I forget if I mentioned this on my blog, but a couple months ago my boss was really riding me for about three or four weeks. One of my classes happened to have a high concentration of
parents who Really Care A Lot About Their Children's Supplementary English Education....and observed classes and commented ALL the time. I only started teaching these wee-wahs in September, but apparently they've nitpicked every teacher they've had at my school, asking for little tweaks and complaining about curriculum changes until the counselor--the Korean who serves as an ambassador between the teachers and parents--quits. Seriously, there have been three or four counselors who have quit in recent months, and they've all had this one class. The kids are totally fine; it's just the parents who are.....
involved. Ahem.
Anyway, for a while there my boss was talking to me every single day about little things she wanted me to change. She started observing my classes, requesting changes in my syllabi, and all that. It all ended okay; after a while, she was satisfied and moved on to some other poor teacher. She has a habit of doing this; she'll focus on one foreign teacher at a time, heap criticism on them until they're drowning, and then move on. The majority of her advice and requests are legitimate and helpful; it's just the quantity and frequency--and often, the style of delivery--that can make being in her hotseat so unpleasant. Poor Roommate Kyle is currently in the hotseat. I make him lots of cups of sympathy tea when we get home.
Anyway, the heat is off of me for now, and I haven't heard a peep from the parents of this one class in weeks. Woohoo! I'm writing about them now because I just graded a spelling and vocabulary test I gave them. For being in first grade, they're pretty advanced in their English ability. They're certainly nowhere close to native speakers, but they do pretty well. Plus, they actually do their homework. I can't tell you how much easier that makes my job.
For their weekly spelling-and-vocab tests, they have twenty words they have to spell, and they have to match definitions with eight of those words. Plus, I'm a complete stickler for capitalization and punctuation; if there's a dash missing or a lowercase letter where there should be an uppercase letter, I take off half a point. On this particular test, they had words like leather, brighter, Indian reservation, the Rocky Mountains, and--the piece de resistance--the Mississippi River. (It was mentioned in one of our textbooks.)
And do you know what? Out of seven first-graders, ONE missed that word. She forgot one of the "iss"es. The rest of them nailed it--capitalization and all. In fact, with two bonus words, my little rockstars had an average grade of 100.
WHO ARE THESE MUTANT CHILDREN???
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