I was suppose to have 24 students in my class. When the students finally all enrolled, I had six students. Six is a pretty strange number for a class. I don't know if I should bring everyone into a little circle and have them look at the same book or sit in front of the classroom and write on the board. I don't now if the students knew what to do either. Commonly they have about 45 students in a classroom. Only having 5 other classmates and a gringo teacher that didn't speak Spanish probably made the situation a little strange for them as well. At one point during the class I was drawing a body on the board to go over the words; head, hands, feet, mouth, eyes, nose, etc... I looked over, and had 5 kids up from their seats drawing people along with me. Some of them are pretty good artist.
I was also determined that I wasn't going to be using any Spanish in class. Charlyn said that we shouldn't....after talking to everyone else, I don't believe that she meant it as exclusively as I took it. The students became so annoyed over the fact that I claimed I didn't know any Spanish, that my class broke down in the middle of the afternoon, and the students all came up to the front of the class and started giving me an Spanish lesson, complete with writing on the board and asking me to repeat after them. I did find that out of shear desperation, the students started opening up and speaking more English than I thought they new. Tomorrow will also have the school broken up more, allowing everyone to be able to focus a bit better.
I wish that I had a more insightful thing to say today, but I don't. It has not been an exhausting day, but it's been a tiring day that I plan to really work over in my head and try to come up with a better strategy for teaching tomorrow.
Wish me luck!
I was suppose to have 24 students in my class. When the students finally all enrolled, I had six students. Six is a pretty strange number for a class. I don't know if I should bring everyone into a little circle and have them look at the same book or sit in front of the classroom and write on the board. I don't now if the students knew what to do either. Commonly they have about 45 students in a classroom. Only having 5 other classmates and a gringo teacher that didn't speak Spanish probably made the situation a little strange for them as well. At one point during the class I was drawing a body on the board to go over the words; head, hands, feet, mouth, eyes, nose, etc... I looked over, and had 5 kids up from their seats drawing people along with me. Some of them are pretty good artist.
I was also determined that I wasn't going to be using any Spanish in class. Charlyn said that we shouldn't....after talking to everyone else, I don't believe that she meant it as exclusively as I took it. The students became so annoyed over the fact that I claimed I didn't know any Spanish, that my class broke down in the middle of the afternoon, and the students all came up to the front of the class and started giving me an Spanish lesson, complete with writing on the board and asking me to repeat after them. I did find that out of shear desperation, the students started opening up and speaking more English than I thought they new. Tomorrow will also have the school broken up more, allowing everyone to be able to focus a bit better.
I wish that I had a more insightful thing to say today, but I don't. It has not been an exhausting day, but it's been a tiring day that I plan to really work over in my head and try to come up with a better strategy for teaching tomorrow.
Wish me luck!
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I miss you!