This week went by like a flash. I didn't do much teaching this week. Tuesday, we had a field trip. Thursday, we celebrated Halloween by having a festival filled with activities, stories, and a haunted house. I was very sad that I couldn't participate in scaring my students half to death in the haunted house because I spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon interviewing candidates for next March.As head instructor this is part of my duties. Each candidate took nearly half an hour of my time. I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday doing interviews.My co-teacher taught most of my classes. Then my story telling classes had to be replaced by open class preparation.
Open class season. I hate this time of year. I never understand why the parents can't just come to school and watch us teach our every day language arts classes. No, instead we must put on a 'show' that is so rehearsed it makes me sick and the students very bored after practicing the routine for like 2 weeks. On top of it, this time around, we've got to demonstrate it twice. Once to the potential new parents that might sign up for next year and then once more at the end of the month for their own parents. That means this week I had a total of one class to explain and teach to my kiddies what will happen next Tuesday morning....Oh yeah I'm sure this will go extremely well. You can now guess what I will be doing on Monday instead of teaching my language arts class. I mean the 'show' must look good so that my hagwon can make more MONEY next year.
Update on Andersen class. Wednesday afternoon a complete meltdown occurred in this class. My co-teacher was teaching them phonics or trying to do so when all hell erupted in that class. The boys just started fighting and screaming. One of the boys punched one of the little girls and then proceeded to hit my co-teacher.By the end of class, she had to call front desk to get assistance because she could not control them. You can see from the pictures below what happened.There was nothing left on the walls...nothing...everything was on the floor.
My only questions: How does this happen? How can it get this far? This resulted in one of the boys not being allowed to return to our school. Finally, the issue of money was put aside for my co-teacher's sanity.
I'm sorry that my blog is not really a reflection of my teaching. I needed to share all these things so that you could understand that right now I'm completely exhausted and my brain needs a time out....Good night.
I have never seen anything like that happen before. I second your question how does this happen? How does your co-teacher still have a job? It's good that the school actually expelled a kid, but shouldn't the teacher have been able to control this? How old are the kids in Anderson class? How many are there? It just seems wild...I have had some bad classes, and students who I'm sure are well on their way to being full-fledged sociopaths, but even he wouldn't have pulled something like this.
ReplyDeleteGotta agree, "putting on a show" for the students is unbelievably dumb. If they want to "sell" your teaching skills they should invite parents to quietly observe individually. Even the parents have to know that what you're doing isn't real... right?
ReplyDeleteAs for the kids brawling, OUCH! Sounds like you weren't there so I'm glad you didn't have to deal with it. Glad for the offending children, that is, because I'm pretty sure you would have served up some knuckle sandwiches. Haha just kidding - but yeah I have a hard time seeing you allowing that kind of thing to go very far.