I'm beginning to understand why teaching is often described as being the best and the worst job in the world. When a lesson goes well, you can be sure to walk out of the classroom happily and be bright and satisfied for the rest of the day. If a lesson goes badly, all you want to do is run out the classroom as quickly as possible with your head down and go hide under a rock. It can be difficult to predict how a lesson is going to go; a lesson plan which has worked perfectly with many classes can suddenly crash with another, and it is ALWAYS your fault if it does, not the students'.
Despite the relative success of my first lesson, teaching has not been a smooth affair. For quite some time I felt that the kids were learning absolutely nothing, which isn't a major problem - the problem is mainly when they don't seem to be having a particularly fun time either. I did a lesson on describing emotions a few weeks back, and when I asked this one girl how she felt at this particular time, she said she felt sleepy. I then asked her why, expecting that she would say beause she had to stay up doing homework or something of the sort, instead she said 'Because it is boring.' Burn!
Lessons continued like this for quite some time. Recently, however, I think they have turned around quite a bit, and I am hugely enjoying teaching. For us it truly is an extremely laid back job. We only teach nine hours a week whilst most other people teach 16, we don't have to set homework or tests, and therefore don't have anything to mark; we literally just walk into class once or twice a day, teach them whatever we want since we don't have a syllabus to follow, and walk out again. I usually do a little bit of teaching at the beginning of the lesson, and then play a game with them. Games are always best when the class is enthusiastic and really start to get competitive. Games in which you get the children to draw or put a silly hat on them are hilarious because everyone starts laughing and it's extremely difficult to stop yourself from laughing too much.
Katherine and I have a great deal of fun reading what the kids have written when we take in work. We did a quiz with them last week on how good their English was and what they would like to study in English, and some of the answers were hilarious. When asked whether they thought the past lessons had been too easy, too hard, OK or too boring, many of them simply put, 'The past lessons have been too easy/too hard/OK/too boring.' I had explained that they had to pick one. Then when asked what they would like to study in English, some of Katherine's students had put, 'I would like to study these things in English, Maths Physics.' Some simply put: 'Spoken English.' I think they were a bit confused. Many were exactly the same, obviously copied frantically from the person next to them as soon as I asked them to hand it in to me. Overall the quizzes weren't hugely helpful.
The students can come out with some quite funny stuff. I was teaching them sickness and health and I got them to create dialogs between a doctor and a patient. Most of them went something like this:
What the matter with you?
I'm not feeling well.
You have a cold.
No.
You have a fever.
No.
Do you cough a lot?
Yes.
You must take some medicine.
I don't have any money.
One boy said to another, 'I think you have H yi N yi' (H1N1) to which he protested violently, 'No, I don't, teacher, it not true.' I was trying hard not to laugh too openly. Of course, this is assuming they actually understand that they're supposed to make their own dialogs and don't just copy straight from the board.
