June 12 Friday
Today is the day I'll be videotaped. I asked what the video was for. Its for an advertisement for the school. Oh my. Its going to be a terrible advertisement!! She told me they would tape me for about 10 minutes. wrong. They taped the whole class! The first two classes will be a complete loss unless they can do some really good editing! The last class actually has usable material. So why do I have to be the advertisement for the school? are the other teachers going to be video taped? (do I even have a choice to say 'no i dont want to be videotaped?'. Seeing me on a video tape isn't going to draw people into the school. 'oh my god-I want her to teach my kids!'
The kids are driving me crazy!
So I decided to give them a break from all the textbook stuff and do a fun activity. The activities are way harder for ESL students though. They don't know what adjectives or verbs are. Even when I spend my time explaining it. I read it and get them to read it with me and I even gave a lot of examples. I took my time to prepare extra material. Then a student asks "whats an adjective?" so I had to explain it again! Then they wouldnt quit talking to each other during class. They were talking while other people were reading their story. I had to tell them a lot of times to be quiet but they didn't listen. They were all talking at one time. I had to beg the last student to read and to be quiet when others were reading. Then when he read he wouldnt read where we could understand. One of the students answered her phone during class. I told her not to. It was her mom. Then her mom came to the school to give her a book during my class. Then another student got up out of his seat with his cell phone and was going to go out the door to answer the phone. I told him no. And all of this was on videotape. great.
My schedule was changed today. I usually teach level 2 on Friday, but they wanted me to teach level 3 for the video. I took the same activity for level 3 except I picked out a mad lib that was more simple. When I went into the class I asked the students to be good for me since they were making a video. They were okay during the actual writing part of the activity. I didn't even bother going into detail on adjectives and verbs for this class. I just told them to 'pick a word from this list'. Then when they got finished writing I told them it was time to read their stories. I picked a student to read first. 'no I dont want to go first'. Then the next student said the same thing. Then the next and the last. I told them "everyone has to read their stories". I begged and begged. I probably begged for 10 minutes or so. They would tell me what they wanted to be. "I want to be second", "I want to be third". Except no one would go first. They were speaking in Korean too much so I told them "Speak in English". The smallest boy said "I dont want to speak in English". I said this is "english class". After all that, I finally just got fustrated and made them do work from the book. The smallest boy is funny. (he's 10) He was in class and he said "I have red pee." Then he lifted up his leg and there was a scraped place on his leg that had blood on it. I didn't worry about it since it wasn't flowing down his leg. It was just a scraped part. This same boy has a black eye and is wearing a band aid on his face.
So those 2 classes make me look bad. It just feels like someone said "be on your worst behavior so we can see that valerie is a bad teacher." I think the kids might have been acting up because there was a camera. I dont know. The 2 classes that acted up usually don't have the best behavior anyway. I work well under pressure. I didn't lose my temper or do anything crazy. I wish I could just yell at the top of my lungs "BE QUIET! SIT DOWN! SPEAK IN ENGLISH! READ IT NOW!" These students just won't behave. The other teachers take their sticks to class every single day. Sometimes I see them leave their sticks at their desk and they come back out and get it.
My 3rd class was perfect. Well except for 2 students coming in late and out of 10 students only 4 actually did their homework. The class was quiet and well behaved and everyone participated. They could actually get some good stuff from that video.It was a writing class.
Wonder if I will get to see the end product? And if it totally sucks then I'll have no say over whether or not it gets used. I probably won't even get to see it anyway. I wonder who will watch it and edit it. They will think that I have no control over the kids. I don't know what to do for discipline and should I discipline them when the cameras are rolling? I wish they had a detention. If they did-I'd be sending tons of kids to detention!
I had a decent light workout tonight at the gym. I just walked on the treadmill for 45 minutes at varying speeds. The highest was 4.2 km per hour which isn't very fast. In comparison--3.5 mph is 5.6 km/h. I burned about 250 calories, but it doesn't really matter since I had fast food today.
I get new books for my students on Monday. I just hate that I won't have much time to prepare for my monday classes because I will have just gotten the books.
Its time to assign more essays. OH NO! I think I'll make something really easy for the bottom 4 levels...maybe just a paragraph about something easy. Then the next levels can write a little more, but I have to come up with a topic. yuck. I HATE ESSAYS!! (THEY ARE TERRIBLE AT WRITING!)
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