Two Months In

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 10^th graders read as 9^th 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.