I don’t think I like teaching. I worry too much if everyone is happy. When people aren’t paying attention I take it personally, and also don’t know how to manage getting their attention back. It’s hard to be on-stage non-stop. Everyone paying attention is watching your eyes for their next cue. The others have no idea what you’re doing.

Tonight I had my second class with the kids and with the teenagers. I’ve spent all my free time since last class trying to get ready: trying to think of creative ways to cover the material outlined in the coursebook. Some of it is boring and too easy (for the teens) and others too redundant yet too hard (for the kids). I’ve spent hours online looking up things like blank comic strips and songs and lyrics and videos and whoknowswhatall, to be able to add variety to the text. But my Tuesday/Thursday classes are way too new to English to be able to use such tools. They don’t have the vocabulary, leave alone the syntax, either to understand me or to compose.

My feelings are additionally hurt because a young girl who came to my first class wanted to quit because she couldn’t understand me. Tonight she came to talk to Magdalena with her parents, to withdraw from the class. She’s studied with M in the past and wants to continue with her when I go. I feel rotten. I speak very slowly in class (I think) and choose my words carefully and do a lot of rephrasing and checking in for comprehension. But when I ask her if she understands, she just shuts down. Others will ask for clarification sometimes, but she just shakes her head. Yet I know she understands more than she lets on, because on the rare occasion she’s spoken, she totally gets the point. She is, according to M, a perfectionist, and can’t stand it if she can’t understand every single thing. She can understand Magda but not me. With that in mind, in tonight’s class I tried a little exercise that bombed but it meant well. I wanted to begin to give students strategies for listening. And I reiterated that complete comprehension is not the objective; even in our native languages we listen selectively. And I said that when we try to understand every single word, we make it harder for ourselves; it may be better to relax and let the words flow through you and grab what you can, until you have the skills to get more.

The exercise that bombed was this: I played an edited video clip of Elka talking about where she’s from, what she likes to do, and how long she’s been speaking English. She speaks very quickly and her words are indistinct. Before playing it, I gave full context: she’s my professor, they’ll meet her next week, she was telling me her hobbies and how she learned English… And I also told them that she speaks quickly and that they probably won’t understand, but not to worry. I played it. They looked befuddled. I asked if there was anything they had grasped. The only thing they heard was the last thing she said: that she started studying English at fourteen. I’m now wondering if that’s a typical learner-pattern — that we hear ends of things. If I remember, I might play with that. In the meantime, I do try to keep my sentences short. But I don’t always succeed.

So with this young woman I think there are several issues

Her personality type, which is both perfectionist and stubborn, and a little controlling in a passive-aggressive way.

My accent.

Probably my teaching style.

The group I’m teaching is small: seven people, all but one in their teens. The adult dominates the conversation and I’m grateful for that. In the two classes I’ve taught, I’ve tried to attend to different styles. I did the Cuisenaire exercise the first day for tactile/visual people; I’ve done a lot of speaking of written things and repetition of pronunciation; I’ve done a lot of simple, topical conversation (trying to use the past tense, as instructed); and today I even did some formal grammar, writing up the conjugation of To Be because I heard people using it wrong, and explaining the three types of past tense endings and — big mistake — when we use them. I was getting into hard core linguistics, and I stood there in the midst of a brain-drain and didn’t know what to do. I tried to think of verbs that I could slot into the three rules I’d written up there, but I couldn’t think of a single regular verb. Not one. Oh, “tossed,” which they didn’t know. But I know a variant of it in Spanish — echando — so at least I could explain the meaning. It was a terrible moment, like the times in Irish dance competitions when I’ve been mid-dance and have forgotten my step in front of the audience and the judges.

The students do feel like judges to me. I’ve imbued them with that power, to make me feel good or bad about what I’m doing. Ultimately, they are the judges, since the “performance” is for them and a botched step impedes their progress and could even diminish their confidence in me.

I learned about one mistake: never give your students a choice or ask their opinion, unless they’re advanced. At one point I thought I’d do a mini-lesson on the pronunciation of “d” since they all have problems with it. I asked if they wanted to do that, or listen to the tape. First of all, I’m not sure they understood the question. Second, those who did seemed unaccustomed to being the ones who help direct the class. So there’s a lesson: charge forward as though you know what you’re doing, even when you have no clue. The trouble was, I’d felt that everything I’d done that night was bombing, and I was afraid of another bomb.

There’s another thing: when Magda introduced me, she said I was an excellent teacher (knowing full well I’m not) and that I knew all the latest techniques. Well, how can I live up to that.

These students seem more comfortable with paper in front of them, so I think I need to make sure they have something to look at. A little plain conversation works fine, but doing an exercise without visual reference seems hard. I know it is for me as a learner of a new language. Where I am in Spanish now, it’s less important. But in Kiswahili and Turkish, I was lost without the written word. So maybe I need to develop a play for them to act out that ties in with whatever past tense shite I’m supposed to be doing.

It is hard, as I expected, to be working with different levels in one group. I wonder if it would be more or less difficult working with this same variety in a larger group. If the students were interested, I don’t think it would be worse, because people could clump according to ability. But here, I need to give each person individual attention, risking the loss of the attention of others.

And that girl — Illaly: I think I’ll ask her to sit next to Jaime or one of his sons, since they have a better command of English and can translate for her. I’ll let her know to ask them. I even spoke some Spanish to her at the end of class, asking her to do the tarea that she didn’t hand in today.

So I had this whole lesson plan worked out and it was quite theoretical, which was stupid. And once I started into it, I realized how hard it was, so I skipped over most. Thus, I got through the material very quickly and was left with 20 minutes at the end of class. So once again I pulled out Tom’s Diner. I had a version of the lyrics in which I’d underlined all the present tense verbs. They’re actually present progressive, not simple present, so that could be a problem. I briefly described the difference. Who knows if anyone understood me. I played the songs and they had the lyrics in front of them. That seemed to give them comfort. And the song uses a lot of common words. At the end of class I realized I hadn’t thought of a homework assignment. So as I was teaching I was also trying to think of something. I couldn’t. But at last I told them I wanted them to change Tom’s Diner to the past tense. Yeesh. I really felt stupid and that I’d failed the students.

I don’t like using the tapes because I think they’re stupid and because I think I can read better. But I tried them for the first time today and asked what they thought. They like them. Oh well. I’ll keep using them.

Before next class:

• Look for a song with simply lyrics and past tense, and a theme that we can ask past tense questions about. Yeah, right.
• Maybe I should play them another video like the one of Elka. I’ve got one of Bea Fantini. Maybe they’d find her easier to understand?
• The lesson plan calls for people to be able to ask questions about the past. I could find a story or folktale with simple language and write definitions up on the board first, and give context, and then read it, and then write a sample question, and then they ask them????
• I could make a card for each person with the identity of a dead famous person and a few facts, and they could pair up and guess who the person was. I don’t know if their skills are that good. Limited vocab.
• I don’t know. I’ll keep thinking. I’ll stick more to the book this time, but I think I need to get them up and doing something. Maybe I can set up a fake tienda and bring in clothes, candy — and the vocab word pasted on it. What did you buy? No, there’s not much else you could do with that.
• I want realia.

As far as the kids’ class was concerned, there was a lot of chatter, even among the two who were more respectful last time. The stuff they’re learning, as I said, is both dull and repetitive, and very confusing for people with limited vocab skills. I spent a lot of time again on “should” and “shouldn’t” but I still don’t think they get the concept, even though we’ve done all the exercises in the book. It’s hard with this group to keep people with the answers from revealing them to those who don’t, and thus to evaluate who’s getting what. When we started working on -self words (myself, etc), I saw that one girl kept listening to or looking at the girl next to her and not even trying to think. Another girl is trying but struggling. So I had a good idea moment. I wanted to make sure those two had a better comprehension of the idea that “I” goes with “myself,” “he” with “himself,” etc. I’d reviewed the book, written it up on the board, done a lot of Q&A stuff, but no luck. My inspiration was to rip up pieces of paper and make an impromptu memory game. I had the three kids who got it write the words on the “cards,” while I talked to the other two and tried to give them one extra nudge. Then we started to play the game. But we made it only two rounds because I felt I had to move further in the book and there were only 15 minutes left of class.

It was strange: I had had tons of plans and options for that class, and barely scraped the surface. Everything took longer than expected and I had more resources than I needed. On the other hand, the later class went by quickly, even including my theoretical digressions that baffled my young friends. I stretched things as much as I could and had a hard time filling the time. It was because the ideas for my lesson plan seemed wrong to me once I was in the setting, and my lesson plan was full mostly of that kind of stuff. It was a matter of putting all of my eggs in one basket. Yet how can one find the time to put six different eggs in their lesson plan? The two I had weren’t enough but they’d taken many hours to produce. I know that it’s good to have things in my back pocket — I’d brought along an Aesop’s fable, for example