I have not had any of the promised training in the school's teaching approach but was told I was expected to plan our upcoming unit. I spent all of last weekend working on an exciting unit on communication, then was told, triumphantly, in a meeting on Monday it was all wrong, I couldn't teach any of it blah blah. Fortunately the headmaster stumbled on our meeting and saved me by staying and, after listening to my pitch, siding with me on the matter. The coordinator said she'd think about it but hasn't gotten back to me.
I can't say I'm winning a lot of allies either when I slap together an impromptu lesson on tenses for my students who can't seem to grasp the concept of time. In what has so far proven to be a vain attempt to help them improve verb conjugation, I downloaded a task from the internet wherein I was to read my students a story, while they looked at badly drawn pictures, and they were to identify the past tense verbs in it. I skimmed the story during my prep time but didn't have time to read the whole thing because of an "emergency" counselling matter I had to deal with.
When I got to class I began to confidently, and with great theatrics, read aloud the story of how a bird came and sat on "my" teacup then began to talk. Just as I was exclaiming with great gusto, "Oh my god!" exactly as it was written on the page, the classroom door opened and in walked the coordinator with the religion teacher. A crashing silence filled the room as they stood stunned in the doorway. I'm guessing that didn't really win me over to anyone's good books but I can't imagine I'll ever again use material in a class that I haven't fully reviewed. Lesson learned.
On Friday there was a particularly violent storm, possibly the outer edges of a typhoon that was threatening Singapore, and, at some point between fourth and fifth period my classroom floor buckled. This was both enthralling and exciting for my students. Despite my strict instructions to stay away from it, when I returned from trying and failing to find someone to come and inspect it, the students had taped cautionary signs all along the floor fault including this one:
Pregnant floor! indeed.
Of course yesterday was ASA (After School Activities) and I am in charge of, you guessed it, English Club. Unfortunately last week was Parent Teacher Conferences and the kids missed their club so we had to get reacquainted. I had just started them on a game where I put up random letters and they have to make as many words as they can from the letters when there was a knock on my door. It was the coordinator with the Mother of one of my students who didn't come last week at any of the times she said she would. She happens to own the school so I guess that's her prerogative but I had a classroom full of students from Grades 2-5.
"No problem, I supervise students you talk," the coordinator said.
But no, the owner needed a translator.
I hadn't put nearly enough letters on the board to keep the kids occupied for the length of a meeting. Just as we were finally wrapping up our meeting, in walked the father of another of my students, a student with problems, who also hadn't bothered to show last week, along with his three of his children. Oblivious to the situation, they insisted on talking to me NOW.
"Um, one second," I pantomimed a please wait and ran to the board to write a new set of letters for my club.
Ten minutes later, as the door closed behind the father and his interpreting entourage, one of the Grade 4's piped up, "Ms., there's a bad word on the board." I turned to read the letters on the board:
F, U, D, C, K, O, A, L
I guess not all of Freud's theories were wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment