Step into my aula....

A couple anecdotes, positive and negative from my various classrooms (aulas):

I'm pretty happy that my students have gotten comfortable with me and call me over to help them with the various exercises we do in class. Unfortunately that also means that when I'm working with one student I sometimes have two or three yelling "Profe! Profe! Profe!" (Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!) at me despite the fact that I'm clearly occupied. Usually I find myself saying, wait! wait! wait! right back at them.

This week, that manifested while we were trying to play a game that my counterpart suggested on the spot so it wasn't super organized on our parts. So I had the class in two teams playing charades with different emotions- each team had five minutes for people to come to the front, draw an emotion, and act it out, one team would go and then the second. I guess that part wasn't clear because these two girls on the team that was supposed to go second kept jumping up and yelling that they wanted to participate. I tried to explain a couple times, in Spanish, to wait until it was their team's turn but they just kept doing it! Finally, I got exasperated and yelled dramatically, in English, "For the love of god, wait!!" and they laughed and actually sat tight till it was their turn. Strange how that works out sometimes.

The other week we were teaching prepositions of place (in, under, next to, etc) using various objects in the classroom and had gotten to the point of asking, for example, "Where is the notebook?" and answering with "The notebook is on the desk." So I was trying to help this girl with the practice exercises in class which were to write maybe five questions and answers about the classroom. I offered a lot of help on the first one so I wanted her to pull her weight on the second. We got the question written but the answer was hard for her to understand and I was getting frustrated myself because I was running out of ideas of how to explain it. Finally, I asked her the question in Spanish and told her to answer me in Spanish and we'd translate to English. Very much to my dismay she just looked at me blankly, and despite all my encouragement and leading questions she couldn't even tell me "The window is next to the door" in Spanish. Then I had a very unteachery moment as I stood up and told her I wasn't giving her the answer and that she would fail if she didn't put in a little effort of her own. That didn't seem to phase her at all.

I have to say, though, that I had one of my prouder moments last week when I overheard one of my first year students telling my counterpart that when I'm not in class it's boring. That was pretty gratifying to hear after I had spent the better part of a one and a half hour class block (that's two 45-minute classes) bouncing around the front of the classroom doing goofy actions for them to repeat after me in order to learn things like open your notebook, silence please, and raise your hand. It can get really tiring teaching like that sometimes, but when the kids respond to it it's totally worth it and feeds the energy right back to me.

and some more pictures from the beach a couple weekends back: