Why teaching is hard...

October 19, 2009
Today marks the first day of my second week of teaching and I’m beat. These kids, I love them all, but they take a lot out of me. I’m reminded often of my own days in high school, and while I look back at my teachers and classes fondly, I can’t stop feeling sorry for all of the times my classes, and I admittedly, misbehaved. I apologize for the poor sentence structure in that last sentence; while I could change it, I’m not going to.

Really though, I am beginning to have such a deep respect for the way my high school teachers commanded our respect, and guided our interest in the direction of their lesson. What skill and what prowess they all demonstrated! This is a time tested skill that I know I can’t acquire after just a week or even just a year of teaching.

I say all of this because my after school 10th grade English club was taxing today. The lesson was their second as a club, and I was focusing on talking about habitual actions. I chose this topic for two reasons: because it uses only the simple present tense, something they’re comfortable with, and because the habitual actions they participate in every day are actions they will need to know how to express in their foreign language. I remember often writing, “Cada dia yo como almuerzo.” When recounting our days, we usually mention eating, because we do this every day.

Before I go on, it just occurred to me that maybe some of you don’t know what my circumstances are. For those of you that don’t know, I am in Indonesia this year on a Fulbright as an English Teaching Assistant. I am at MAN Limboto teaching an English class a week to all of the 10th graders and all of the 11th graders. These classes are all taught once during the week by their regular English teacher, and once by me. So as you see, they have English class only twice a week, but these class periods are 45 minutes long, and the periods are always taught in blocks. This means that I teach one class for 90 minutes at a time. This is very long, and I really struggle to keep them interested during the entire class. In addition to teaching the 10th and 11th graders, I teach all of the 10th graders in an English club on Mondays, all of the teachers in an English club on Wednesdays and all of the 11th graders after school on Thursdays. These clubs last for two hours after school and are taught solely by moi. And just so you can imagine it, that’s 80 10th graders with me in one hot room for two hours after school on Mondays and 112 11th graders after school on Thursdays.

Now that you have a better idea of what I do, I can tell you a little bit more about my experiences today with the 10th grade English club. I felt that I did a pretty good job introducing my first activity, leading into it for about 20 minutes. They brainstormed most of the words they were about to be using, and the sentences they would be saying most frequently I modeled for them beforehand. They loved the activity I had them do where they act out the habitual actions of someone in a particular profession and their group members ask them yes or no questions until they can clearly guess what kind of profession they’re acting out. So each person chooses a card that has a profession printed on it, and then they act out actions that that person might do every day, while their group members ask them questions like, “Do you work outside?” or , “Do you work for the state?”

I must give credit where credit is due and tell you that I got the idea for this activity from the book Grammar Practice Activities by Penny Ur – a very useful book.

I then transferred the focus to them; what kinds of habitual activities do they do? Well, we brainstormed for a while about what we do every day, what we do once a month and then what we do once a year. The brainstorming went well, and they understood what to do when I asked them to make three lists of their own of what they do every day, once a month and once a year. I gave them 20 minutes to come up with their own individual lists, and then I put them in groups of 10 to share what they wrote with everyone in their group. The catch here was that, if someone read aloud a habitual activity that you also had on your list, then you must both cross it out. In this way, at the end of the activity each student in the group is left with a list of habitual activities that are unique to them.

I had lots of problems during this second activity. After counting them off into groups of 10, I found that my 8 groups were very uneven. Being a math major, I knew I myself had not counted them off wrong. But somehow my group 2 had morphed into containing some 17 members, when I knew at most it should have 11. Where had these extra 6 or so members come from, and why were groups 6 and 3 so small? Had these students all forgotten their numbers, and just joined group 2, or had they wanted to be in the group with their friends? Moreover why was this discrepancy in group size bothering me so very much? I was getting very flustered before they even began sharing their lists with one another, because I could not stand how uneven these groups had turned out, and more importantly why my system had failed.

I earnestly asked the members of what I thought to be the large group 2 to raise their hands, but to no avail. I asked and asked and asked them to raise their hands so that I could determine just how many more people I needed to move out of group two, but I never really got them all to raise their hands. I think this may be because some of them knew they were not actually members of group 2. But I’m getting a little bogged down in the details here.

So yes, grouping was a problem, and so was reading aloud. So many of the students simply allowed others in their group to view their lists, and subsequently cross things out, instead of reading their lists aloud to each other in English. That was the third struggle: getting the students to use English when I wasn’t listening. This is perhaps my biggest challenge. I don’t know how to encourage them to speak English when I’m not listening. I almost resorted to begging. Almost.

The last problem, and by far the most upsetting is the students lack of respect for me, but more importantly, for their fellow students.

I have been to high school. I know that many times we do not respect our classmates, but this is more brazen than I have ever seen. The students continually have side conversations that almost always drown out any student that is speaking out loud in the class. That means when their fellow classmates brave speaking out loud in their foreign language, in front of everyone (something I shudder at doing myself), they laugh and talk in Bahasa Indonesia and don’t bother listening to a word being said. It really upsets me to see. I got very upset today when they would not listen to me, they never stopped talking, and when their classmate stood up to speak many continued on as if no one was standing and talking to all of them.

And do you know what really discourages me, making me think I will never change their habit? The student who stood and spoke to the class, clearly did not expect them to ever stop talking and listen to him. When I told him to wait with me as I waited for complete silence, he continued speaking long before total silence was ever reached, because even he saw this as a unachievable goal.

Please, for those of you that are reading this blog – what should I do? How can I make them want to respect each other? Can this be instilled this late in the game?

If you are a teacher, maybe you have dealt with this. What can I do?

I did end the class by giving them a quick talk about how I wanted them to respect each other and me when we’re speaking. I made sure to define respect, and I think they understood what it meant. They clearly sensed that I was upset, but while I was disciplining them, they were still talking amongst themselves and having side-conversations. I felt so discouraged after this lesson.

Well, a little time has passed and I’m feeling a little more hopeful, but I think this will be a challenging problem to face.