Well, I've decided to revive this old girl on account of my new class, which I think deserves at least a weekly post to remind myself (and probably no one else) what my first official semester at
Trum@n is like.
The first class was this past Saturday and I had 38 students enrolled, only 29 of which showed up. Thank goodness, since there was one extra chair and I was using it. I was really nervous before class started, but once I saw one of my fellow employees, I felt better. This lady is stone cold nuts. She wears these opaque rubber boots all of the time, boots that are held together with duct tape, to "protect her from radiation." That's what one of the other teachers told me over the summer. She ambles around like she drank a lithium cocktail on the way to school. She's clearly insane, and if SHE has a job there, surely I will look good in comparison -- to the students as well as the administration. At least I hope so.
The class went well:
- First we took attendance.
- I had them fill out little questionnaires about themselves and how they use English, where they're from, etc. As everyone was filing in, this is what they were doing. I wanted them to warm up a little bit before we started talking.
- We went around the class and introduced ourselves, blablabla. That was fun. I have students from the following countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Bangladesh, Thailand, China, Russia, Mongolia, Ethiopia, Poland, Haiti, Vietnam, Ecuador, Colombia and I think that's it.
- Then I went over the syllabus (as much as I had) and explained to them what the portfolio is going to be like. They seemed to like it. I told them that it would probably be more work, but they would learn a lot more. I explained that my goal is to increase their vocabulary, help them with pronunciation and intelligibility and enable them to speak comfortably and confidently to native speakers. They were cool with that.
- Once that was done, we started talking about should/should not. They knew a lot more than I thought they did, so we did a lot of talking about health, and what constitutes a healthy lifestyle. I had them get into groups and make lists of what people should and should not do in order to stay healthy.
- BREAK -- 20 min.
- When we came back, I handed out the story about the Christian Scientists, we did the agree/disagree portion and read the intro. Thelm@ is really confident. She's also married to someone from Iowa. Muscatine, to be precise. Rum@ny (is that his name? I can't remember) seems to be really opinionated too. I hope his wife, who is also in the class, keeps him from making people mad. At least he seems really smart. He knows what he's talking about. His grammar is pretty bad though.
- We talked about people's rights to refuse a doctor's advice for a while and I had them write their answers to the comprehension questions on the board. They seemed to really enjoy talking about the differences between traditional Eastern medicine and modern Western medicine. There was some confusion over which one was being referred to in the question as "nonconventional" since convention differs depending on where you come from. The woman who asked about that, whose name I have completely forgotten, is really bright. We went over the answers and I was going to correct some grammar, but we ran out of time and I had to explain what to do for homework. They were to read the story and complete the opinion-based questions at the end.
Overall, the class went as well as I could have hoped. Idiotically, I left BOTH of my folders in room 2424 and right now they're just sitting on a counter (hopefully) with everyone's writing in there. I've already woken up at 6AM two days in a row worrying about it -- from now on I am going to do a mental checklist before I leave that place and make sure that I have everything. It's tough to keep track of all of the stuff I need. Also, next time I will bring a snack that I actually eat. The cereal I had at 7:45AM didn't carry my through to 2PM very well.
Next week: comps! It's the TESL section, so I'm not too worried about it. It will be a long essay, I suspect. I need to brush up on theory and stuff, but I should be fine on this one.