Life at school

This week we have our midterm, so we reviewed by playing a game of Jeopardy where all the questions are things they were supposed to learn in the past two chapters (hahaha). It was kind of good because the kids are really competitive, so they tend to get pretty involved in any kind of activity that pits them against each other. What I didn't anticipate is the pressure that playing team Jeopardy entails...one player from each team comes up for each different question, but because the team as a whole loses points for a wrong answer, the rest of the team can be kind of hard on the kid who gets something wrong. I hadn't thought much of this, and in most classes this didn't turn out to be a huge deal, but in one class I had a little boy who couldn't take the pressure. He was sure that he wouldn't know the answer, so when his turn was about to come, he put his head down on the desk and just sobbed quietly. Of course the other kids, with the sensitivity of 11-year-olds, were all like "TEACHER HE'S CRYING" and crowded around him. I made them leave him alone, and tried to comfort him a little bit myself, but since he barely knows any English, there wasn't much I could say to him to help. I ended up dispatching Patty to take him outside and talk to him a little bit to make him feel better, while I got back up front and kept the game rolling to take the other students' attention away from the problem.

My heart just breaks in a situation like that, for one because it's my fault for giving them such a high-pressure game, but also because I have something like 280 fifth graders that I teach, and it's so hard to give them all the help they need. Many of my more privileged kids have parents that pay for them to go to buxiban ("cram school") after school, where they take supplemental classes to stay ahead of their classmates. However, for the kids who don't have this opportunity, school can be a constant struggle. When they're having trouble with material that their peers have already mastered outside of school, they experience a great loss of confidence, and sometimes start feeling like it's useless for them to even try to catch up. In every class I have some kids like this, but in a class of 36 kids, it's hard to notice and give individual attention to them on a daily basis. When we grade classwork and quizzes, though, it's impossible to ignore the fact that some of the students haven't even tried to answer a lot of the questions. Patty and I have been working on identifying the kids who need the most help, and trying to figure out a way to give it to them.

On Tuesday, I have an open slot last period, which I usually use to talk about lesson plans and random stuff with Patty. This Tuesday, we had a small group of students come in during that period to retake their lesson 2 quiz, which they had all bombed. As they were about to leave, I asked Patty if they had this period free or not. She informed me that they had a sort of flexible class for the last period, so I asked if I could keep them to do some review. When she proposed this to the kids, they all opted to stay and work with me. At first I was just trying to chat with them a little bit, but because they didn't really know what I was saying or how to talk to me, it ended up turning into a full-fledged vocabulary and grammar lesson on the words we were supposed to learn in the past chapter. I had to break out some of my Chinese in order to communicate with them effectively, but they took it in stride, and we actually started getting somewhere. Having only seven kids meant none of them could slip under my radar, and everybody had to talk. Producing their own sentences of spoken English seemed like a foreign concept to them, but by the end some of them were getting really into it. At the end of the period, I asked my quiet-as-a-mouse student Jason how he felt, and he told me, "I feel happy!" I was totally jazzed. I still have lots of students who need extra help, and even the students I got to work with for a bit still have a ways to go, but you have to take small victories where you can get them. I probably have something like 40 or 50 students who need a lot of help, and having that many kids in one session of extra-help would probably ruin its efficacy, so I need to find another solution.

It's been a good learning week for me too, so far...on Monday I went to bellydancing again and we tried doing this one dance all the way through and I felt like I had caught on pretty well. The teacher even complemented me on something, which was special because since I am the newbie in the class, I am usually the one who does things wrong and has to get corrected. On Tuesday the English Angels taught me how to say "photosynthesis" in Chinese, and my little swim team girls taught me how to say "submarine" (preceded by me trying to explain to them what the English word "submarine" meant, which is a lot easier to do when you are in a pool). Also, the swim coach Jessica decided that it would be fun to teach me how to do the butterfly. Fabulous!