My director observed one class which did not go super well. It was Monday morning a few weeks ago. On Mondays there are announcements before the first bell down in the main hallway. Often the announcements go beyond the beginning of first class. I was already upstairs in my office and went to the classroom 10 min before class but it was still locked. At 9:05 the class was unlocked and we all went in. My lesson involved new vocabulary then used to fill in the blanks in a Shevchenko poem. Since I didn't have a chance to print a copy of this poem for every student, I had to put it up on the chalk board which took another 5 minutes. During this time, the director of the school walked in and planted herself in the back of the class.
The presentation of vocabulary went well, directors presence in the back of the class guaranteed perfect discipline. Then applying these words in the poem also went smoothly, with the students speaking English and understanding the context in which the words are used. And then the bell rang. Yes, time management failed.
The director afterwards told me frankly that from a pedagogical standpoint, the lesson was not effective because it did not include all 4 skills (writing, reading, listening, speaking) and it involved no visible evaluation of the students.
The most painful step came tonight when after the teachers conference, the director asked me and the teachers I work with to stay late. We did and she went over the fact that we need to have matching conspecti for each lesson and cover all 4 skills plus evaluation. Then it came out that I was much more effective with the younger students because of my emphasis on speaking and listening. Also younger students often see me as such a cool dude that I have no discipline problems and I can easily keep the whole class engaged.
I am here to focus on communication. This is more than combining the skill of listening with the skill of speaking. Communication involves interpretation of what you hear and an ability to fill an information gap with the language that is in your active vocabulary. The best way to do this is through real life simulation. Communication in real life happens in small groups, most often pairs. Thus it would seem simple to give pairs of students basic outlines, dialogs, situations or other communication tasks and have them work and practice together. However, students want to sit in class and do nothing, at least when they are in 8th grade or above. I try to make every activity relate to their personal life, something with sports, Ukrainians, cars, news, real life stuff, but even so, if I do not enforce my tasks with grades, students will not do them.
This for me as a home-schooled student is baffling. Why when you are given a chance to learn English from an American for free doing interesting and different activities rather than working straight from a 1960s book would you not take advantage of it? I went to high school just to play soccer and then realized while sitting in class waiting for soccer practice that this was a great opportunity to learn. The teachers found all these great resources, then stood up in front of us telling us how to understand it, then assigned homework which allowed us to use new information. Information combined with application created knowledge.
Next semester I will start teaching even younger students becoming even more like a living pronunciation guide. I will be lucky to keep my 8th graders and most likely work with 2nd-7th grade. I can't help but feel like a failure. I wonder if I could have done better. It is really good that my school is so strict in enforcing the planning and everything else, but it has also crimped my potential in the older forms. The students of 8th-11th grade do not have the capability to communicate in English. They can translate, and retell texts, and transcribe, but not communicate. For me to teach this skill would require going backward, and using much easier and simpler themes rather than the books they currently use. If a student cannot tell me in full sentences what they did during fall break, how on earth can they answer and ask questions about the future of the English language? Or Ukrainian's space and rocket scientists?
It's not necessarily bad. The younger students do learn by ear much faster, and generally have a much higher opinion of movement based learning and games, which are super effective. Maybe my time here will be more effective teaching younger students. I will also try to focus some frustration into my ecology club (Sixteen 6-8th graders who are doing a lesson on decomposition times and recycling tomorrow), teaching and getting good materials into the biology classes on HIV/AIDS, and hopefully getting involved in the EuroClub' tolerance project.
The EuroClub has a volunteer from Poland come every week and he took them to a 5 day camp and some other workshops in Lviv. He is a volunteer with European ???? organization and will be here for a year. He also teaches some in Lviv because he only comes out to Velyki Mosty once a week. Anyway, he has been doing great stuff with discrimination, stigma, xenophobia, racism, all focused around the theme of tolerance. Hopefully we'll become friends because his English is pretty good and he likes football.
Ahh well, I got home at 8pm and am so discouraged and frustrated that I just ate cabbage and plopped down in front of a movie. I don't want to do any thinking. I need to plan for tomorrow, so I'll probably sleep a bit less and wake up early to plan, but I don't want to do anything tonight.
That's all for now.
