Early Teaching Struggles

The following two entries were written as rants in my journal that I then typed up to share online. I haven’t yet had a chance to write another long post about all the more fun stuff I’ve done, but I will soon.

8/18/09

Observations after Seven Days of Teaching

Tuesday afternoon, after seven days of teaching. Things had gotten better, but today might’ve been the worst. Definitely the worst since the first two days, when I felt more overwhelmed than I have in years. Last week I established that the kids didn’t know anything and decided to teach based on that, but I don’t think I really comprehended what that meant, or how hard it would be, until today. I tried to teach a music lesson about beats, where we clapped along to songs and I led us in Old MacDonald, setting the pace with the clapping. It went fine (except for some of the kids getting a little too enthusiastic with their clapping or singing and disturbing the other classes) until I tried to explain, in a basic way, how you count beats. The concept of beats per minute was just impossible. I tried to begin with 60 beats per minute, or the speed of the second hand on the clock. When I was asked how many seconds there are in a minute, I was met with “1,” “2,” and closest, “4.” When I tried to take a different approach, and talk about it in terms of rate, I again met with failure. They didn’t know what miles per were, so I didn’t have any kind of jumping off point.
In health class, my attempts to teach the Food Guide Pyramid crashed and burned when they didn’t know what “serve” meant, let alone understand the concept of a serving. Steve’s discussion on the scientific method fell apart when he tried to talk about the results of their paper airplane experiment and found they didn’t know how many inches were in a foot. When asked what they thought a ruler was for, they responded “For drawing straight lines!”
At this point, we’re left wondering—what the hell have they been doing for six plus years of school? They can write a complete sentence, sometimes. They can read, but all that means is that they can say the words out loud—there’s no level of comprehension. They can memorize definitions, but they forget them a week later and can’t come close to actually utilizing the vocabulary words. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems all they’ve done so far in school is copy things out of textbooks and mindlessly memorize. They haven’t been trained to think at all. Changing that will probably be my biggest challenge this year.

The upside of being here—this entry was written in my journal after a tough day of school, sitting against a rock out at the point, watching the sun go down on the mouth of the bay and taking in the waves hitting the rocks and rolling them back towards the sea with a sound like tearing earth.