3 year olds to retirees in a day

Ok, now I’m sat back in the UK with Elche a world, or at least a good chunk of a continent, away. Here are a few final thoughts.

The first and most striking thing is that trying to distill a typical Leonardo project teacher’s experience is impossible. What I experienced as a kindergarten teacher would be completely different to the teachers who taught adult classes at Top School. The best way to illustrate this is with a description of last Thursday. As well as teaching kindergarten, I taught an adult class observed by Michael in Top School, so I did everything from 3 year olds to retirees in the space of about 8 hours.

At the end of the morning I taught the 3 year old class. They are a very sweet group to teach, but I doubt any adults had to be instructed to go to the toilet and wash their hands upon arrival at Top School classes! With the 3 year olds, repetition of activities is not only not a problem, but really helpful for them to learn. So I did the Slippery Fish song as I had done countless times with 3 and 5 year olds and it still goes down a treat with them no matter how many times they’d done it before. Classroom management is so much more challenging with kindergarten however, and once they were on to their book activity which involved a pop out tadpole that becomes a frog, managing the concentration of children who do the activity at a different speed to the others is very challenging. As the disruptive students can tend to be the ones who gain all the attention, the idea of having all the children’s names on the board moving towards happy and sad faces on the left and right of the board depending on their behaviour in class works well in giving the good children attention, and setting the class the goal of all being on the good side. Once the pop out activity was done, the class really responded to the chance to jump like the frog in the story, but the challenge is to get them to stop! For all the exhaustion they can cause by the end of the day, the level of the English that these children have is phenomenal for their age, and seeing a 3 year old do something very well is enjoyable in a very different way to teaching a lesson where an already competent upper-intermediate adult produces good language that they were in all likelihood capable of producing with or without the teacher.

The early afternoon saw a five year old class where the children were preparing work for a display on the wall about the animal theme that they had been studying in class. After the usual routine activities such as who could tell me the day and date (move to the happy face for those who did
it after putting their hand up and not shouting) and the hello song, we revised animals with flashcards and the Sounds that the Animals Make song, before they had the chance to draw and colour their own favourite animals to go on the wall in the kindergarten building.

This all sounds very straightforward but 5 year olds in the afternoon, when they have been in school since 9am are the height of distracted irritability and disruptiveness, and the energy it takes to manage 18 children this age in the afternoon makes me admire full-time kindergarten teachers but not envy them. I should also say though that I loved doing the kindergarten activities and will really miss some of the children in case anyone thinks I am downbeat
about kindergarten teaching. I really can’t wait to be in a future role in Japan where I will be doing kindergarten classes among other age groups.

After doing a similar class with the other 5 year old class, then assisting Isa as she taught a 5 year old class at the end of the afternoon, I took the bus to get back to Elche. On arriving, I went straight back to the flat to pick up my laptop and drop off kindergarten stuff and headed to Top School where I met Michael who had an idea for the first hour of my adult class. When I got there I found out that I’d be teaching with Steph who was going to bring her class in with mine. I was very pleased about this as after getting used to kindergarten, I was really nervous going back into an adult class. We did a listening lesson based on Elvis Presley’s You were always on my mind. It was great to teach an adult class after several weeks of kindergarten just because the
challenges are so different and I would have missed out if I hadn’t had the chance to teach adults. It was enjoyable having a really motivated small group of adults but I did realise that team teaching is a skill in itself. As much as I think Steph and I understood the activities we were doing, being aware what we were expecting the other to do in class could be a bit stilted.

In the second hour, I had just two adults, both named Jesus. I did the Empire State Building lesson with them which worked very well and felt very easy. Whereas kindergarten involves a lot less preparation than an adult class, once you are confident that the idea for an adult class is good and that you know your lesson, the class runs relatively smoothly. In class with two strong intermediate adults who were keen to learn, compared to the afternoon with 5 year olds felt like everything ran itself. It also gave a chance to deal with more interesting language. The pronunciation drilling that we did at the end with a few words I noticed they had difficulty with also led them to start asking about other areas where they had queries, and drive the class along with problems they had come across in their own use of the language that they wanted to resolve. This was really enjoyable as they were immediately engaged with something they had taken the initiative in wanting to know how to communicate in English. Michael observed and gave great detailed feedback which was extremely valuable for me going forward.

The day ended with Christine, the Top School boss, treating all 15 of the teachers to a fantastic meal which was a great way to celebrate the last week of the project.

My overall final conclusions? I’m really glad I ended up doing kindergarten as I’m so much more confident tackling this again in the future having had this experience, but I couldn’t work full-time in a kindergarten. I loved teaching the adult class, and if I could have four more weeks and sample more adult classes and other age groups I would definitely do it as I would have no problem doubling the time I spent in Elche and getting to experience all the different types of teaching. I was lucky to have great flatmates, other teachers on the project, fantastic colleagues at San Alberto Magno and support from Top School, and superb training from UKLC, and Michael in particular while in Elche. If you’re a new TEFL teacher reading this and thinking of applying in 2013, do it! You are crazy not to take this chance if you get it.

Hywel