Teaching

ELS started me off teaching 3 Conversation classes per day.

I'm working part time for this first month. If they decided to keep me I'll be moved to full-time.
I mention this because I'm still horribly green to teaching. I feel nervous each morning before class. I worry constantly that I'm not doing well enough and that I won't be up to the job.

That being said, I am currently the only native English speaker at this ELS facility. This gives me a large advantage in teaching English. Hopefully I'll be able to use this to better effect and become a good English teacher.

Currently this facility has levels 1-6. Level 1 being an absolute beginner, on up to level 6 being fairly adept with English. Other facilities go up to level 9.

My 3 conversation classes are levels 2-4. I see a lot of variance in the levels of the students amongst each level. Of course that makes sense, however some of the students are so shy to speak it's rough.

My level 4 class has 8 students. My level 2 and 3 classes each have around 20 students. I'm trying to get each of them talk-time so I can hear them and help coach them to correct usage of language. It's a bit difficult, but I'm managing.

My nervousness isn't going away until I'm in front of the students. Once class starts, unless the class is being observed!, I feel fairly comfortable teaching the class.

If everything goes well and I am hired full time then I will have 2 more classes as well as having to cover the full gambit of subjects and ability range (1-6). Hopefully in the coming weeks and I can adjust quickly enough to rate that full-time position.

I shocked one of my Japanese students today. She told me yesterday that she is not comfortable speaking or listening to English. She doesn't feel that she understands what's said. I know a little Japanese, so I used a few Japanese words with her to help her understand and to make her feel more comfortable. I think this will help her feel more at ease and willing to speak in class.

I have a lot of students from the Middle East. Most of them are willing to speak, not all of them are good at it however. I only ask that they try and practice. What I do not like about them the most is that they tend to be a powerful force in the class. What I mean with this is that they dominate the volume of the class more and actually try to dominate me at times.

I am the teacher, you are the student, I'm in charge so you are going to have to listen to me and follow my directions. End of story (for them, not for you, you poor sucker reading this).

An example of this I shall give you.

Yesterday my 102 class I split into 4 groups and assigned them the task of finding information out about Malaysian holidays that I picked for the groups.

One of the Arabian students demanded I change his groups' holiday from Wesak to Chinese New Year. I said no. The main reason I said no is that one of this group members is from China. Of course she will know more about CNY, making things too easy. I assumed that that was the end of that when I said no.

When they groups introduced their given holidays today guess who's group was divided into 2? 2 people in their group prepared to tell everyone about Wesak and 2 people (the girl from China who did all of the work) and the Arabian guy who was too lazy to look things up on his own, instead relying on someone else to do the work for him?

I scolded him about this, advised him that when I said to cover Wesak, I meant it. If he doesn't know how to look things up online, that is not my problem, obviously others did. I asked another Arabian who DID look things up on his own, to help him with it next time. There really was no excuse for that kind of laziness.

One Korean girl, on a good note, put together a power point demonstration covering her holiday. She's very hard-working. The rest of her group, however, didn't do anything. I scolded them and made them read parts of her slide show to the rest of the class. It should not have been up to that girl by herself to look things up.

One thing about that Korean girl (I do not want to give student names in this blog) that amused me however. She copied things from the internet. She did not write her own material. She plagiarized. I don't mind that as much for this, however she didn't really UNDERSTAND what she'd plagiarized.

Bye.