parasitegirl | good teaching week (Reply)

Sweaty hot today, still. One of the teachers tried to tell me that it was 120degrees…but I suspect his calculations were wrong. It’s simply in the 80’s with high humidity.

Tomorrow is my last school teaching day of the semester. I’ll be doing the Ninja game with 6th graders and then a special class with the special needs students. I’ve made a hybrid of a few lesson plans for the special needs group but it will all be around color and will culminate in us mixing two colors with our bare hands and making a class hand print flag of our original colors. I miss doing special needs classes.

In other schools occasionally the special needs kids come in with their assistants and join the regular students when it comes to English Communication classes…but that can be embarrassing because those special needs kids kick more English ass than the regular students: they’re not embarrassed about answering, they enjoy simple memorization tasks and grouping words, and they are probably more in touch with “learning to watch for clues as to what to do when you don’t understand” than the average kid…and have probably been better drilled in how to deal with the frustration of not understanding.

I realize that much of what I do is teach students how to cope with frustration. I usually have to talk to teacher before class and say “Yes, the first time they get into groups and have to answer this questions they will be very confused, but you need to let them be confused because after they try…and they see my reaction… they will fully understand what is needed of them and will be able to do the task and will be better able to deal with the stress of answering while not being 100% sure in future English classes.”

This week’s school has been great on many fronts. For two years they’ve been scheduling me with and without support staff. When the support staff isn’t here the homeroom teachers have to participate more in English class and communicate with me more. This is a deliberate choice the school has made. They want their homeroom teachers more involved and less afraid. Also, this week, there has been almost no classes without other teachers from different grades dropping in to observe. They want to see the different lessons and how their peers are coping..and they are talking to each other (and to me) about what they’ve seen. This came from the principal and the teacher in charge of English.

The main lesson for today has been 5^th graders on the theme of “our school.” As you know, I abhore using textbook lessons finding/navigating rooms in imaginary schools no one gives a shit about. When I arrived here on Monday I got a copy of the school map…and whited-out most of the rooms. Tuesday, I took pictures of many of the rooms: a general picture, a close up picture of an item in the room and a pulled-back shot of that item in the room.

Weds, I checked to make sure we could hook up the computers to the large classroom tvs..and organized my photos on my USB stick.

Today’s class:

Using the general photos of their school we started identifying the rooms and got a general familiarity of what they are called in English. I always ask students to brainstorm before I give them the perfect answer…so after a while the English gets creative. The best guess for Principal’s Room was “King Teacher Room!” and The Home Ec room became Cooking Machine Room (combining cooking with sewing machine…)..the most sarcastic guess for Pool (same in English and Japanese) was “WATER ROOM!”

They see a closeup (in this case a close-up of the swing seats in the play ground) and they guess and I draw back..Then, understanding the quiz format (pictures of close-ups in the school) we break them into groups, give them the whited-out maps and scraps of paper. They are asked to get permanent markers and colored pencils.

I explain that they will write the answer on the sheets, in permanent markers and that Japanese kanji will be allowed (as I will constant call things by the English words regardless of what they write)…they look at the next picture and we all wander around helping re-explain in easy English, or asking if they are finished/ok/what not. Then a countdown to quiet. Once they are quiet, I ask them to hold the sheets up.

“Group 1 thinks…Nurses room, group two, NURSES ROOM…” then I show the answer, give them points, and inform them they now must find the nurses room and color it red on the map.

It’s a really easy class where there’s a ton of basic “are you ready?” “Need hints?””Ok?” sort of questions and constant English use by me and the teachers…and the questions are hard but the way to respond easy enough that the students are all engaged in the task. Students in really good classes can be prompted to tell me their answers and can vote if they want the next questions to be easy or hard and with or without hints. Teachers love it because they can walk around using very very very easy English. “Where?” “What room?” “Write.” “Red. Nurses room red.”

We end with tallying the points, checking the maps, and adding up the question points and the map points.

The teachers today are very happy…and the principal dropped by my desk to ask what photo I used for his room because he didn’t have time to stay for the whole lesson.