Teaching...

The first week and a half of school have been rather rough. It has been very difficult for me to learn the students names because some are just so very different from the kinds of names I am familiar with, plus many of the students speak very softly and it is hard for me to catch. I think they probably consider me to be a somewhat strange eccentric teacher because I am always asking "what??? Can you say that again please?" while walking up the aisle toward the speaker's desk. Overall I have been very impressed by the English of my students though. This week I am having my S2A's work with the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is tough stuff. The language in that document, like most formal declarations, is not very accessible to the reader, but they are managing pretty well.  After we've talked about it a little more, I plan to do the exercise with them in which the number of students in the class represents the population of the world and based on different statics, a certain number of students would step forward to demonstrate that. For instance if the 20 studnets in class's represented the world, then 1.5 of them would have a college education and 1.5 students would step forward to show that, or 3 of the 20 would not have acess to clean drinking water. I am guessing that they haven't done anything like it before, while is am very impressed with the quality of education here overall, my one critique so far is that the students have never been challenged to think beyond "the test," to think as people who belong both to a specific country and the world as a whole. TheN again though did my education teach me that back when I was 11 or 12? Or am I preaching from college? In my other class I was having the students do family trees, which seemed to be something new for them, and it was a lot of fun. I blew their mind when I asked the to decorate it, I think. I don't think the kids are used to directions like that. Despite a few small successes, the past week and a half has been challenging. The kids like to test me a lot because I am new, but also because they know they can get away with more when I am around simply because i don't know the culture and the rules as well. It has also been incredibly hard for me to lesson plan from scratch for each class too. I have a curriculum to follow which helps, but I put everything together on my own. On top of that, there is so much I want  to be and do as a teacher, but it is hard to implement things sometimes and to find a rhythm with each class, not to mention trying to find the balance between being a teacher and getting to know my students. All of that takes time though, and it hasn't been that long. I will post more later. That is all for now.