The Teaching...

I thought ‘The Teaching’ would give out the same creepy vibe as ‘The Shining’. I guess it didn’t, not even after I’ve added three periods after the word.

The point is: the teaching that happened today was really creeping me out.
Yeah, there were ghost stories being tossed around at one point of the teaching, but that’s not really what I meant. I was completely creeped out at how well I adapted with playing a high-schooler.

Anyways, here’s what happened. Five of us had to teach for the whole session, each given 30 minutes to perform whatever teaching skills they have to the rest of the class. We’ve all drawn lots the previous meeting so it’s not really something surprising - I got lot no 19, which meant that I was going to be teaching around the 20th of March (still about a month away, so no sweat).

The five had a week to prepare themselves, which was a lot of time, so we expected them to be ready and to be pretty confident with whatever they’ll be teaching. Most of them were ready, anyway, except a dude who’d lost his listening files to some virus.

The plan was SIMPLE: they’ll play the role of teachers, and we’ll play the role of pain-in-the-butt high-schoolers.

Turns out the teaching session was SIMPLY EXCRUCIATING/PAINFUL/A TORTURE to endure.
Everybody gave pretty much the same sort of performance, which isn’t a problem, really. Skills can be sharpened. But how the hell did all of them end up teaching THE SAME THING, The same stuff over and over again for two and a half hour??I mean, yeah, sure, reinforcement, right? Repetition will enhance memorization. But two and a half hour!

I mean, sure, they were bound with the same syllabus, that they had to teach RECOUNT using four different skill approaches (listening, speaking, reading, writing) but honestly, they could have really developed their students’ skill of recounting if they’d given them different angles, not just, “okay, so you’ve learnt recounting via listening passages. Okay, now it’s time to learn recounting from reading passages!

Wow, exciting.

How about using biographies of some famous people? How about going a little bit more mysterious and talk about people who could remember their past lives? How about recounts of brave firefighters? How about recounts of the World War II? How about recounts of famous places? How about having students practice recount by using fictional (though authentic) situations? How about explaining what the hell recount really means besides that it utilizes the past tense and that it has three parts in general???

And what’s really difficult to enjoy from all the sessions was the lack on the teachers’ part to detect the students’ boredom. What’s more, there’s no creative solution to uplift the atmosphere, they just droned on and on, until time was up, and then that’s it. Seriously, even with all my SPD training, I found it extremely difficult to suppress my yawns that day - and I think I yawned lots of times back then. Not that it would matter, I could have yawned a gazillion times and none of the teachers would have noticed.

And that’s what’s creeping me out, that I felt myself being drawn back to my school years back in Batam: Doodling, rocking my chair raw as the non-attentive teachers droned on and on about things that may or may not be important to our lives. And that’s really the crime, you know, that the teacher could have really been teaching an important subject for us that was killed in a frenzy of rigid classroom teaching.
I truly felt like a teenage high-schooler again: bOrED oUT Of mY SkuLL!!



…anyways, all five preformed okay. None of them explained what type of class they were going to teach and, since none of them had proper set inductions, I found it really difficult to foresee what we would be learning and what Ideas we should prepare beforehand. I think, obviously, we all learn how important it is to have a thorough set induction.

Didn’t think Student A should have told us his ‘I lost my listening file last night and I went out to have fun until I found a great listening material on the net this morning’ story. It’s really depressing to know that your teacher wasn’t prepared and was giving you some random material he plucked off the net just a couple of hours ago. It went okay, I think, standard listening session, really awesome material, I think. Was really impressed with media player’s ability manipulate the speed of a sound file.

Oh yeah, and he should have ironed his shirt.

Student B was also doing okay, except I don’t think she’s responding to her students very well. If she asked a question and a student answered wrongly, she wouldn’t discuss the mistake and the student in question would not understand what went wrong. She’d simply say “next!” which is kind of depressing if the student had actually tried his best to come up with his answer. I think she should be more appreciative of the creative process that the students go through to produce an answer.

She also did a mistake which I find very disturbing: she tested the students’ knowledge of the ‘recount’ genre before even teaching about it. I mean, sure, if you’re absolutely sure that your students are knowledgeable regarding one thing, you can go ahead and skip the whole teaching process. But what if your students DON’T understand ‘recount’, hadn’t even heard about it? Making ‘recall’ questions isn’t going to produce anything and would in fact pressurize the students.

Student C wasn’t doing any better than the previous two in that even though he seems more confident and in control, he is, in fact, not contributing much to the learning of the classroom. He gives out handouts and explains simply that the answers to any questions regarding the material are already included in the handouts. Seriously, I mean, well, if all students need is handbooks, then what’s the whole point of teaching them in the first place??

We should always keep in mind that even though handbooks are helpful, but they will never be as effective in helping students understand materials as a teacher’s eloquent explanations and demonstrations.

And I wish he’s just skip explaining about the elements of ‘recount’ - which had been discussed by Kristen - and simply do a review about it if he really felt that it was necessary.

Student D was doing okay, except there’s not enough individual/group/classroom text deconstruction. She explained that “well, this part is the orientation, this part is the..” without really explaining what an orientation should really contain, what its purpose is, and how to make a good orientation (or a thesis statement).

More time is spent on students’ text production than it is on her teaching session... it really should have been the other way around, really: More emphasis on teacher performance than on text production. Just because your students are great writers doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve did a great job teaching them writing, you know.

The Last girl, needs a confidence boost and a new recording tool (to avoid creating more goddawful recording materials) and a grammar check for her listening material. She focused more on only one part of the class and barely made an eye contact to the rest of the class.

None of the guys paid attention to the rule ‘give explicit instructions’. None of the students knew what to do with Ramdhani’s material before he finally explained that we had to ‘turn to the second page and answer the questions’. He forgot to mention, however, that it’s a fill-the-blanks-with-the-words-provided exercise and some of us actually anticipated a second listening material from him. I think it’s best if we can stick to this principal of classroom management: be as explicit as possible.

…I guess that’s all I have to say. I've probably hurt someone’s feelings, but, well, I gotta do what I gotta do. All I can say is, I really meant all I said, and I really think a lot of improvements need to be taken if we’re ever going to be excellent teachers.

God bless you all, and see you on my next reflection..

29 - 2 - 09