I am going to
preface writing about my school experience and the differences between the
Hungarian and US systems by saying that I am still learning A LOT of
information that will affect my views moving forward. What I say in this post
might be contradicted in a following post because I learned something new or my
views changed. Obviously this whole experience is about changing and growing,
so I fully expect following posts to reflect those changes.
Moving on…
I’m
at the two month mark of teaching here and I can finally remember my
schedule – most of the time! J I consider that a win because at the beginning I
was checking my agenda every 15 minutes to remember what I had to do next. Things
are looking up!
One major
difference between Lakeshore and Szegedi is that nothing is electronic here.
All of the teachers share 3 computers and 1 copier/printer. Teachers are
allowed 50 copies per month. The administration here allowed me to have extra
copies, but I feel bad using them when no one else gets extra, so I tend not
to. Messages and notices are not emailed – there is a white board in the staff
room where these get written, so teachers have to make sure to check the board
regularly. At first, when I was told nothing was emailed my inner, email-reliant,
American recoiled in horror thinking “how do you ever communicate with one
another?” but since everyone is in the same room between classes it is much
easier to talk to someone. Actually it is a nice switch from the impersonal
email notes to physically walking over to someone’s desk and having a real conversation.
I think, at home, technology can isolate us in our classrooms, so I have
enjoyed moving away from that.
Staying in the
same vein of nothing is electronic brings me to how I record grades and take
attendance. Each class (9B, 10B, 11A, 11B, 11C, you get the idea) has its own
record book called a Naplo. Teachers take the Naplo to class with them every time
and mark attendance in there. We also have to record what we did that day in
that class. The descriptions can be very basic though – I wrote “Halloween
Vocab” and “Discuss Fall Break” for two of my latest. At the end of the Naplo
is one page dedicated to each kid in the class. On this page there is the kid’s
personal information such as address, parent’s names, etc as well as their
grades. Grading is MUCH different here than in the US. For starters, I grade less
here than I do at home. The general rule of thumb is that per semester each
teacher needs to have a grade for how many times a week they see the class,
plus one. For example, I see my 10B groups twice a week. That means I should have at
least 3 grades per semester for them. However, I have found that most teachers
grade more than this, myself included, but it is still not as much as I do at
home i.e. I don't have any 5-8 page papers staring at me out of my school bag this year. :) Not all students have to have the same number of grades however. It is
perfectly OK for one kid to have 6 grades in the Naplo for a certain class and
another student to have 3. That was a big shock to me since at home everyone has the same amount of grades with rare exceptions.
Differing
numbers of grades brings me to my next point which is really several points in
one. If a student chooses not to do an assignment there are no immediate repercussions
for that. If a student opts out of several assignments, the teacher can enter a
1 in the Naplo (grades are on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the best), but one
missing assignment does not always equate to a 1 in the Naplo. I’m not sure how
I feel about this rule because then I wonder if the kid is really being penalized
for not doing assignments and how that factors into their final grade. That is
a question I will have to come back to after we figure kids final grades in
January. Also, if students do not do assignments it is not the teacher’s job to
hold them after class, chase them down, call their parents, or otherwise ensure
that the work gets done. The onus for learning is placed much more on the
student’s shoulders and not the teacher’s. I do think I like the idea of the students
being held more responsible for their own grades than sometimes happens in the
US. The current climate of teachers being held solely responsible for a student’s
learning absolves that child of any self-responsibility which will be detrimental
for them in long-run. (As well as absolves our law makers of seeing the
complete and complicated picture of education, but that is a topic for another
day) However, I have seen the difference
that a teacher makes by taking the extra step (or two or three) for a child and
I can’t discount the idea of the teacher having a responsibility to help
his/her students succeed. There has to be a happy medium in there somewhere!
One of my
biggest challenges so far has been figuring out my student’s ability level. I
take for granted at home that I will have their ability levels nailed down pretty
well within the first week or two. Here though, I am embarrassed to admit it
has taken me closer to two months, although to be fair, some classes I haven’t
even seen the equivalent of two weeks yet. In the beginning, when the students
were still afraid to talk in class, I would ask a question and no one would
answer. Then I was left wondering if they didn’t answer because they really
didn’t know, if I didn’t make my question clear enough, or if they just didn’t
want to speak in English. Thankfully this problem is going away now that they
are more comfortable with me, but sometimes I still have to remind them they
have to answer me somehow!
The other big
struggle I had was trying to figure out the “scope and sequence” of what they already
learned and what they should learn by the end of this year. Again, that is
something I take for granted since I am very familiar with Lakeshore’s curriculum.
I know what my 10th graders read as 9th graders and I
know what skills they were supposed to have learned so I know where to start.
Here though, it is a whole different story. Not every class has done the same
thing and not every class is working on the same material. For example, I have
two 10B groups, but one is working in one book and the other group is working
in another. I didn’t realize how much I relied on my knowledge of “scope and
sequence” at home until I no longer had it here! I spent quite a few weeks
wondering if what I was doing was productive or too hard or too easy. I started,
then discarded, more ideas and assignments than I can count. I’m sure I will
spend the rest of my year doing that to some extent, but those first several
weeks of feeling like I was floundering were difficult. To sum it up, it is really
hard to go back to being a first year teacher who has a very limited idea of
the larger picture of the school/school system/curriculum/students/etc. I think
I tried to block out those memories, or at least look at them with rose-colored
glasses, so being forced to confront all of those uncertainties and insecurities
was tough.
Now, to what I
am actually doing in class. As I said last time, my main goal is to get the
students more comfortable with communicating in English, so they need to speak
a lot in English, which they don’t love. I usually start out each class by
going around the room and making the students tell me about their weekend or
something that happened since I last saw them. This is pretty easy to do
because I don’t see my students everyday so something has usually happened they
can talk about. I am working right now on getting them to expand on what they
say, which is hard because sometimes they simply don’t know the words to do
that. Instead of just saying “I went to my grandmother’s this weekend” I want
them to start telling me what they did there and if they enjoyed it. This will
obviously be a year-long goal as even my strongest students are not super at
verbally expounding on a subject.
Now that I am
much more familiar with each class’ and student’s ability level I am designing
projects and assignments that will get them speaking for a more real life scenario.
I want to work with some students/classes back home so my students in Hungary
have an actual audience who will hear them speak. I also am going to have my
students do a variety of “presentations.” Anything from mock debates with a
classmate, to solo discussions of a topic (random or student chosen), showing
the class how to do something (like a verbal Process Essay), sales presentations
for a product or place, etc. Really anything that will get them speaking at
length in English.
I had a few of
my classes do an in-class writing assignment where each kid starts a story by
writing one sentence. Then they pass their papers to the next kid who adds one
more sentence to the story and on and on until the paper comes back to its
original writer with a, hopefully, completed story written on it. What I found
when I read these stories was that my students did not have a good grasp of the
cohesion of a piece written in English. There were many tense changes and point
of view changes and things that just didn’t make any sense. (To be fair, the
same thing happens when I do this assignment with my US students as well) Another
goal of mine has become to expose them to as many pieces of English text as
possible: articles, poems, short stories, short novels (for my advanced group –
they want to read The Great Gatsby
which I am thrilled about!), newspaper stories, etc. The more they read and
hear cohesive English texts, the better they will get at producing their own
and finding their own mistakes. This is a challenge for me to find texts that
are appropriate skill-wise for the students. I got one article from TheWeek.com
and made some adjustments to it to make it a little easier. I thought I was
good to go until the first group started reading it and were clearly completely
overwhelmed. I had to go back and quickly revamp it again before the next group
so that we weren’t spending all of our time deciphering vocab words instead of
discussing the main point of the article.
I have also
begun playing word games with the students just so they relax and have fun with
the English language. The word games impart the idea that language is a puzzle
to figure out and that we can figure it out together. I want them to learn that
it is OK to make a mistake and we can all learn from each other and still have
a good time. I really enjoy the moments when the whole class is working
together to solve the puzzle (me included sometimes!) because they are engaged
in the language in a positive way.
