First Week

This week was my first week teaching, and I'm still not 100% convinced I can do this. I don't think I did particularly badly, I just think other people do much better. Brianna, the other person at my site, has a very active learning style, and she doesn't particularly mind, say, doing a word bingo game with her adult learners, because she knows they will enjoy it and learn something from it. She also seems to plan her classes much better than I do; I am allowing the students to dictate the pace of the class right now, because I don't feel comfortable enough making them go over everything again. It isn't so bad right now, because a lot of the classes are just reviewing material from before the summer break, but once we get to new material, it will be a lot more important.

Oddly enough, the classes where I feel most comfortable teaching are the classes where I'm just teaching men. I don't know whether it has more to do with the people in my classes, but the men just seem a little more at ease, and I feel a little less self-conscious teaching them. I also don't feel quite as stupid doing activities to teach them. This is exactly the opposite of how I expected to feel. The class that is solely women is my least successful class so far, and the class that I think is getting the least out of my teaching. This is a somewhat dis-spiriting feeling, and I hope that it changes as we venture into new material.

Also, in every class there seems to be one person who gets it immediately, and wants to press on in the book at their pace, and then everyone else. They also will answer every question you ask, if you let them. I need to be more careful not to allow the more advanced students to take over the classes.

Well, next week my full schedule of classes start, including a couple of classes of people at the very beginning of the books. I wonder what communication will be like with them; every class so far has been very surprised that I can speak not a word of Spanish. I stupidly left my "Spanish For Dummies" book in a box in New York. I also am wishing that I had my copy of "The Joy of Cooking": so far, all my cooking has been making slight variations on Tuna Helper products. I still don't know the status of my food stamp application, although supposedly my application through AmeriCorps to have my student loans deferred has been received. I've paid my rent for October, and just bought groceries last night, so I'm golden, at least for the time being.