This week I had the opportunity to substitute teach for a straight week. It was the first time I'd been completely in charge of a class since being in Thailand, and the freedom was kind of overwhelming but enjoyable.
I can now cut a little more slack to teachers who complain about how people say teaching is an "easy" job. Such a statement is, frankly, complete and utter crap. There are so many factors that go into effective teaching that doing it well is extremely challenging and requires 100% of your energy and focus.
The first day is (always) the most terrifying and stressful, simply because there are so many unknowns. It's easy to think of teaching as a checklist of items to cover. Students show up, you teach them the content, and you're done. Which is why you might think that teaching a beginning level English language class would be a walk in the park. How hard can it be to teach basic vocabulary and grammar? Bwahahaha! The truth is, of course, much more complicated. There is SO much more to English teaching than showing up with a picture of an apple and teaching some basic phonics (which, if you've even thought about English spelling for a few minutes, you will realize are not so basic).
The number one X factor of teaching is that your primary focus is (or at least should be) the people in your classroom, and these people are not blank slates. They each bring their own unique sets of experiences, personalities, expectations etc. Add to the fact that they will be interacting with each other and the issues that can arise are overwhelmingly complex. There are personality issues, ability level issues, gender issues, and cultural issues. During my practicum I had set up a nice communicative activity involving pair work and, for the sake of time and convenience, simply assigned partners based on proximity. One Muslim woman in my class had her face completely covered which, unbeknownst to me, means that she can not interact with a Muslim man she is not married to and unfortunately I had accidentally paired her with a male Muslim student. There was some awkwardness and luckily my practicum teacher was able to step in and repair the situation with little fuss, but that is just one of the many invisible factors at work in the classroom.
For me, simply monitoring the levels of engagement and mental states of all of my students is the most challenging thing about teaching and it's one you simply cannot appreciate until you have experienced it. It's like public speaking to the power of ten.
Then there's pacing. Knowing how to time activities so that they fill up the appropriate amount of class is akin to magic and almost impossible to predict. When I'm nervous, I tend to rush things out of the fear that my students are getting bored, and so I have a tendency to just fly through planned materials. On my most important observation day for my practicum I was extremely nervous because I hate being evaluated. It is very unsettling to have someone watching your every move and writing notes about you while they do. While my lesson (about religion, so, you know, that's not a sensitive topic...) went smoothly (despite the fact that I kept running into things) and the students (bless them) responded really well, I ended up finishing my lesson 30 minutes before the end of class. It was a complete nightmare.
This week the first couple of days were no different. This was the longest amount of time I'd ever taught (five hours straight) and between that and the nerves I was constantly wracking my brains for ideas of how to extend the material. Luckily I have some fun games in my repertoire now that I was able to use and by the third day I'd gotten a feel for the rhythm of the day and was feeling calmer at the head of the class, so I had no problem filling the time.
All of this kind of outlines the soft skills of teaching, which are essential to being effective. But the nuts and bolts of what content to present and how is the challenge of teaching that I find to be the most mentally stimulating. As I said above, there's more to it than just content. Especially at the lower levels it's the process that's important, so while it may not sound that challenging to teach basic vocabulary and grammar consider that learning a vocabulary word in a foreign language encompasses recognizing it when it is spoken, learning to pronounce it properly, learning to spell it, and learning how to use it in context. Regarding grammar, it's really complicated, and so my primary concern as a teacher is knowing how much grammar to include, how to limit my instruction. All of this means knowing how much my students know which is impossible to completely know...
When I'm teaching I'm constantly processing all of these different factors. I not only have to monitor the class to make sure everyone is on task and playing nice (and figure out how to appropriately intervene if something isn't working, which is really a case by case thing), but also manage time efficiently and, ultimate goal, decide how to direct the class for optimal learning. For instance, today we were reviewing vocabulary about family which was paired nicely with a worksheet about adjectives. As reinforcement and practice, the students had to write sentences describing their family which, of course, creates errors galore at this level. So do I address the grammar point that we say "I have" but "He has," or leave it for another day? Do I let the unconfident student get away with misspelling a word for the sake of encouraging him at the risk of letting him get in a bad habit? How thoroughly can I answer the advanced students' questions without completely losing class focus? These are just some of the issues I've run into in my short time of teaching and it's just going to take experience before I can iron out my approach to all of these issues.
Needless to say, I was completely exhausted at the end of each teaching day this week and felt I had thoroughly earned my paycheck.
