Greetings! it’s been a while since I’ve updated and a lot has happened. This week i started training at my new English teacher job and so far I am both pretty impressed with the job description details and the support and training we have received. The company I am working for has several “luxuries” that have never been present in my other full-time teaching positions: training and observation, a pre-existing teaching system, and COURSEWARE! I cannot even tell you how excited I am that the most I will need to do in terms of writing new courseware is look up activity variations and fit them into the existing textbook lesson structure! All my other jobs have involved me reinventing the wheel at schools who either could not afford textbooks or were trying to revolutionize the system in some way. I think education systems in general could use a lot of revolution, but asking someone untrained in the subject matter standards, developmental targeted curricula and teaching to write a textbook from scratch is crazy. I always did my best, but it was impossible to make something work from just my brain. So I am extremely relieved that I will not have to do this for this job. I can just focus on learning the curricula and understanding in a good enough way why it is designed the way it is without having to worry about all the nuances and research about why learning certain sentence patterns in certain ways before others is what works, for example. The textbooks that they chose are also pretty well aligned with my own pedagogy, so I feel ethically comfortable with teaching out of them. This was very rarely the case with those typical math books that no one could learn from but are in every school. So not only does the curriculum already exist, but it is good enough and I can concentrate on learning from it and building my teaching style with a strong foundation. This is ultimate luxury for me! With this in mind, I think this may end up being the easiest teaching job I have ever had– even knowing it is a subject I have not taught, an age range I have not taught and in a culture I am new to. Avoiding the nightmares of designing everything will let me sleep at night.
That said, I am also excited about my particular challenges with this type of teaching. One of the main flaws in my teaching style has always been an over reliance and bias on abstract reasoning– even to the extent of completely neglecting memorization and emphasizing basic patterns. I realized in my TEFL certificate course that my early learning experiences seemed to embed me with the idea that the way to teach and evaluate learning was done best through the “curveball approach”. For instance, let’s say I am supposed to be testing students on their arithmetic with negatives skills. In writing the test, I would not simply put different equations to solve. I would make them use ‘cleverness’ on many layers, by having a variety of perspectives (like having a blank other than after the =), making a puzzle, trick questions, various instruction styles, and other complications to ‘mix it up’ somehow. On one level, I thought something like, “If they can decode what I want and then use the math skill, then they must really know it well”, but I never drilled them on the straightforward basic skills they were supposed to be learning. In my TEFL student demos, I made questions that were not only testing their English, but also their ability to psych-out the question. I was trying to make it hard for them to succeed. Another distorted thought was that it was insulting to them to just ask them to demonstrate the skill directly. I have a pretty good idea of where these weird ideas came from, and I think they have been a great deal of what has tripped up my success with reaching more students. I’m not sure if I am explaining this well, but the point is that my old approach kept the students from learning the intended subject matter and made them feel less confident, unless they happened to have brains that easily jumped through the same kinds of hoops that mine does, which is a minority of brains.
I will mainly be teaching children from as young as 3 to around 10, and then a few classes of adolescents or adults. Especially for the young kids, I am going to need to become comfortable with giving and repeating strong and simple teacher commands (“Stand up!”, “Sit down!”, “Once more!”) and the pulse-like rhythm of a consistent modeling. I also need to practice lowering the register of my sentences (“What did you do?”, “Who are they?”, “Is this a cat?”) and not trying to analyse everything constantly. This practice is wonderful. I think I am going to become even more mellow once I get good at this. Through the training, I have begun to internalize that kids really do appreciate structure, authoritative voice, consistency and constant praise. I think that I either cannot remember for back enough, or that I was always deeply self-conscious, because I expect the constant “very good”s and “well done”s to make the kids roll their eyes after a while, but they don’t. I am sort of angry about the peer pressure I have always felt to not take seriously the type of dramatics that kids need to learn. In the practice in our class, I found that even when I KNOW the language, the interruptions in an otherwise consistent pattern completely loses me and makes me feel like I screwed up somehow at the same time. I am hoping that whoever teaches me Japanese will also know this! I think that this aspect is going to be extremely difficult for me, but incredibly healing (and eventually a relief) for that self-conscious, fear of insulting people who actually need straightforward basics part of me. I just need to remember how grateful I felt for those methods in the times when a demo in Japanese was given to me!
It looks like I will be the only full-time teacher at my location, and that I will teach at the same place every day, which I consider great news. I don’t know much about my apartment yet, but I will probably move in Aug 30th or so. I have reason to believe it will not be very clean, but hopefully it has a ofuro (japanese bath tub- extra deep!) and enough floor space to practice yogo, kung fu, and kendo (if I start it).
My brain is mush now, so good night!
i get a moose?! joy!
i have been thinking about you guys a lot as the techniques and style of teaching young kids are explained! the modeling that the trainer is doing reminds me so much of how we would play when I was teaching you how to read, count, colors, shapes, dance, sing, games and all that fun stuff. I found out today that my particular location has a special kind of class for 2-3 year olds with their mothers which is basically all of that sort of play-learning that I did so naturally with you when you were a toddler. I think it is going to be extremely healing for me to reclaim my natural child-mentoring instincts without all the extra weight that was there for us back then. I know what kids need and like, I just need to give myself permission to not inhibit or complicate what needs doing. I think it will be great practice for being a mom someday, too!
it is always a cleansing and clarifying experience to recognize and then feel like you can let go of distorted methods… I know exactly what you mean about the “teaching” techniques (of course i do) and i know it will feel good to find a new way, and you are going to be a better teacher than before. Considering you were a really great teacher even when you weren’t reaching all your students, you will now be pretty damn awesome. =) I’m interested to find out what your experiences are going to be with the younger age group, that will be a good learning experience as well! I’m very happy for you, and i almost want winter to come so that i can come see you =). I miss you so much! hug hug hug! moose!