Practicum

Sorry for being so long in updating my blog. It has been a very busy couple of weeks. This week and last week we had our practicum, where we would teach a few classes in the surrounding schools. It was a lot of planning and stress. On top of teaching in the morning we still had a good three to four hours of language lessons in the afternoon.

As far as the practicum goes, I think I did pretty well. After my first lesson to a 9^th grade class, I thought I did a horrible job. The lesson seemed so boring, but apparently I was able to get students to raise their hands and participate who had never participated in class before. That was REALLY exciting to hear. It definitely made me feel that I must have done something right in order to make students feel comfortable enough to raise their hands. The thing that I think worked was that I gave positive feedback and I didn’t humiliate students when they got the answer wrong, which is extremely uncommon in the Albanian classroom. It really is amazing what positive feedback and taking notice of all students can do. In another class, there was a boy who had no book and was just sitting there not doing the exercise when everyone else was working. I went to him and gave him my book and began to work through the exercise with him. I found out that he knew very little English, so I started by just translating the sentences. When I left his side he continued to copy the sentences from the book. Then when it was time for me to take my book back so we could go over the exercise as a class, he turned around and worked with the book of the girls behind him. It was really exciting to see that I helped him at least feel like he was worth something and he could do something. It is these types of moments that help me remember why I am here. There were plenty of awkward moments when I would ask a question and no one would raise their hands or I would realize that the class was no where near the level that the book was. So, I rarely got through my whole lesson plan because I would have to explain concepts and words more than I thought I would. Surprisingly, my best class, as a whole, was a bunch of fifth graders in a small village school. I brought in a dialogue about cleaning the classroom (which the students do in the village schools) and the fifth graders read it and then translated the whole dialogue into Albanian. It was incredible. I had translated it myself and I expected that I would do it, but after I did the first line, they started doing it all by themselves.

I had some fast planning sessions as well. For my lesson last Thursday, I was co-teaching with another volunteer and we had a lesson planned and then we got to school and the teacher said we couldn’t do that lesson. We had a five minutes planning session and I believe we delivered a good lesson. We did fool some of the other volunteers, who were observing us, into believing we had planned the lesson the night before. On Monday, I didn’t receive the book until 40 minutes before class started. When, I went to plan the lesson. I opened the book and saw that there was no structure to what I was to teach. I was supposed to do exercises in the book for practice and then realized that none of the exercises were related to the previous exercise. I ended up going through word choice and changing from the active voice to the passive voice, which, I might add, they had never covered before. I got through only two of the eight exercises I was supposed to get through. But, I refused to move on when the students were completely lost. I think it worked and the students seemed to appreciate it.