21-22/06/11: More Teaching

I write these blogs by going back through the journal I keep and here’s what I had to say on the day my afternoon classes began:
“…if I’m not careful, I’m accidentally going to punch one of these kid’s faces in. Hm, I’d get banned from teaching for sure – maybe that’s not such a bad thing…”
So the second week of teaching I got another class, this one from 3-4:00. The class was only an hour, I was pretty sure Irma Agnes had told me the students were going to be older, and with any luck the class size would be smaller and more manageable. Things were looking up. Well, actually no. Turns out the class was younger – kindergarten/1st graders (my first class is 3rd and 4th graders) – and bigger – around 40 to 50 students. Gradual but absolute chaos. Even better, the classroom I teach is right next to the room for a woman’s study group so we couldn’t get too loud. When some genius finds unicorns or invents a time machine, please work on this question next: how do you teach 40+ 6 year olds “music” quietly for an hour? For at least 3 months? Oh right, and, having just started school, they know about as much Portuguese as I do since they grew up speaking the local language, Xopi.
That evening, Scooter helped me talk to Irma Agnes who was very sympathetic and willing to negotiate changes. The class size would be reduced to about 26 and she would give me simple math books to work them through.
Another excerpt from my journal from next day:
“Best class yet this morning! I didn’t even know a class could go that well.”
So obviously this job has its ups and downs and I just happened to go through the two extremes in rapid succession. It was a very good class though and definitely made up for the previous day. My morning class went through all the English phrases we had learned so far and strung them together into a short conversation that the students got very engaged in and by the end they were having the conversation with each other and without my help. Everything went so great, it took up nearly the entire first hour, which never happens. After that we went over some basic math rules and then I wrote problems on the board for them to practice and, would you believe it, they worked quietly on the problems! At the end of the lesson, I told them that’d I’d be leaving to Swaziland tomorrow but when I returned we would start learning music. I played Waka Waka and Wavin’ Flag on the recorder as a demonstration and they loved it.