Catching Up

Thanks to both of you who left helpful comments about finding the guidelines! It's nice feeling like I will be able to get a handle on what I'm doing.

This blog has fallen by the wayside with all the other events happening in my life, but I'd like to resurrect it and try to keep it going. I find myself struggling with job insecurity and lack of structure in the environment and wonder if I will be able to continue working like this for the rest of my life, or if it's time to find another career. At times I feel like I'm just not doing a very good job, or at least the job I would like to do, although sometimes the reasons for that are beyond my control. My adult students are nice, but not always motivated and I find sometimes that their expectations of what teachers are supposed to do just don't meet my teaching style. As in, some of them want someone completely grammar-focused with lots of worksheets and I don't get the idea they believe that a mix of some grammar combined with communicative-based activities will lead to progress. I've been told I need to "stick with the book and hit grammar hard" with my new batch of classes, but while some students are okay with this, others are not. I really feel like I am damned if I do, damned if I don't, not to mention the fact that I'm not a "stick with the book and pound away at grammar" kind of teacher. How to please all of the students and thus the bosses? Not an easy path to trod. Business courses are okay but I'm not passionate about teaching presentation/meeting skills for the billionth time, and I just don't have enough real courses with the young ones. On the other hand, I'm grateful I am employed, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.

When things die down, I'll post more and ask a few specific questions I've been thinking about. For now, I'd just like to know any nice things people have done for Halloween with young learners. The Toussaint holiday comes at a time that more or less makes lessons on Halloween too early or too late, so we decided to have our 'celebration' after the fact. I thought it might be nice to have something fun to come back to, but I'll let you know if that was a wise decision. I found some nice activities at FamilyFun.com that I'd like to try, although I did need to ask my mom to bring a few supplies with her when she visited.

Today I bought a copy of Meg and Mog that I'd like to use to get some good language going (I'm still working on getting those kids to understand English can be used to talk about things and is more than knowing the word for the flashcard), so if anyone has used that successfully, I'd like to know. I do know that I have too many things planned for this one class, so I'll have to rank things in order of importance. I definitely want to work in the target language (easy stuff like parts of the face/body and simple "It's/They're" sentences), so some of the craft stuff will probably have to be really quick and easy. I'm tickled to add in a little bit of culture but want to make sure there's still a language focus and not just a random craft, no matter how cute it is, that has nothing to do with what we're trying to accomplish.

I've also made up a quick mini-play that I am determined to get one class involved in...I think they are ready but it's a new step for them and my biggest challenge is to get them using English in addition to playing around with the props. Last week I wanted them to act out the story in our English Adventure unit...they enjoyed the story, they enjoyed playing with the parts of Mr. Potato Head, but I waited until the end of class and they were too scattered to really be able to do the language functions that I know they can perform. One of my gems was busy trying to stick things up his nose, so that was a distraction that I did not predict. Next time I will know and be prepared. Sheesh. On a positive note, I do see kids making progress and I'm pretty tickled with that. If only I could do this all day! I love having reasonably-sized classes and good materials, which is what is keeping me from trying to do this in an actual school. I have heard so many local horror stories from the assistants that I'm pretty put off on trying to work for the public schools.