The teaching is okay. I have to say I am not giving my everything to it. I don’t have the energy given that my first 2 months here have been spent trying to restore the wreck of a house I have, and the next month was spent resigning.
And most weekends I’ve had to go somewhere which means waking up at 3am to catch the only bus out of here so I’m left feeling decidedly knackered for the next few days. Mind you, without all the resources I had in England to research lessons and to teach lessons with, it takes so much less time to plan.
I have one irritating student in S4 who keeps standing up and saying ‘I don’t think it is necessary for us to do this’. Yes it flipping is necessary you cheeky little git, you do whatever I tell you, I’m your teacher. Simon says sit down, shut the ?%$* up and do as you’re told.
Anyway, time wise it’s cool at the moment, at this placement anyway. I teach 22 50 minute lessons a week, Monday – Friday, between 8.00-1.15pm and have the afternoons spare to prepare lessons and mark. However, the afternoons are usually a daze of tiredness heightened by the midday heat so I usually spend it baking and eating cake, eating biscuits, staring at the walls, wrangling with VSO or trying to read a book.
Would be so good to teach something interesting in English to students schooled in English, rather than trying to teach boring English grammar in English to students who are schooled in French and don’t understand me. I enjoy the bit of teaching where you’re developing the students’ minds, questioning and challenging them, getting them to explore issues, getting their minds to think in new and different ways etc. I can’t do this to any great extent because their English isn’t good enough and I’m not yet a good enough teacher to compensate for that.
Trying to develop the minds of the languages and literature stream students so that they look for meaning beyond the literal meanings etc and so that they write with creativity and imagination is a hard slog. Did ‘de-stigmatise’ and impact of stigmas in society etc in a lesson today though with the science stream students and that worked, I think. Weird, sometimes you try and explain something, think you’ve failed, feel de-motivated and then the next lesson they’ll start using the word without any prompt! And then you say Alleluia and they chorus Amen.
And most weekends I’ve had to go somewhere which means waking up at 3am to catch the only bus out of here so I’m left feeling decidedly knackered for the next few days. Mind you, without all the resources I had in England to research lessons and to teach lessons with, it takes so much less time to plan.
I have one irritating student in S4 who keeps standing up and saying ‘I don’t think it is necessary for us to do this’. Yes it flipping is necessary you cheeky little git, you do whatever I tell you, I’m your teacher. Simon says sit down, shut the ?%$* up and do as you’re told.
Anyway, time wise it’s cool at the moment, at this placement anyway. I teach 22 50 minute lessons a week, Monday – Friday, between 8.00-1.15pm and have the afternoons spare to prepare lessons and mark. However, the afternoons are usually a daze of tiredness heightened by the midday heat so I usually spend it baking and eating cake, eating biscuits, staring at the walls, wrangling with VSO or trying to read a book.
Would be so good to teach something interesting in English to students schooled in English, rather than trying to teach boring English grammar in English to students who are schooled in French and don’t understand me. I enjoy the bit of teaching where you’re developing the students’ minds, questioning and challenging them, getting them to explore issues, getting their minds to think in new and different ways etc. I can’t do this to any great extent because their English isn’t good enough and I’m not yet a good enough teacher to compensate for that.
Trying to develop the minds of the languages and literature stream students so that they look for meaning beyond the literal meanings etc and so that they write with creativity and imagination is a hard slog. Did ‘de-stigmatise’ and impact of stigmas in society etc in a lesson today though with the science stream students and that worked, I think. Weird, sometimes you try and explain something, think you’ve failed, feel de-motivated and then the next lesson they’ll start using the word without any prompt! And then you say Alleluia and they chorus Amen.
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