Tongan Take-aways : Practice Teaching

October 2, 2012

We have started teaching this week and so far it has been going really well! Monday was nice to get a gage at what the kids actually know, and unfortunately what all the old volunteers have been saying is true, they are way behind where they should be… They are mostly all a grade level or 2 behind where they are “supposed” to be (according to the curriculum) but some kids are where they should be. The differences in ability between each kid are vast and it makes me realize just how hard this job is going to be… Teaching the class five kids was more challenging than I thought and I have learned that repetition never gets old in the classroom, if you don’t repeat something at least five or six times the students will not know what you are talking about. We spent two hours today teaching the kids about Characters, events, and settings in a story and after reading the book 3 times and doing 4 separate activities they still had trouble giving me their exit tickets (before they left the class they had to tell me the main character of the book and one event and one place). Side note here: the book was called My Airplane, it is about 7 pages and no page has more than 2 sentences on it, just to give you an idea of where the students are.

All in all it is super fun though and even though it can be really frustrating when the students just stare at you blankly or look around at their fellow students to copy. They copy everything, and they are too shy to really try. In their normal schooling they just do a lot of copy from the board and listen to the teacher, so the idea of group work or trying and getting the answer wrong and that being okay is very foreign to them. It will be nice to get my own class and set up my own learning environment with the knowledge of what my student’s abilities are.

All the students are adorable and they all think that we are the most fascinating thing they have seen. They just circle around us when we come to the school and now they all know our names so when we walk around the village they all call out “Sifa eh!”