First Classes

My first classes have finally begun. Last night was my one night school. I very badly misjudged the student's abilities at that school. I thought I was going way way out of my way to be overly simplified and slow in my speech, however, it turns out even simple sentences like "I like cooking" were going over some students' heads. I'm going to have to really change my game plan for the night schools if I'm going to have any hope of being successful with them.

Today, I had my first classes at my base school. I used some of what I learned last night to fix some of the more mechanics-based problems with the lesson, improved my visuals, and prepared my wording a little bit better. However, when I pitched the lesson to the co-teacher, I was met with great concern about the difficulty of the lesson even after my improvements. Despite that, I went ahead with the lesson as-planned, and it turned out to be a perfect success! It was just challenging enough without being misunderstood. We had just enough time to go through all of the content I prepared. The student interaction was as good as I could have hoped for and was positive. Many of the students even took initiative to relate later parts of the lesson to earlier parts. I was really surprised that my translation game, which was designed to be overly difficult and make the students realize that participation and effort were often more important than rigid grammatical perfection, was met with great accomplishment. Some of their final sentences matched my answer key exactly!

I absolutely love the feeling I get when I see that the work I've done has made real progress toward a student's education. I hope this continues!