I have now been teaching for four weeks!! I still have no books for 9th or 10th grade. Hopefully customs will let them through soon. I am starting to feel slightly more on top of things (some days anyway). I wanted to introduce all of you to my home room class, 7th grade. I have them for devotionals and Earth Science 4 days a week. They are all sweet in their own way and I do love them, but when you put 10 boys and 5 girls into a small classroom they have so much energy and ideas for mischief. I am rapidly learning that their is a wide gap between what works to teach a 10th grade class and what works for 7th graders. I have 1 student from Germany, 2 from Canada, and the rest are all born and breed in Jarabacoa. It is interesting to have such a mixture of second language learners. We are working together to make our classroom a productive, fun, safe and godly place. If any of you have words of wisdom on teaching middle school boys, I would love to hear them. I am always surprised by how many lessons are universal. For example, not poking your neighbor is something I have to tell Kindergartens and seventh graders alike. I hope and pray that I can be the teacher that this class needs me to be and that we can learn to trust each other and have more meaningful times learning about science and about God.
3 comments:
As ever, keep it up!
My experience teaching middle school boys (which I did in Spain) was...pray! And tell lots of jokes, or sing, or dance, or do something pretty dramatic to keep their attention, and then accept that no matter what you do, you won't be able to have their attention at all times anyway. Good luck :-)
Hi Emily,
I enjoy following your experiences in the DR. I have set up a blog for David in Nepal -- he has no internet access. We're hoping when he travels in about 3 weeks, he'll find an internet cafe and make some first-hand posts. Even though your situations are a bit different, you may be interestedin looking at http://sarkuwa.blogspot.com/
Ann
Hi Emily! There is no right way to teach middle school boys, they are what they are :) Remember, they are a lot like your college boys, just smaller. Boys never change :)
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