When I was taking my online TEFL course, I had to prepare approximately 714 sample lesson plans. My school was extremely specific about the desired structure and content of said plans, and I, as the good student I am, of course made every effort to give them exactly the lesson plan they were looking for in the hopes of achieving a good grade.
The thing is, even at the time I knew that what 70-85% of what I was writing was utter laughable nonsense.
My school LURVED pair and small group work. So I put pair work and/or small group work into every single plan I wrote. At the same time I was doing this, I was co-teaching Georgian primary school children, and knew with the certainty of a Christian Science Believer that not ONE of my classes would be able to handle a single one of these activities. I know this because I had tried, and after several catastrophic failures I swore I never would again because each time the lesson had disintegrated in about 40 seconds, into even greater chaos and mayhem than it was operating at previously. The only way to keep my class engaged and even remotely on-task was to give them an activity that the entire class could participate in at once, and was both reasonably unchallenging and had a fairly decent helping of "fun".
The irony of this was not lost on me. I was creating TEFL lesson plans that had exactly zero chance of success in the TEFL classes I was concurrently teaching. It kind of made me wonder if the folks who had designed a TEFL course had ever actually taught TEFL children. But then I remembered that I was in Georgia. At the time, I was unshakably convinced that Georgian schoolkids were the worst-behaved schoolkids on the entire planet. Mostly sweethearts, sure, but feral. Surely, in other countries not Georgia, second and third graders could handle a five-minute pairwork exercise.
Then I came to Turkey. Georgia, I owe you one big fat apology. Your kids are most definitely NOT the worst-behaved schoolkids on the planet.
When I applied here through my recruiting company, I was advised that "classroom management" was one of their biggest problems. I nodded sagely and thought: "I've been in Georgia. It will probably suck but at least I'll have the comfort of having seen the worst."
Wrong.
Although, maybe it's not that Georgian kids are actually worse than Turkish kids. I have very clear memories of one particular 7th grade class in Poti that probably remains the worst group of students I have ever laid eyes on. But the thing that is important is -- at least Georgia acknowledged this very significant problem, and more importantly attempted to deal with it practically. They knew their kids were buttheads, but they wanted the benefit and prestige of having native English speakers in their schools. So they did the very best thing they could possibly do, which was to have both a native English teacher and a Georgian English teacher in the room together. And yeah, before you're all off on "but you hated that so much!", I'm going to say that yes, that co-teaching experience was very frustrating at times. Mainly because my Georgian co-teacher did not want to be co-teaching. But when I was lucky enough to be paired with a teacher who wasn't afraid of change and new things, we had some very cool classes together.
But in light of my current situation, what appeals to me so longingly at the moment is the fact that, when a student got unruly or rude or spastic or whatever, there was an adult person in the room who could speak that student's same language.
This is something I have been dying to get off my chest. Ahem.
ATTENTION: American teachers and American parents -- teaching English in a foreign country is completely fucking different than teaching anywhere, even at problem schools, in your own country. Unless you have ever faced an entire classroom of shouting, screaming, crying children, and have not had one single fucking idea what any of them were saying because you do not speak their language....
Then shut the hell up. You have absolutely, positively, not the slightest fucking idea of what I or any other TEFL teacher will put up with on a daily basis.
I hope I have made myself clear.
It's also a pretty good bet that even the worst schools in America have at least some sort of disciplinary system in place. Detention, writing lines, docking grades, calling parents, something. It's guaranteed not to be foolproof and it's also guaranteed that students will misbehave anyway, but at the very least you have the comfort of a system in place, to say nothing of the comfort of actually knowing and being about to use and take advantage of that system.
Today I asked my school's Director of English about what is done when a student is truly bad. Surely there must be something in the ballpark or disciplinary action. Except.... no. There really isn't.
I don't hand out grades. Detention doesn't exist. With the ever-present problem of the language barrier, I can't call parents. There is, quite literally, absolutely nothing I can do to discipline students. And boy oh boy, do they let me know they know it.
Enough on discipline for now. Let's talk content.
Frankly, even before I started teaching here, I'd come a long, cold, reality-shower down from the completely unrealistic fantasy-land expectations set by my TEFL course lesson plans. But believe it or not the textbooks I've been given for my third graders are every bit as laughable. I have to wonder if, much like my TEFL course designers, the authors of my textbooks have ever taught a TEFL course in Eastern Europe. (I hear Asia is like a completely different TEFL planet. I think that may be my next stop.) My books include ridiculously complex charts, for god's sake. My kids are struggling with sentences, and you want them to grasp the concept of filling in a chart?? With nothing but English directions??? The teacher's books includes games with multiple little paper parts that require cutting out and entire paragraphs of directions. Um, again with the language level, people. Not to mention the discipline problem, sorry for bringing that ugly thing up again. I can just see exactly what would happen if I ever tried to play one of these games with my third graders, and it certainly does not involve anyone ever winning or reaching the finish line or whatever the logical conclusion to a game would normally be.
The only game that has been even mildly successful is Hangman, and even then the majority of my students refuse to grasp the basic concept, and insist on shouting out random words instead of letters ("armchair!" "hippo!" "pencil case!" in the true lottery-player's hope of somehow randomly hitting the Hangman Jackpot.
90% of my third graders cannot speak or write in sentences. Most of them cannot identify more than the odd word or two at a time. They struggle with "I like cheese" and "This is a pencil, it is yellow", and yet the books have them reading stories about cows that break into their next-door neighbor's garden and put on her clothes that she left on the washing line. It is, frankly, about one jillion times too advanced for them. They have absolutely NO FUCKING IDEA what they are listening to or better yet, attempting (badly) to read phonetically. Because they don't understand, they are bored. Because they are bored, they act out. I know this, and I even understand. But I have to keep plowing forward with the books I have been given.
After a month and a half of teaching, I was finally told that one of my third graders is studying English for the first time ever. Holy crap, no wonder he is completely distracted and off-task for the entirety of every lesson. Now that I know, I'll attempt to give him a little more personal attention. But to be perfectly honest, he is in a class of 18 other students, at least 10 of which are complete miniature assholes. I am simply not afforded the luxury of crouching down to eye level and speaking softly, giving this guy some private minutes of encouragement. Because as soon as I take my eyes off the rest of the class and stop barking at them to sit down and shut up, the entire class has gone supernova. My question is, why is he in this English class at all? It doesn't seem to require rocket science to figure out that he should be in a beginner class that is at his level, with other students who are also at his level.
But -- much like Georgia -- my school does not test or place students according to language level or ability. So every year, the gap between those that know and those that don't get's steadily wider and more unfixable.
So, the books are too advanced, and the language level of my students ranges from complete zero to "Teacher, may I next to the Sena?" which, if you do not speak Turkish Third Grader English, is a request to sit next to a friend instead of in her proper seat. (A request which is always denied, because if I grant it once I have to grant it to everyone, and the entire fucking class becomes a really entertaining episode of musical chairs. But even though it IS always denied, they still ask at the start of every goddam lesson.) The kids act like they know their actions have no consequences, because their actions have no consequences. Sounds like this would be a really tough 40-minute lesson, right?
But oh no. It gets better.
Every single lesson I teach is a "double lesson." If your brain just short-circuited when you heard that, much as mine did, I will explain that this means I teach each class I have for two lessons back-to-back, with a ten-minute break in the middle. Let me tell you just how awesome it is to try and teach English to 5-9 year olds for an HOUR AND TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES at a stretch. It's impossible. Simply impossible.
They do not have the attention span for it. Without fail, the second lesson is always WAY WORSE than the first. Even the best kids disintegrate after an hour. When you were six, did you want to do ANYTHING for an hour and twenty minutes? If I ever find the dude who came up with this genius fucking idea, I am going to straight up punt him in the testes, and worry about getting deported later.
For the first month, my worst classes were undoubtedly my first graders. These babies were practically just born, for god's sake. They barely know Turkish.
Teaching these wee youngsters would be challenging enough under the best of circumstances, but my particular situation is complicated ever further by the fact that, for some reason, I have been given NO materials for first grade. Not a single book, workbook, worksheet, or CD. Nothing. And I am supposed to keep them engaged and on task for an hour and twenty minutes? With WHAT?? My friend and co-worker Sarah teaches first grade as well, and she has a book. Every week she gives me a list of the 10-20 new vocab words they are learning that week, and I have to somehow come up with an hour and twenty minutes worth of activities from 10 or 20 words. Not only that, but they have to be about the level of difficulty you would pick if you were trying to teach your pet how to speak English. Every week I spend hours making worksheets and flashcards from scratch. It takes freaking forever. And every week I doggedly go through my lesson plan and hand out the worksheets only to see them scribbled on and my directions more often than not completely ignored.
Generally, the class was good(ish), for about 10 minutes. And it predictably went downhill from there. There were the spontaneous criers. The nonstop requests to go to the toilet or to get a drink of water. The tattling (in Turkish, so I have no idea what they are telling me but I can tell a tattler when I hear one). But all of that would still be okay except that at the same time, the entire class was out of their seats, laughing, shouting, running around, and pretty much completely ignoring me.
I tried everything. Shouting. The angry human statue. Stickers as bribes. Games. Songs. Absolutely nothing worked. NOTHING. I had my nadir moment when I had drawn a tree on the smartboard and was shouting myself hoarse to get their attention, just wanting one single small human to acknowledge my fucking existence at the front of the room and tell me that what I had drawn was, in fact, a tree. I looked around the room and every single one of them could not have given less of a crap that I was there. My worksheets were being ripped up and dropped on the floor. I shrugged my shoulders and just sat down at the desk until the bell rang and released me, feeling like the biggest fool in Istanbul.
The last two paragraphs are in past tense because about two weeks ago I decided that I simply was not going to do it anymore. I went to my Director of English and told him very frankly that I needed help with the first grade. I explained, in priceless American clarity, the situation in my classrooms, and I said that he could either put a Turkish teacher in the room with me or take the first grade off of my schedule. He opted to give me a Turkish co-teacher, and I am extremely happy and relieved to say that my first grade classes have gone from being my worst and most dreaded classes to being my uncontested favorite.
I don't think it was too much to ask. I needed someone in the room to ask why a crier was crying, and comfort him or her her accordingly. I needed someone to tell the tattler not to tattle, and then tell whoever was being tattled on to stop it. I needed a second pair of hands, and vocal cords, to keep these exuberant little monsters under some modicum of control. Now, I still do the actual teaching, and she does crowd control. It's the best of both worlds. The kids get a native English speaker, and I get someone who can actually communicate with them.
At the end of last week, I was almost on the cusp of writing a slightly different, slightly more moderated Teaching Exposé. But then today happened. I can say with Going-To-Confession Honesty that I have never quite experienced prepubescent maliciousness like this before. And I never will again. Both my school and my recruiting company have been advised that if significant changes are not made to a particular class of third graders, then I will no longer be teaching them.
I'm not going into details. Mostly because I just tried to type it out, and I know I wasn't doing justice to what happened. To how it made me feel. It was one of those "you had to be there to understand" moments. Or at the very least, you have to be a TEFL teacher.
You want to know something truly amazing? As bad as my kids are, my roommate Rachel has had it even worse. Here is just a short run-through of some of the things she has had to deal with in her classes, above and beyond the usual ridiculous level of bad behavior that I have to face every day.
A kid has bit her. BIT her. She has also been punched, smacked, and kicked hard enough to leave a bruise. A girl spontaneously poured a bottle of water all over herself and the desk. Kids regularly fight each other, flip tables, and have on-the-floor screaming tantrums, in the middle of her lesson. And my personal favorite -- during her first week, a kid legit shit himself in her class. Pooped. His. Pants. In her class. I think I would have quit that very day.
Note: I wrote that last paragraph about a week ago. In the days since then, the pants-shitter has been upstaged by a young man who legit pulled out his dick in front of her... and peed on her feet.
I am not making this up.
And through all this she is supposed to TEACH? WE are supposed to TEACH? In the name of all that is holy, I ask you -- HOW??
This is not a grandiose opus leading up to my justifying quitting. I will be going into work tomorrow same as always. In fact, my first double lesson of the day is with that same third grade class from today. I hope not a single one of them sleep tonight. Consequences might not translate into Turkish, but I'll make damn sure they know it in English.
The thing is, even at the time I knew that what 70-85% of what I was writing was utter laughable nonsense.
My school LURVED pair and small group work. So I put pair work and/or small group work into every single plan I wrote. At the same time I was doing this, I was co-teaching Georgian primary school children, and knew with the certainty of a Christian Science Believer that not ONE of my classes would be able to handle a single one of these activities. I know this because I had tried, and after several catastrophic failures I swore I never would again because each time the lesson had disintegrated in about 40 seconds, into even greater chaos and mayhem than it was operating at previously. The only way to keep my class engaged and even remotely on-task was to give them an activity that the entire class could participate in at once, and was both reasonably unchallenging and had a fairly decent helping of "fun".
The irony of this was not lost on me. I was creating TEFL lesson plans that had exactly zero chance of success in the TEFL classes I was concurrently teaching. It kind of made me wonder if the folks who had designed a TEFL course had ever actually taught TEFL children. But then I remembered that I was in Georgia. At the time, I was unshakably convinced that Georgian schoolkids were the worst-behaved schoolkids on the entire planet. Mostly sweethearts, sure, but feral. Surely, in other countries not Georgia, second and third graders could handle a five-minute pairwork exercise.
Then I came to Turkey. Georgia, I owe you one big fat apology. Your kids are most definitely NOT the worst-behaved schoolkids on the planet.
When I applied here through my recruiting company, I was advised that "classroom management" was one of their biggest problems. I nodded sagely and thought: "I've been in Georgia. It will probably suck but at least I'll have the comfort of having seen the worst."
Wrong.
Although, maybe it's not that Georgian kids are actually worse than Turkish kids. I have very clear memories of one particular 7th grade class in Poti that probably remains the worst group of students I have ever laid eyes on. But the thing that is important is -- at least Georgia acknowledged this very significant problem, and more importantly attempted to deal with it practically. They knew their kids were buttheads, but they wanted the benefit and prestige of having native English speakers in their schools. So they did the very best thing they could possibly do, which was to have both a native English teacher and a Georgian English teacher in the room together. And yeah, before you're all off on "but you hated that so much!", I'm going to say that yes, that co-teaching experience was very frustrating at times. Mainly because my Georgian co-teacher did not want to be co-teaching. But when I was lucky enough to be paired with a teacher who wasn't afraid of change and new things, we had some very cool classes together.
But in light of my current situation, what appeals to me so longingly at the moment is the fact that, when a student got unruly or rude or spastic or whatever, there was an adult person in the room who could speak that student's same language.
This is something I have been dying to get off my chest. Ahem.
ATTENTION: American teachers and American parents -- teaching English in a foreign country is completely fucking different than teaching anywhere, even at problem schools, in your own country. Unless you have ever faced an entire classroom of shouting, screaming, crying children, and have not had one single fucking idea what any of them were saying because you do not speak their language....
Then shut the hell up. You have absolutely, positively, not the slightest fucking idea of what I or any other TEFL teacher will put up with on a daily basis.
I hope I have made myself clear.
It's also a pretty good bet that even the worst schools in America have at least some sort of disciplinary system in place. Detention, writing lines, docking grades, calling parents, something. It's guaranteed not to be foolproof and it's also guaranteed that students will misbehave anyway, but at the very least you have the comfort of a system in place, to say nothing of the comfort of actually knowing and being about to use and take advantage of that system.
Today I asked my school's Director of English about what is done when a student is truly bad. Surely there must be something in the ballpark or disciplinary action. Except.... no. There really isn't.
I don't hand out grades. Detention doesn't exist. With the ever-present problem of the language barrier, I can't call parents. There is, quite literally, absolutely nothing I can do to discipline students. And boy oh boy, do they let me know they know it.
Enough on discipline for now. Let's talk content.
Frankly, even before I started teaching here, I'd come a long, cold, reality-shower down from the completely unrealistic fantasy-land expectations set by my TEFL course lesson plans. But believe it or not the textbooks I've been given for my third graders are every bit as laughable. I have to wonder if, much like my TEFL course designers, the authors of my textbooks have ever taught a TEFL course in Eastern Europe. (I hear Asia is like a completely different TEFL planet. I think that may be my next stop.) My books include ridiculously complex charts, for god's sake. My kids are struggling with sentences, and you want them to grasp the concept of filling in a chart?? With nothing but English directions??? The teacher's books includes games with multiple little paper parts that require cutting out and entire paragraphs of directions. Um, again with the language level, people. Not to mention the discipline problem, sorry for bringing that ugly thing up again. I can just see exactly what would happen if I ever tried to play one of these games with my third graders, and it certainly does not involve anyone ever winning or reaching the finish line or whatever the logical conclusion to a game would normally be.
The only game that has been even mildly successful is Hangman, and even then the majority of my students refuse to grasp the basic concept, and insist on shouting out random words instead of letters ("armchair!" "hippo!" "pencil case!" in the true lottery-player's hope of somehow randomly hitting the Hangman Jackpot.
90% of my third graders cannot speak or write in sentences. Most of them cannot identify more than the odd word or two at a time. They struggle with "I like cheese" and "This is a pencil, it is yellow", and yet the books have them reading stories about cows that break into their next-door neighbor's garden and put on her clothes that she left on the washing line. It is, frankly, about one jillion times too advanced for them. They have absolutely NO FUCKING IDEA what they are listening to or better yet, attempting (badly) to read phonetically. Because they don't understand, they are bored. Because they are bored, they act out. I know this, and I even understand. But I have to keep plowing forward with the books I have been given.
After a month and a half of teaching, I was finally told that one of my third graders is studying English for the first time ever. Holy crap, no wonder he is completely distracted and off-task for the entirety of every lesson. Now that I know, I'll attempt to give him a little more personal attention. But to be perfectly honest, he is in a class of 18 other students, at least 10 of which are complete miniature assholes. I am simply not afforded the luxury of crouching down to eye level and speaking softly, giving this guy some private minutes of encouragement. Because as soon as I take my eyes off the rest of the class and stop barking at them to sit down and shut up, the entire class has gone supernova. My question is, why is he in this English class at all? It doesn't seem to require rocket science to figure out that he should be in a beginner class that is at his level, with other students who are also at his level.
But -- much like Georgia -- my school does not test or place students according to language level or ability. So every year, the gap between those that know and those that don't get's steadily wider and more unfixable.
So, the books are too advanced, and the language level of my students ranges from complete zero to "Teacher, may I next to the Sena?" which, if you do not speak Turkish Third Grader English, is a request to sit next to a friend instead of in her proper seat. (A request which is always denied, because if I grant it once I have to grant it to everyone, and the entire fucking class becomes a really entertaining episode of musical chairs. But even though it IS always denied, they still ask at the start of every goddam lesson.) The kids act like they know their actions have no consequences, because their actions have no consequences. Sounds like this would be a really tough 40-minute lesson, right?
But oh no. It gets better.
Every single lesson I teach is a "double lesson." If your brain just short-circuited when you heard that, much as mine did, I will explain that this means I teach each class I have for two lessons back-to-back, with a ten-minute break in the middle. Let me tell you just how awesome it is to try and teach English to 5-9 year olds for an HOUR AND TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES at a stretch. It's impossible. Simply impossible.
They do not have the attention span for it. Without fail, the second lesson is always WAY WORSE than the first. Even the best kids disintegrate after an hour. When you were six, did you want to do ANYTHING for an hour and twenty minutes? If I ever find the dude who came up with this genius fucking idea, I am going to straight up punt him in the testes, and worry about getting deported later.
For the first month, my worst classes were undoubtedly my first graders. These babies were practically just born, for god's sake. They barely know Turkish.
Teaching these wee youngsters would be challenging enough under the best of circumstances, but my particular situation is complicated ever further by the fact that, for some reason, I have been given NO materials for first grade. Not a single book, workbook, worksheet, or CD. Nothing. And I am supposed to keep them engaged and on task for an hour and twenty minutes? With WHAT?? My friend and co-worker Sarah teaches first grade as well, and she has a book. Every week she gives me a list of the 10-20 new vocab words they are learning that week, and I have to somehow come up with an hour and twenty minutes worth of activities from 10 or 20 words. Not only that, but they have to be about the level of difficulty you would pick if you were trying to teach your pet how to speak English. Every week I spend hours making worksheets and flashcards from scratch. It takes freaking forever. And every week I doggedly go through my lesson plan and hand out the worksheets only to see them scribbled on and my directions more often than not completely ignored.
Generally, the class was good(ish), for about 10 minutes. And it predictably went downhill from there. There were the spontaneous criers. The nonstop requests to go to the toilet or to get a drink of water. The tattling (in Turkish, so I have no idea what they are telling me but I can tell a tattler when I hear one). But all of that would still be okay except that at the same time, the entire class was out of their seats, laughing, shouting, running around, and pretty much completely ignoring me.
I tried everything. Shouting. The angry human statue. Stickers as bribes. Games. Songs. Absolutely nothing worked. NOTHING. I had my nadir moment when I had drawn a tree on the smartboard and was shouting myself hoarse to get their attention, just wanting one single small human to acknowledge my fucking existence at the front of the room and tell me that what I had drawn was, in fact, a tree. I looked around the room and every single one of them could not have given less of a crap that I was there. My worksheets were being ripped up and dropped on the floor. I shrugged my shoulders and just sat down at the desk until the bell rang and released me, feeling like the biggest fool in Istanbul.
The last two paragraphs are in past tense because about two weeks ago I decided that I simply was not going to do it anymore. I went to my Director of English and told him very frankly that I needed help with the first grade. I explained, in priceless American clarity, the situation in my classrooms, and I said that he could either put a Turkish teacher in the room with me or take the first grade off of my schedule. He opted to give me a Turkish co-teacher, and I am extremely happy and relieved to say that my first grade classes have gone from being my worst and most dreaded classes to being my uncontested favorite.
I don't think it was too much to ask. I needed someone in the room to ask why a crier was crying, and comfort him or her her accordingly. I needed someone to tell the tattler not to tattle, and then tell whoever was being tattled on to stop it. I needed a second pair of hands, and vocal cords, to keep these exuberant little monsters under some modicum of control. Now, I still do the actual teaching, and she does crowd control. It's the best of both worlds. The kids get a native English speaker, and I get someone who can actually communicate with them.
At the end of last week, I was almost on the cusp of writing a slightly different, slightly more moderated Teaching Exposé. But then today happened. I can say with Going-To-Confession Honesty that I have never quite experienced prepubescent maliciousness like this before. And I never will again. Both my school and my recruiting company have been advised that if significant changes are not made to a particular class of third graders, then I will no longer be teaching them.
I'm not going into details. Mostly because I just tried to type it out, and I know I wasn't doing justice to what happened. To how it made me feel. It was one of those "you had to be there to understand" moments. Or at the very least, you have to be a TEFL teacher.
You want to know something truly amazing? As bad as my kids are, my roommate Rachel has had it even worse. Here is just a short run-through of some of the things she has had to deal with in her classes, above and beyond the usual ridiculous level of bad behavior that I have to face every day.
A kid has bit her. BIT her. She has also been punched, smacked, and kicked hard enough to leave a bruise. A girl spontaneously poured a bottle of water all over herself and the desk. Kids regularly fight each other, flip tables, and have on-the-floor screaming tantrums, in the middle of her lesson. And my personal favorite -- during her first week, a kid legit shit himself in her class. Pooped. His. Pants. In her class. I think I would have quit that very day.
Note: I wrote that last paragraph about a week ago. In the days since then, the pants-shitter has been upstaged by a young man who legit pulled out his dick in front of her... and peed on her feet.
I am not making this up.
And through all this she is supposed to TEACH? WE are supposed to TEACH? In the name of all that is holy, I ask you -- HOW??
This is not a grandiose opus leading up to my justifying quitting. I will be going into work tomorrow same as always. In fact, my first double lesson of the day is with that same third grade class from today. I hope not a single one of them sleep tonight. Consequences might not translate into Turkish, but I'll make damn sure they know it in English.
I totally feel your pain, just reading this puts me into a state of Post-Georgia PTSD meltdown.
ReplyDeleteRemember that school in Georgia I was teaching at that I kept telling everyone was so fucking awful?
It was a Turkish school!
Nuff said.