Teaching Roundup 2: Thanksgiving, MLK, and Mad Men

I’m about to start my fourth week of actual teaching and my sixth week at school.  It’s been fun and stressful and feels like I’ve been running around my school for much longer.  Here’s the breakdown so far of the three pillars of my “English Assistant” existence: lessons, students, and teachers.

Lessons: My teaching duties consist of 12 hours of lessons per week, mostly working with students in small groups.  I have a lot of freedom when it comes to planning lessons, and I've found it to be fairly challenging so far.  Some of the teachers have instructed me to review a particular topic with the students, but most of them have told me to do whatever I want as long as the students are practicing their spoken English.  I was kind of daunted at first, but I’ve started coming up with more ideas (and there are a ton of helpful ESL resources online).

The past few weeks I’ve particularly enjoyed teaching lessons about MLK, Thanksgiving, and Mad Men. My first MLK class involved an impromptu American history lesson (from slavery to Civil Rights- ready, go!), but I think I pulled it off. All of last week was taken up with Thanksgiving lessons (my way to deal with not being home for the holiday is to make as many of my classes learn about it as possible). And I was thrilled to incorporate Mad Men into a class: instructed by the teacher to find work-place related video clips, I showed the pitch meeting to Lucky Strike scene from season one.

Students: The students have been the biggest surprise.  Despite my Hebrew School teaching last year and my pursuit of the TAPIF program, I do not consider myself to be a natural with kids, and before I arrived I was somewhat apprehensive about working with high schoolers all year. It helps, of course, that I’m not that far from my own adolescence, and once I got here I realized it would be no problem to relate, at least on some level, to many of the students.

I’m working with a range of students: from the school’s youngest (15) to oldest (early 20s) and from limited to advanced English ability. Though some of them would clearly prefer to not learn English at all, I’m finding that several of my classes are full of very motivated students (these are usually the ones who gleefully shout “hello!” when they see me in the halls). I particularly enjoyed when one advanced student came up to me at the end of class last week and asked me to explain what a “man crush” is.

Teachers: I am chiefly working with groups of students separately from the teachers, but I find that I still interact with the teachers quite a bit. The English teachers are a fun group—most of them are always up for chatting in the teacher’s lounge between classes, and I’ve started meeting with one of them to practice speaking French (I’ve had to become more proactive about improving my French since, amazingly, I do not speak loads of French in my day to day life).

While I’m glad that I get along well with the teachers, working here has still been a challenging adjustment. One of the reasons for this is my somewhat strange situation: while I have authority when it comes to working with students, I’m younger and have much less power than the actual teachers.  I guess this is sort of the definition of a language assistant, though, and I figure with time this semi-limbo status will feel more normal.

~ From my Thanksgiving worksheet - I tricked a few people with d) ~