Tough Teaching Times

Well, I can hardly believe it but this is my second-to-last week of teaching already! I am teaching both seventh and eigth graders full time now and it's exhausting! While lesson planning is easier in a way (I don't need to prepare as many activities per day because the pacing is different), monitoring 3 to 4 classes for a double period each day is draining, especially since most of the classes are not well behaved, so I feel like I am constantly "policing."

This is probably my hardest week of teaching so far. I am frustrated when the students continually speak Chinese in the classroom. This is a problem that all teachers face, but it seems especially bad this week. My mentor says it is probably because the students are under a lot of pressure with testing. I hate the feeling of almost being powerless when they converse in Chinese, because I have no way of knowing whether they are on tastk. On monday, some students asked to shorten my name, and later, I found out they were laughing and laughing because their nickname meant something negative in Chinese. I have tried implementing a points system, verbal warnings, taking away participation ponits, and replacing group activities with individual assignments. NOTHING seems to work....I am at a loss of what else to do, so I just will try to monitor it the best that I can for the next two weeks. It makes me feel both better and worse that noone else at the school has seemed to figure it out yet, either, since it is an ongoing problem.

This week I am also having many issues with the students' maturity level. It is SO different than in the USA, and while I try to keep that in mind, it makes lesson planning difficult. I like to get students up and moving, doing fun activities, but this almost always ends in disaster because the students often cannot handle it. For example, today they were doing a jigsaw activity and creating posters when two boys stood up and started doing cartwheels. Simultaneously, another group of students were drawing all over themselves with the pastels. Similarly, three students drew VERY inappropriate pictures on assignments that they handed in. Whereas in the US there are set steps I could take to deal with these issues and students, the school here does not have any discipline system in place. So, I feel like I am always using empty threats, etc....not the kind of teacher I want to be at all!

While I don't think I am learning concrete techniques that I would want to use in the classroom, or even practicing teaching in the same way (lots of things that are necessary to do here are against my philosophy of education that I would want to have back home), I am grateful to be developing a skill set that will benefit me back home. I would mention what that entails here, but I am not quite sure yet...its still a work in progress! I definitely feel stronger from the experience, and while I'm not necessarily enjoying the teaching aspect of things as much as I had hoped, I am growing in ways I hadn't necessarily expected, both personally and professionally.