It was my second week of actual, full teaching at ACS Jakarta. For those of you who haven't, please read the first part of my teaching experience blog series here. This is the second part and I'm planning to publish at least two more posts.
A Little Bit on the Post Title
"Karena Selama Hidup Kita Belajar" is a book written by Faldo Maldini, the President of PPI UK in 2013/2014. I was working alongside him as the Head of Department of Sports, Arts and Culture; and I must say I have learned so much from him and his story.
The title of his self-biography reminds me a lot of him and the time we worked together. He is a very humble leader who always signed his emails with "Yang masih belajar, Faldo Maldini" which means "The one who's still learning, Faldo Maldini". He is always forgiving whenever I make a mistake or fail to deliver a project, and it always hit me that I too am still learning and could easily make mistakes. Every day is a new day to learn something new, and you as human beings are to seize this opportunity.
Speaking about my teaching experience, I am taken aback by how much I have learned in the past week. I experienced a lot of challenges, stress, emotional breakdown, confusion, and various other conflicts... On the other hand, I have also experienced a new kind of satisfaction, learned to appreciate certain things more, and had quite a lot of fun too! Each day is indeed a different experience. A different group of students also exposes me to different things which requires me to learn or figure out a new way to handle them.
When Things Don't Turn Out the Way You'd Intended...
I am the kind of person who likes to plan things out, yet still allowing a certain degree of flexibility. When it comes to planning for class, I'm still finding it hard to prepare the right amount or structure my lesson logically. Even after discussing it with Mr Ng, sometimes things still don't turn out the way we had planned and we would have to do something else spontaneously. This confuses me and gets me worried about how to prepare the next time. Should I have prepared for the whole week in advance? Should I have prepared some extra exercise just in case?
One day I prepared a certain subchapter to be covered within 1 period but ended up only finishing half of it. The other day I prepared another topic for 2 periods, but finished it within 1 period and had to make up examples spontaneously. These things make me confused. To be fair though, I normally prepare just a day in advance, or on the same day in the morning so it doesn't allow enough time for evaluation and if I happen to finish the lesson early, I wouldn't know where to move on to.
As a result, last Friday I solved my example problem incorrectly and certainly confused the whole class. I sometimes underestimate it just because it's grade 10 material, but I clearly shouldn't have. I need to make sure I understand every little detail before passing on my knowledge to others. Another time I have prepared a worksheet but it wasn't good enough, so I had less than an hour to prepare a new worksheet. Of course I couldn't make it in time and only made a new worksheet the next day. It's quite saddening when things don't go as well as expected, but I hope to be able to overcome this challenge within the next two weeks.
A Little Too Busy for an Intern
You may or may not know that I have had an internship at school before in 2012 for 2 months or so. It was right after I finished IB, before starting at university. Compared to now, the workload was very very light that I had so much free time to do anything I wanted to. I could go home on time, didn't need to prepare for class, didn't even need to teach, and had my weekends free. That time my job was merely assisting my teachers in class when students were doing exercise, marking some homework, or looking at some students' IA. I never felt tired, never felt stressed out, and never even complained.
Now, my job is kind of in the middle of a full fledged teacher and a teacher assistant. I'm only teaching one class (6 periods a week) and assisting in one other class (also 6 periods a week). However, I also have a private tutorial during school hours because the student has free periods, that's 8 periods a week. So in total I have 20 periods a week which is 2/3 the standard for legit teachers, although some teachers happen to get just a few more periods than I do this year. In addition, after school I have 1 hour tutorials on Mondays and Fridays, and 1.5 hour tutorials on Wednesdays.
As a fresh graduate I'm finding this quite a challenge. Even though I seem to have just a few hours compared to a student, I am still working outside these teaching periods to prepare for a lesson, prepare worksheets, mark some homework, and other trivial stuff such as photocopying. When I get home I still have to think about how to teach on the next day, or stress about that homework I haven't finished marking. How I wish I could be a student all my life...
Surely some days are busier than others. One day I forgot to eat my lunch and only ate at 4pm. The other day I had to eat my lunch in 5 minute sections. In this week I went home at 5pm once and at 6pm twice. Every time I get home I'm very tired already and don't have the energy to do work. However, this may be common routine for other teachers. I know some teachers always go home later than 5pm, or often eat their lunch late. Or even teachers who go home at 4.15pm actually bring their work home and continue working in the evening. This thing I should take as the routine, so when I could go home early or eat lunch on time I would be able to appreciate it more.
Someone told me I keep complaining as if it's my first time working. Well duh it actually is! :P (Although I really need to complain less and appreciate the good things in my life more.) It's my first time working such a demanding job. Being a teacher is really not easy. However, it doesn't mean being a teacher is a horrible job. Of course there are some other jobs that require you to work overtime almost everyday, or get scolded by their boss every so often and have to redo their work many times. I think I'm lucky enough to be able to become a teacher, and I know that I actually enjoy teaching at ACS Jakarta. I could only hope that my students do enjoy being taught by me too! :)
Why Is It So Hard to Become a Teacher?
That's a question I have asked myself every day in the week. It is a very demanding job both physically such as having to scream off the top of my lungs and also emotionally such as having to handle misbehaving students. The latter concerns me more than the former. Those who know me well would know that I am not a people person. I'm always scared about how I should present myself to others and how to respond to other people's actions or words. This doesn't help at all when I have to face a class of 24 students, or even a class of 50 students. Teaching is a job that requires one to interact with teenagers not only on the surface level but deeply. So deep as to touch the students' hearts and make it grow.
I often have emotional conflicts where I don't know how to handle a student's misbehaviour. On one hand, I cannot accept their attitude. It's clearly against the rules and I know some teachers would strictly ban their action. On the other hand, I know and realise the student won't like it when teachers discipline them. I too have been in their shoes and I have seen some situations where the students bully and hate strict teachers instead of respecting them. I don't want to be the one teacher that all students hate. Should I handle a case seriously or let it slide? If I just let them do what they want, they won't behave in my class for the rest of the year and other students (even those who aren't in my class) will take me as a chill and relaxed teacher. Which surely is not what I want. But if I am serious and fierce with them, they won't like me and might disrespect me even more.
One day I got really mad because I have warned my students so many times not to do certain things, but they take me lightly and keep repeating it. That day they had crossed the line and I had to take some disciplinary actions. The class went so quiet when I scolded them, and that's the first time I saw that class completely silent. It is an important matter that happens not only in my class, so it is important that teachers tighten up the rules and act accordingly.
However, sometimes after getting angry at my students, I regret my actions and want to apologise. But I don't know whether apologising would be the right move to make, as this shows that I am inconsistent and the students won't take me seriously next time. I do feel bad for them because some students misbehave not because they are naughty, but partly because of the teacher's attitude as well. Therefore it is important for teachers too to know how to handle their class.
I really admire fierce teachers such as...you all know who they are. :) I'm very envious of how they could be strict and fierce when they need to, yet also friendly and humorous at other times. Those teachers are in control of the class, yet students could enjoy and like them too. It's the perfect situation isn't it? No one gets hurt and time is not wasted.
But me? I still need to work very hard in order to get there. Students who know I am an alumnus will underestimate me right from the start. Some might also look down on me because I'm still young. They unconsciously planted a thought in their mind that I won't be serious and get angry at them.
I still remember one teacher told me about his experience teaching kids from dysfunctional family or troubled background. I wondered whether those kids respect him as a teacher and he answered, "well, it has to be earned." Respect is indeed earned and not given. There is no way I could expect my students to respect me right from the start. So now the question is what should I do to get my students to respect me?
I keep asking myself why I respected some of my teachers so much (and I still do up until this point!). I don't know the answer but I reckon one of the reasons was because they respected their students as well as the school rules. In that those teachers know they have to discipline the students when they disobey the rules, but they also know to give the students a certain extent of freedom. This is very mind boggling to me and I guess it isn't something that I could learn within just one month of teaching. Still, I hope to learn as much as possible from this teaching opportunity and hopefully I could be a good teacher for my students someday!
Isn't It Funny When You Are More Worried Than Your Students About Their Deadlines?
It is a crucial time for the gr12 as it is time for them to get serious and spend more effort on their IA, EE and TOK. Unfortunately some students are just indifferent about their study, even though their teachers believe they could do a lot better if only they put in the effort. I agree that this is the case for many students, but sometimes we just can't help it, right?
In a discussion with some of my gr12 students during tutorial, I realised that they only have two weeks to write their maths IA first draft, but many of them have not even found a topic, and the rest who have don't know how to write a good IA. (At the time of writing, they only have about a week left and I know almost none of them have started writing their IA.) I was really upset because I still remember how much guidance I got from my teachers when doing my IAs for all my subjects, but now these students are so lost. This is unfair and I feel that I need to step in. It is very important for the students to do well in their IAs, so in case if they flunk their exams for whatever reason, the IA could bring their grades up. Or even if they do well in the exams but flunk the IA, they might barely miss their IB7 (which has actually happened to many students).
So I had decided to hold an IA tutorial where I went through the criteria with them, showed a variety of examples and explained why those examples were good. I also let them discuss their topics with me and guide them how to narrow down or how to structure. It is very challenging for me too because the IA type now is different from my time, when the tasks were given and we just had to answer the questions. Now they are free to choose their own topics, so this is more like a mini EE and I need to familiarise myself with the types of acceptable topics and not so good topics.
However, I have to say that this is quite exciting for me too, because some students have come up with very interesting topics and it's fun to hear about them too. I feel that becoming a teacher is more of a learning experience because I'm learning more from my students than I'm teaching them. Here I could see that most of these students are actually quite serious and hardworking, but maybe in class they want to have fun and play around.
If any of the gr12s is reading this, please feel free to contact me for help with your IA or EE! I took maths, physics, chemistry and economics, so I hope I could help in those subjects; or give some general advice in any other subject.
In another group of students, the same thing can be observed. Last Friday I had a tutorial and quite surprisingly everyone turned up. However, some of them were there just for the sake of it. Some people couldn't wait to go home, some others just copy from their friends, and some other seemed to be paying attention but may be just pretending.
At 4.30pm (or before then) half of the group went home. To my surprise, the other half stayed there to finish the exercise until almost 5pm. One of them told me he wanted to stay because he knew he needed it. Aww, it was the most touching thing I've heard in this week! Although he added that he meant the exercise and not me. Haha. (It still means the same thing to me though!) ^_^
I'm really touched by these kinds of students. They may seem very playful and loud in class but they know when to be serious and they work hard. It's quite funny how they were trying so much to avoid my tutorial but ended up staying back later than required for it. The fact that they stayed until they finished the worksheet is enough proof that they are serious and this makes me very happy. Yes they still played around, put on weird and inappropriate music even though I told them to stop, but they did the work seriously until they know how to do the questions correctly. Faith in humanity = restored. :')
There Goes My Second Week of Teaching...
It is these kinds of things that get me going as a teacher. I realised I need to appreciate all these little things more, as not all students are willing to learn and be serious about their study. When I was exposed to a cultured group of students, I took it for granted and assumed it as normal. When I saw this misbehaving group, it stressed me out and got on my nerves. I guess it should have been the other way around... That a misbehaving group of students is normal, and a cultured group of students should be a blessing. However, it is what makes teaching an interesting job, and I'm very excited to learn more from my students in the remaining two weeks of my internship period.
To any of my students who might be reading this, please fill my last two weeks with you all with a lot of fun experiences!
And please do not forget to subscribe to hear the latest updates from my blog! ^_^
Yang juga masih belajar,
Desy
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