Teaching, Finally

We are actually teaching classes this week! After much, much confusion over who, exactly, our students were going to be, we've mostly (kind of, sort of) got things going. Half of the people in our group are teaching what was supposed to be a camp for high schoolers, but actually has children from 5 all the way up to 17 years old. They must be doing a good job, because each day they get more new children being dropped off.

I am in the half of the group that is teaching the teachers from this college who are not in the English department. We were told at first we would have over 100 teachers, once all the departments sent their contingents. In reality, we have about 30-40, and even though we're trying to make the class changing schedule clear to them, they keep regrouping themselves in the hallway in between classes and showing up in random places. I think they'll grasp the concept about the time we're done teaching them.

Since we don't actually have 100 people, we've been team teaching in four classrooms and trying to rotate the students through 4 classes and a 5th discussion hour back in their first classroom. I'm team teaching with Lee. Since Lee is a high school history teacher in the US and I'm good at coming up with integrated ESL topics, Pat P. put us in charge of deciding on the discussion topics for the 5th hour. This means we're lucky because we've been tying our own class topic to the larger discussion topic, which makes our class seem so integrated and organized.

Our students seem to be enjoying all the classes in general, even if they are generally confused about where to go. Hopefully this means that next year, if it happens again, everything will be much more organized, because people here will know more about what to expect.