Slowly Refining My Teaching

So I'm in the third week of my regular morning class, and it has been an enlightening experience.  It is so different to be the main person in charge of planning overarching lesson goals, and picking what kind of lesson we will be having what day.  If a lesson flows smoothly I get to take the credit, but conversely if things just don't work I have no one to blame but myself.

One of the main challenges I have been facing is how to review past grammar concepts or vocabulary, particularly since I was given a class that was three units behind in the textbook.  Add on to that the fact that out of approximately 25 students, only two have been there for the entire session so far.  Most days I have at least five absences, and it's rarely the same people over and over again.  This combines to a difficult situation for reviewing.  No time, and I can't count on the fact that all the students present have even learned this.  But, my attempted solution for the moment is to do the review in the beginning of class when the students are still filtering in (apparently 8 a.m. class is still impossible to get to on time, even when you leave college).  The majority of the students who arrive on time are the same ones who are pretty regular, or at least are more motivated.  And with only ten or so students there in the first half an hour - compared with about twenty in a cramped classroom - I can give them all the personal attention that they may need, even if they were absent the first time I taught a given grammar point or whatever.

So we'll see how that goes.  As I said, it's a whole new world for me, since my position with the Masuda BOE did not involve any curriculum planning, and - as I've mentioned - English in grade school is less about actual knowledge and more about being in school.  Review was unnecessary.  Language retention was pretty much unheard of.

Since I have become a teacher and moved myself to the other side of the learning process, I have found that I am slightly forgetting what it is like to be a student.  This became most apparent this summer when I was working with teenagers and I found myself getting frustrated with their behavior.  But honestly, what did I expect?  I was there myself.  Class was time to space out and occasionally pay attention if I felt the urge strike me.  Teachers can be nice, but they are the "other" and you are going to associate yourself with the other students before you get on the side of any teacher.  This at least is what I remember of being in class in high school.  I think about this often too with my study abroad experience, which is similar to some of the students at the school I work at now.  Yes, I signed up for the class, and yes, I wanted to learn Japanese.  But three hours a day was killer.  And immersion studying was bewildering.  Occasionally speaking English to the other students was a lifeline.  I am often amazed by how much these students are devoted to speaking English in class, since I know I wasn't that good about it, and dropped the Japanese speaking when I could get away with it.  Perhaps a personal flaw; can't say.

But recently the Japan-lust has been creeping back up on me, extremely intensely, and I find myself lingering sadly near Japanese grocery stores and book stores.  I dug out my old JET textbooks that I didn't have the will to study in Masuda, and I have been voraciously consuming them.  I have been happily creeping people out on the subway my muttering in Japanese to myself while I study.

Aside from just being good for my Japanese skills, I do believe that it will help me in teaching.  I have forgotten how long it takes to read a language I don't know, and I have forgotten the personal process of breaking down a long text into something manageable.  I have forgotten what kind of activities help me, at least, acquire a new word or a new grammar point.

Through karate, I've always known that when you are a teacher, you are also learning: you review the knowledge and you must feel comfortable in it in order to share it with someone else.  But I had never thought about the necessity of being a teacher and a student at the same time.  It is something I am exploring for the time being.

Anyway that's all for now.  :)