First day of school

28/07/14

After settling in over the weekend, today was my first day at school! I was quite nervous because I've been told that I can come across as shy and this isn't ideal when trying to make friends/colleagues in a workplace (must work on shaking off the newly acquired 'shy' label). That said, I wasn't too worried as I am quite confident working with children.

The school day was kicked off by the daily student run assembly. Classes lined the hall, standing. One older student on the stage led the hall in a pledge, followed by an army-like "attention! At ease!" Following this were a couple of songs sung by the school in perfect unison and times tables repetition led by a year 10 (which I struggled to keep up with!)

After assembly I met and briefly talked with the English teacher then followed her to class 7* grammar. I introduced myself as Miss Rachel and they all laughed as I attempted to pronounce some of their names. During that lesson I mostly observed and questioned students on verbs and adverbs, which they had perfectly memorised answers for.

Later in the day I went to Class 9. In England year 9 has a bit of a rep for being the difficult year in terms of behaviour, but this class definitely didn't fit that mould. They were quite shy when I spoke to them at first.. I think this was the class that found my accent the hardest to understand. I led the class, reading a traditional Indian short story and questioning the class as I went. The teacher asked me to read to the class so they could pick up the English way of speaking, but when I stopped to ask questions I was met with a lot of blank stares.

Class 10 has about 13 students and begun with a girl giving an impressively detailed summary of a short story 'The Bet' which they had read in the previous lesson. I went through the sections on themes, characters etc with the class and I think they also had difficulty with my accent, but as they got used to it they were putting their hands up more to answer questions. In my second period with this class, the pace picked up a bit and I noticed some very intelligent students in the class. The plot of the story involved two characters having a debate over capital punishment vs life imprisonment. One question about their opinions on the subject led into a very interesting debate which I recorded in a pros/cons style chart on the board. I was surprised by some of the well thought out and mature responses to the question. I look forward to teaching this class more, I think I will learn a lot from them.

*In England we call it year, here they call it class.