Teaching Practicum

Last Friday started our PST teaching Practicum, and frankly, despite the picture above of me smiling with 7 adorable schoolgirls, it was a pretty terrible experience. If you look closely, you'll see that I'm not actually wearing my "this-was-awesome" smile, but instead the "why-the-heck-do-they-want-a-picture-with-me" smile. Let me explain things a little bit....

Last Thursday we were informed that "tomorrow, you will be teaching your first class of students here in Armenia". Since no mention of teaching actual students had been made prior to this, I was alarmed at the lack of preparation time we were given. We were told what grade we would be teaching, but apart from that, we were given no direction as to what their English proficiency levels would be, what they were studying in their normal English classes, or what we should try to teach them in the time we were given- although the Peace Corps staff did give us a format for what they called a "successful dialogue". It essentially stated that we should be sure to name the people speaking, use contractions, and make our dialogues 8 to 10 turns long, with each participant given 3 to 5 lines. 

I was assigned to the 4th grade- the youngest group of students involved in our practicum lessons. Students here start to study English in the 3rd grade. Basically, what this meant was that my students knew essentially zero English and I knew essentially zero Armenian. We were scheduled for a 30 minute lesson after school on a Friday in weather that easily soared into the 90s during the day. Fantastic. 

Needless to say, the first lesson was a disaster. Unprepared as I was, I decided to try to do a simple listening exercise with the students. Thursday night, Sam and I recorded a simple conversation on my iphone- it fit the PC's rubric on every point:

Sam: Hello. My name's John. What's your name?

Molly: Hello, John. My name's Anna. How are you?

Sam: I'm fine, thank you. How are you?

Molly: I'm well. Where are your from?

Sam: I'm from America. Where are you from?

Molly: I'm from Armenia.

Sam: Goodbye.

Molly: Goodbye.

These were things that we had heard almost every student in our village shout at us in the streets, so I thought it wouldn't be a difficult lesson for the 4th graders- simple introductions- right? Well, apparently they weren't so simple. What I wanted to do what have the students listen to the conversation (part by part) and translate the simple sentences into Armenian. I started by drawing a boy and a girl stick figure on the chalk board and having them listen to the conversation.

And the classroom went wild. I don't know what went wrong, but I couldn't get them to pay attention to listening at all. Perhaps it was because a listening activity was an entirely new idea for these kids, or perhaps it was simply because it was after school on a Friday afternoon in the summer time.They kept shouting "boy" and "girl" at me and pointing to the chalkboard. They jumped out of their seats. One boy kept jumping out of his seat and purposely falling over when I told him to sit down. It was basically a 30 minute long zoo. At one point, I was so overwhelmed that I tried to find someone who spoke Armenian to help me get the kids in order, but there was no one there to help. (This became a very contentious point- our training director insists that there were teachers in the hallway if we needed help, but my experience was that there were none. I looked. Many times. There were none.) 

About 25 minutes into the class, one adult did stick her head into the classroom to tell us that "since we started late, we should go for an extra 10 minutes".  Before I could tell her that we had not in fact started late, I absolutely did not want to go another 10 minutes with these monsters, and for the love of God, please don't leave me here alone with them- she was gone. 

In the grand total of 40 minutes, we successfully identified the names of the two people in the conversation. That was it. I ended up keeping the students for another 5 minutes after the surprise 10 minutes because no one came to stop me. I kept waiting for someone- these kids teacher? maybe a parent? Some responsible adult to come and take responsibility for the room of 9 year olds. But no one came. Eventually, since I had no idea what else to do, I just let them go and hoped they all got home okay. (Well, hoped most of them got home okay, there were one or two who I hoped stepped in dog poop on the way home.) I felt like crying.

I seriously considered leaving the program that night. What am I doing here? I wondered. I'm not a teacher. I don't even like kids. I never wanted to do this with my life. I applied to be a health sector volunteer. Why did the Peace Corps tell me to teach? I think that if it weren't for Sam, I might have left. Fortunately, we've been together for a while, and he's seen me through a few rough patches. He reminded me that every time I get a new job I have at least one complete and total melt down in which I'm utterly convinced that I am completely unsuited to the position, that I'll never be able to learn the new skillsets necessary, and that I'll be a total failure. He then reminded me that eventually I pretty much rocked every one of those jobs that I agonized over not being able to do. It took a while for me to listen to him, but eventually it started to sink in.

Once I stopped panicking, I started to think critically about the experience I'd just had, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn't so much that I'd failed as it was that I had been given an impossible task with insufficient support from the Peace Corps. I had been given minimal time to prepare, thrown to a group of students with whom I shared no common language, and who had every reason to misbehave (they were hot, it was beautiful weather outside, it was after school on a Friday when they should have been starting their weekend), and given no leverage with which to enforce good behavior (it's not as if I can give them bad grades or detention). In the week that's followed, I've also realized that the idea of an auditory dialogue is completely alien to these kids: I doubt they've ever been forced to listen to spoken English (without supporting text) before in their lives.

All of this made me feel very unsupported by the Peace Corps training program, and very frustrated by the experience. This frustration grew when I confronted our training manager about the lack of support, and was essentially told "oh, yes, you were supported". "No," I tried to explain, "I wasn't". "Yes, you were," was the response. We continued to have a rather unproductive conversation for several minutes before deciding that one of the Peace Corps staff and the students' teacher would be present for my next lesson. I felt marginally better, but not much.

We had our second class today (after which the photo above was taken) did go better than the first- for several reasons. First, the PC staff really did deliver on the promise to have some one in the room this time: the students homeroom teacher, the headmaster, and a member of the PC training staff all sat in the back of the  classroom and observed- with all these real authority figures from their lives present, the students were on their best behavior. Second, the worst-behaved student, the one who seemed intent on purposefully disrupting the lesson, wasn't there today and as a result, the other students who had trouble concentrating due to his shenanigans last class were much better able to focus. Finally, having thought long and hard about how Armenian students are normally taught, I abandoned the PC's instructions on the use of dialogues in the classroom, and instead focused the class in a different, more familiar direction. 

We spent the first half of the lesson today going over our two classroom rules (focus on the lesson only, and speak on your turn only) which I had written in both Armenian and English on a large piece of paper and posted to the blackboard, and the three Important Words of the Day: Quiet, Please; Sit Down; and Listen Carefully. I had taken the week to memorize the Classroom Rules and the Important Words in Armenian, so I that I was able to ensure that all the students understood what these expressions meant, and so we would all be on the same page for baseline behavior. That was really my only goal for the class. 

We spent the remaining 15 minutes reviewing colors. I mostly chose colors because I had some colored construction paper at home and was able to make flashcards for the students easily. We used reviewing the color vocabulary (which- it turns out, they already knew) as a structure through which we could practice the classroom rules and the important words. Things actually turned out rather well, I don't know that the kids learned a lot of English during the lesson, but  that was also true of last weeks class, and this week I didn't feel like crying afterwards, so I'm going to go ahead and say that it was an improvement. And the girls in the class all wanted a photo with me afterwards, which I guess was cute. 

I absolutely think that the only way to learn how to teach is to actually practice teaching, but it still strikes me that there must be a better way to go about organizing a teaching practicum than this. I'll have to think on it some more, and probably wait until I have some more distance from the problem to really be able to offer any solutions, though.