I worked with Nanosh this evening on what the heck he was going to teach for his first classes - which he wasn't expecting to give until next week.
But how do you introduce yourself as a teacher? I was disillusioned last year - or misinformed - and thought that the students wanted to hear all about my education and how hard I had worked. How horribly I knew African culture, specifically Mozambique. My students just wanted to know who I was, not what I had done. How old I am, brothers, sisters, other family, where I'm from, what food I like to eat, if I cook for myself, etc. And I never presented my students with a person; they had to discover me, little by little. I'll have some of the same students this year (unless I only have 8th grade), but for the new ones, I need to decide how to strike a balance between human informalities and strict rule-setting for the year.
Nanosh is allowing the students to come up with some class rules, too, so we'll see how that goes. Could be a really good idea, or could just be mediocre. That seems to be the general results of any experiment in the classroom. The key seems to be just to keep on trying while realizing that your experience isn't necessarily indicative of what other situations - class sizes, times of day, subject material - may manifest.
This year, I'm planning on basing 50% of my students' grades on testing (most teachers: 100%) and the other 50% as a combination of behavior, absences, homework grades, group-work grades, and a year-long project to help end-of-year exam studies. In order to alleviate homework grading, I'm going to assign it every day, but only randomly collect 5 students' assignments every day. We'll see, like everything else.
I find I've been talking about Phi Kap (my college fraternity) quite a bit lately. I learned so much in my experience there, about working with other people, working toward common, abstract goals, conflict resolution, humor, friendships and selflessness. It's unfortunate that people hear the word "fraternity" and have very different thoughts. In the same vein, "Peace Corps" has a very different connotation than reality.
Peace
John
