Blog Number 7
January 28, 2008


Today has been my toughest day of teaching yet. It has nothing to do with my preparation, or my directions or anything, but I think that the cultural differences are really starting to play a roll. Last week Wednesday I collected an assignment that I had assigned a week before then, and 15 of one class of 45 and 12 of the class of 44 did not have the assignment completed. I knocked off points and said that they must get it to me the following morning. Still there were about 4 students who just didn’t do it. Then I assigned another writing piece that would be due that Friday. This piece delt with including detail in writing and really shouldn’t have been that hard. I had given them until the end of the day on Friday and then collected it. Students were coming up to me with excuses and I noticed that the piles seemed small but there wasn’t anything that I could do at that time. I expressed a bit of this concern to my cooperating teacher. and he said that we would deal with it on Monday.
So today I get to school and begin to grade the assignments, It turned out that some students just put their notebooks in the pile to look like they had it done, but in actuality the work hadn’t even been started. Only 22 from the class of 44 and 21 from the class of 45 had a completed assignment.
Since today was a teaching day for me, I had a game all set and ready to play for spelling. After we went through the spelling test, I walked around to check that the students completed all of the spelling work that they has been assigned all year when they receive a new batch of words. I ended up keeping count of the amount of students that had completed this and it ended up being 18 from the class of 45 and 17 from the class of 44.
Seeing this, I was extremely disheartened. I ended up writing these two batches of numbers on the board and even they were astonished at the amount of students that did not have the work done. I reminded them of their promise to Mr. Bright of being respectful of me while I am here. I questioned them on whether they thought the lack of homework showed me that they respected me. Rather then playing our game that I had all prepared I ended up writing the excercises on the board and they had to silently work on them until class finished.
I have decided that since the students know that I will not smack them over the head or cane their hands like my cooperating teacher will, that they can get away with this. To me, this seems like a huge lack of disrespect. While I was talking with the group about my disappointment my teacher just sat their quietly. Later on that day he told both classes that if they didn’t shape up when I was teaching he would begin to keep track of the lashings that they deserved and once I left they would pay for every single one of them.
One girl after class actually came up to me with a note it reads
Dear Miss Chelsea,
On behalf of my mates and I, we want to tell you that we are sorry for what we did. We will try never to do that again.
Please forgive us.
Your student
Gloria
While I see this as a sign of disrespect of the students, I cannot put all of the blame on them. I have forgotten part of what we talked about in overseas seminar. I came here to teach, and I brought my games to play and learn with and extremely different teaching styles then anything that they have gone 5 years with. I have done very little adaptation to my teaching style, which totally defeats the purpose of overseas teaching.
So I plan to try to mimic the teaching styles of my cooperating teacher a bit more. This might mean less games, but hopefully it will mean that I will be taken more seriously. In no way does it mean that I will loose any of the energy that I generally bring to my teaching, and I will attempt to still include creativity in the activities, but I need to follow the regimine that they have already established. And who knows, if the students are really good I will throw in some games here and there ;)

Ok, so not much about my weekend, but totally really was a trying and frustrating day that I figured needed to be worked through.

Ghana won tonight against Morroco and will be in the quarter finals so I am falling asleep to the sounds of horns honking and whistles blowing as the celebration continues!

Much love!
☺ Chelsea