First day of school

Today I finally started at the school. It was a nice easy day, turns out on Tuesday I will only have classes in the morning, which was nice for the first day. All this week I am just observing, getting to know the school, the kids, and the other teachers. On Monday I will start teaching, so I have all week to plan my lessons for next week. As I'm sure I mentioned before, I will be teaching 5th through 8th grades. There are two classes in each grade except in fifth grade there is only one. Today I met both 7th grade classes and one of the 8th grade classes. So far I would definitely say the 8th graders seem the most challenging, but I also think they might be the most fun. They talk A LOT and many of them have problems staying in their seats. But a lot of them asked me questions that made me smile such as: Do you know any famous people, like Justin Beiber? At least five of them asked me if I have Facebook (luckily I am hard to find, I do not need my students looking at all my pictures and such on there), and several asked if I have a boyfriend. I tried my best to present myself as an authority figure, but sometimes it's hard because I know I look young. But I think it will be fine. I think it's cute that they are so interested in me. One student took a picture of me with her cellphone.

I was expecting the teachers to be strict, but I was surprised by how much the kids seem to get away with. The classroom (at least from what I saw) is quite different from what I've seen and worked in back home. There seem to be a lot more rules in the states. Also the way teachers interact with the students here is a lot more laid back than in the US. At my school, teachers can wear jeans and pretty much whatever they want. The kids call the teacher Tìa or Miss and then the teacher's first name. And the contact with the children is very different. Here it is perfectly normal to saludar the children, which is a kiss on the cheek as a greeting. This is very different for me, as in the states when a kid hugs a teacher, you pretty much have to raise your hands up in the air to avoid being "inappropriate". I definitely prefer this laid back approach, but I am going to have to make sure that the children know they must respect me and listen to me so that I don't have issues with classroom management.

My schedule will work as following: the classes are split into "hours" which really last about 45 minutes. Most of the time a class will have two hours in a row of English. So for the first hour, the class will stay together and I will be co-teaching with Ana. Then for the second hour, we will split the class and half will go with me into my own classroom. I am pretty lucky to have my own classroom, because here in Chile the teachers move around the rooms not the children. But I will have my own room because it is part of the requirements the government asks of the school, so that there can be a designated English only space. It will be nice to have a space I can decorate however I want and also to leave my stuff in there. So during the time that I have kids in my classroom, we will be doing activities that I plan, and the rest of the class will be with Ana doing what she planned. Then the next time we have that class we will switch so that we both get to work with everyone. The nice thing about that is I essentially only have to plan every two weeks.

In addition to teaching normal English classes, I will be doing an English workshop with a smaller group from each grade. This is pretty much like an extra class, open to anyone who wants to come, but they have to sign up. 5th and 6th graders will be together, and then 7th and 8th grade seperate. During this time, which will be about an hour and a half, I will get to do whatever I want. It doesn't have to follow the curriculum. I am definitely most excited about this, I plan to do lots of games, use music, videos, art, theater dancing, whatever. The point of these workshops is to spend some extra time with the kids who are most interested in English. Ana told me a lot of kids are excited about it, and they already have more signed up than I was originally supposed to accept. I guess I am just going to take them all for now, assuming some will probably end up dropping out.

I am quite happy with my schedule and the set up we have for teaching. It's nice that I don't have to plan everything, but I still get to do some planning, and I will have plenty of freedom to do some things the way I want to. I am really excited to start working with the kids and getting to know them. Overall they seem to be really sweet and capable of learning a lot.