Today, after a rather nice holiday (I didn't visit last week), it was back to Nampeidai.
I was a little apprehensive, a bit more so because David was coming to watch my classes.
I had left my teachers with a lesson to teach in my absence. When I got there, I found out they hadn't done it. Since the lessons had been planned to be relatively easy for the teachers to do themselves, I left them to run a fair bit of the lessons, just taking over for some of the pronunciation stuff. On the whole, it went quite well, definitely an improvement over the last two times. As the teachers were more in control, they felt more responsible for controlling class behaviour. The kids still had a very short attention span, and a tendency to start talking loudly given half an opportunity, but it was an improvement over last week. Having David there probably helped also, another knowledgeable adult floating around and keeping them on task.
It also helped that with my worst class, the ringleader spent the lesson in the corridor, for some reason not quite known to me, except he pissed the homeroom teacher off quite badly just before the lesson was supposed to start.
Having said that, at one stage during that lesson, while playing alphabet karuta (small groups have letters A-Z spread out in front of them, I say a letter, and the first one to grab it wins that round), I looked over to one kid's desk, to find the words "munty sex" spelt out...
I had a really good meeting with the teachers after school, and I am cautiously optimistic that we have put together a lesson plan (quite different from any I've done for that lesson at any other school), that will hopefully keep them focused and active for most of the lesson.
Just to balance that out, I couldn't find my year 5 teachers for a meeting. Oh well...
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