Teaching Is Really Hard Work

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.

YES!

Great article from the Atlantic! Absolutely what I have been thinking ever since I started studying linguistics. 

How Brains See Music as Language

More Telepictionary

Per usual, I've had a lot going on. School and work have been increasingly intense, the holidays are coming up, I've had several special events including my dad's birthday and a concert in Seattle which included a lovely reunion with several college friends, one of whom I hadn't seen in about three years, and as always the Japanese students are keeping me busy. Here are some recent rounds of telepictionary that I wanted to share. 

Round 1

My students were making fun of the fact that I don't always wear matching socks, so I drew this picture. 

Round 2 - Perceptions of Gun Ownership

This is one of those times where my sense of humor confuses my students. However, it is always interesting to see how they will interpret things, so it's kind of intentional. 

Round 3 - The violence in the last one was entirely my fault, but this kind of scared me.

Well that escalated quickly.

 Round 4 - Exercise and being environmentally friendly

Flying cars are good for the environment? I want one!

I'm feeling Peter-Pannish these days. This is not because I've given up on my goal of becoming a real adult. It's just that, more and more I'm starting to question the definition of "grown-up." I read an article the other day about how 25 is the new cut-off for adulthood. It made me gag a little bit. The argument for this was that people continue to grow in emotional maturity, self-awareness, and judgment until they are 25. Well... of course they do. I'm pretty sure people continue to grow in pretty much all these areas for their entire lives. Isn't that the benefit of experience in the first place?

Then I started thinking that the external markers we use to measure adulthood are pretty shallow. In American culture, these markers seem to be getting married, buying a house, and having a family. Interestingly, getting married and having a family seems to take precedence over having an actual job. I have several acquaintances who married young, before they had finished their education. This somehow gave them more "adult" status than we carefree, unmarried undergrads. There's some logic to that, I suppose. All of these markers - marriage, house, family - are signs of stability, and stability shows that you have established your adult identity. But. I think we can all agree there are pretty lousy reasons to get married, buy a house, or have a family. Signs of adulthood? Possibly. Guarantees of maturity? Doubtful.

When I was growing up, I had unwavering confidence in the Big People. They were godlike beacons of wisdom and I couldn't figure out how they knew so much. So it was a little freaky when I officially became an adult in the eyes of society and (gasp) I didn't have it all figured out. Had I missed some sort of vital training? Was I stunted by my upbringing? Then I looked around me and began to wonder if, horror or horrors, the Big People didn't really deserve the sort of reverence I'd been instructed to give them hitherto. But no! It wasn't possible! If they didn't have it figured out then nobody had it figured out and that wasn't a reality I liked to contemplate. Yet reality has an unfortunate way of persisting.

I've been in the middle of an interesting mix of conversations these days. I'm completing my practicum in a high level reading/university prep class and some of the coursework involves using a textbook about American culture. One of our discussions the other day centered around the American value of self-reliance and how we essentially kick our children out at the age of 18. This is not a universal human custom. My students were genuinely shocked when I told them it was shameful to stay at home with your parents. They conceded that eventually you should move out and start a family of your own, but the timeline was not so strictly set.

Meanwhile, I've been reflecting on some of the perhaps hidden advantages of my generation having a later start. 1) We are more highly educated than previous generations. In my book, the world could always use a little more edumacation. 2) We "floaters" may not be building up corporate resumes or making babies, but we are gaining a wider perspective of the world and its people. I truly believe this is going to be more and more necessary as globalization continues to force us to rub shoulders with people who are different from us. 3) Maybe starting with less and feeling our limitations is actually a blessing in disguise. Maybe this recession is forcing us to question the materialistic drive of our culture and giving us perspective on what the good life really means. I know that post-grad life has given me a much-needed dose of humility and perspective. I've discovered that I can find joy in things that aren't related to my pocketbook or personal accomplishments.

So my millennial friends, maybe we really are on the way to making the world a better place. Maybe we truly are standing on the shoulders of our parents' generation, able to see just a little bit further. Hopefully we'll be able to use these experiences, good and bad, to make life suck just a little bit less. Maybe we are on our way to being awesome and we don't even realize it. And if not, we can always hide from the student-loan people in a millennial liberal arts grad commune somewhere abroad.

Pictures

One of my favorite things to do for my evening tutorials is play "telepictionary" with my students. Telepictionary is a game combining telephone and pictionary. The first person in the circle draws a picture, the second person writes a sentence describing the picture, and the next person must draw a picture based on that sentence. Here are the highlights of this week's round. (Bonus points if you can guess which drawings are mine.)

Round One

 Round Two

I guess this is the Japanese equivalent of "ding!"

 Round Three

 Round Four

I do not know why they drew this. There are practically no guys at MFWI. Possibly they meant the SFCC students.

They also recently tried to make popcorn in the microwave. This was the result.