First day of teaching (for real)

O.K Let's try this again. Yesterday was the first official day of teaching. The course is British and American culture, which is a little ironic (o.k. not exactly ironic) because everything I know about British culture I learned from Monty Python's Flying Circus. Anyway, I have three sections of this course which meets once a week each for an hour and a half. I will receive more information about the rest of my teaching load later this week. I had made extensive plans for the class. One thing they drilled into us pretty well in our training was the importance of lesson planning, and in particular one pattern of lesson planning. You begin (1) with some icebreaking activity to get the class going. Then (2) you present some material that will be the basis for the class. This is the lecture component, though it doesn't have to be a straight-forward activty. Then (3) you engage in some "student centered" activity, primarily some form of group work. Then (4) you have the students prodcue something, for example, report out from the group or do a role play. Then (5) you summarize. From someone who has been teaching fifteen years without a lesson plan, this was quite a challenge but necessary given the sort of teaching, which is "tefl" or teaching english as a foreign language.

So after having the class introduce themselves I was going to talk about stereotypes, because with a class that talks about British or American anything, there is a danger of generalizing. There is no way to say all Americans do or like anything, although there is a tendency to think in those terms (just as we think in those terms about other cultures). I was going to talk about in logic there is what we call the fallacy of hasty generalization, which is doing precisely this, generalizing unjustifiably from a small sample size. As it was the anniversary of 9/11, I was going to talk about how after 9/11 a man was shot and killed simply because he looked Muslim but was in fact an Indian Sikh. I was then (part 3 if you're paying attenion) going to have them break into groups and discuss some of their own stereotypical thinking and then (4) report out. Not a particularly exciting lesson, but it was the first day of class and I couldn't expect them to have read anything.

But when I got to class I realized there was a problem. They had put me into a technology classroom, which meant there was a computer set up with dvd/cd player and other devices, plus the students all had computer screens at their desks so they could watch what was on the big screen. This was great for a lot of things, but not for group discussions. It did not matter anyway, since the introductions took a lot longer than I thought, This was in part because of the method of introduction I had devised. The students were to partner with someone and then they would come up and introduce each other. I would then ask each of them a question. This not only helps to get to know the students but allows you to gauge the level of English competence, which can vary greatly. But with forty students (another unexpected thing) this simply took most of the class. Since I have two more sections, I think I will try to just do as many introductions as I can in the first half (classes run 45 minutes-5 minute break-45 minutes) and do something more substantial in the second half, completing the rest of the introductions in future classes (not bad as icebreaker). If you have any suggestions, feel free to e-mail me.