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.

I’ve imbued the students with the power of judges, and to make me feel good or bad about what I’m doing. Ultimately, they are the judges, since my botched step could impede their progress.

My feelings are 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 the director with her parents, to withdraw from the class. She’s studied at the school for a while 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 the director, a perfectionist, and can’t stand it if she can’t understand every single thing. She can understand Spanish-inflected English but not mine. 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.

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.
• My speech patterns. I do try to keep my sentences short. But I don’t always succeed.
• Probably my teaching style.

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 the young girl: I think I’ll ask her to sit next to the man 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.