Let's Begin Again...
I re-started my volunteer teaching assistant career today. It's been a year and a half since my last gig, and I'm glad to be back in the saddle, and a much shinier one at that. Compared to the last school, the one I'm at now is a dream. I'm assisting in the public school system again, but this school's neighbourhood is pretty affluent, and you can tell. Parents are a lot more involved in their children's education, the kids are much better behaved and there just seems to be a lot more stuff that they have access to. The teacher I'm working with is really kind and very patient, someone who clearly isn't "burned out" despite having been in the profession for 17 years. She has made me feel very welcome, and so have her kids. I'm really excited about the whole endeavour.
The first school I worked at was located in a lower-income/government housing type neighbourhood, and unfortunately the teachers I encountered there were as inspiring as a bowl of oatmeal. In fact, most of what I learned there came from observing what I did not want to be as a teacher. The kids were a bit older than the ones I'm working with now, and they weren't as bad as they could have been (in retrospect), but it was pretty obvious early on that they had had many years' experience in a system that taught them very little about manners, respect and how to focus on the task at hand. I got the chance to work with an entire class, rotated in groups of four, and noted that most of them had found ways of investing the minimum amount of energy required to get by. (I had learned how to do that when I was a kid as well, and I can tell you that it hasn't paid off.) Even the really intelligent ones were reluctant to put more energy into their work than they thought was absolutely necessary, and I would have sworn that the entire class was suffering from varying degrees of ADD (though I knew it was the atmosphere, not actual learning disabilities in most cases). The worst of it was that I was tutoring these kids so that they would perform better on the province-wide tests at the end of the school year. Asking them to think for themselves was like dragging them to the dentist, especially since they knew that the tests didn't count towards their report card marks, so their interest in performing well was practically non-existent. The teacher was so uninspiring, I was crying out in my head, "Please, stand up and teach these kids something! Don't sit behind your desk, reading instructions at them (ones you clearly hadn't read beforehand) and yelling when the kids aren't paying attention!! They're bored, I'M bored, and you clearly don't know the material nearly as well as you should!". To be fair, I could tell that the teacher really wanted the kids to learn and to benefit from their experience in school, but she just didn't know how to relate that hope and compassion through a teaching style that worked. She was just a mess, both physically, organizationally and professionally.
I also volunteered for half an afternoon a week in another class at the same school. The teacher of that class really had his heart in the right place, unfortunately he was in the wrong job in the wrong country. His heavy accent made him very difficult to understand, and he had absolutely no control over the kids. He was obviously unused to the kind of freedom (for better or worse) the kids have over here, and didn't know how to straighten them out once and for all. I can only think of one or two children who were able to sit down and do their own work for a reasonable length of time, and frankly, I couldn't blame any of them. The noise level was unbelievable for a class of 9-year-olds, and everyone was running around, yelling, fighting and doing everything but the task that had been asked of them. It was complete chaos, even when the teacher got the kids to finally settle down for all of 5 minutes; the back-talk and constant disruption was astounding.
I have so much more to add, but I gotta get this posted already!
The first school I worked at was located in a lower-income/government housing type neighbourhood, and unfortunately the teachers I encountered there were as inspiring as a bowl of oatmeal. In fact, most of what I learned there came from observing what I did not want to be as a teacher. The kids were a bit older than the ones I'm working with now, and they weren't as bad as they could have been (in retrospect), but it was pretty obvious early on that they had had many years' experience in a system that taught them very little about manners, respect and how to focus on the task at hand. I got the chance to work with an entire class, rotated in groups of four, and noted that most of them had found ways of investing the minimum amount of energy required to get by. (I had learned how to do that when I was a kid as well, and I can tell you that it hasn't paid off.) Even the really intelligent ones were reluctant to put more energy into their work than they thought was absolutely necessary, and I would have sworn that the entire class was suffering from varying degrees of ADD (though I knew it was the atmosphere, not actual learning disabilities in most cases). The worst of it was that I was tutoring these kids so that they would perform better on the province-wide tests at the end of the school year. Asking them to think for themselves was like dragging them to the dentist, especially since they knew that the tests didn't count towards their report card marks, so their interest in performing well was practically non-existent. The teacher was so uninspiring, I was crying out in my head, "Please, stand up and teach these kids something! Don't sit behind your desk, reading instructions at them (ones you clearly hadn't read beforehand) and yelling when the kids aren't paying attention!! They're bored, I'M bored, and you clearly don't know the material nearly as well as you should!". To be fair, I could tell that the teacher really wanted the kids to learn and to benefit from their experience in school, but she just didn't know how to relate that hope and compassion through a teaching style that worked. She was just a mess, both physically, organizationally and professionally.
I also volunteered for half an afternoon a week in another class at the same school. The teacher of that class really had his heart in the right place, unfortunately he was in the wrong job in the wrong country. His heavy accent made him very difficult to understand, and he had absolutely no control over the kids. He was obviously unused to the kind of freedom (for better or worse) the kids have over here, and didn't know how to straighten them out once and for all. I can only think of one or two children who were able to sit down and do their own work for a reasonable length of time, and frankly, I couldn't blame any of them. The noise level was unbelievable for a class of 9-year-olds, and everyone was running around, yelling, fighting and doing everything but the task that had been asked of them. It was complete chaos, even when the teacher got the kids to finally settle down for all of 5 minutes; the back-talk and constant disruption was astounding.
I have so much more to add, but I gotta get this posted already!
posted by DaftLadybird at 6:53 PM
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