My biggest take-aways from this last term have been:
- Student assistants. I resisted because they're students as well but I've finally accepted that in the Chinese school system, students are given different jobs anyway. That and when you have so many classes, picking someone responsible who knows who's who and can help you find the people you need is very valuable. So next term I will give my class notebook to a responsible student where they can record the names of students I have carded, need to talk to, and who I needed to take to the head teacher.
- Consistency in class points and discipline. Now that I have more ways for students to earn their points back when they've been lost, I can take points with less concerns about coming off as unreasonably harsh when I'm aiming to be authoritative. For the most part, they're good kids but my biggest issue is the recurring noise level.
- The importance of recording everything. I have class points from most weeks, but some are dated funny, or we had a break we weren't told about, or we had a class on the weekend to make up for a lost day so not every day in my classes was accounted for when I was putting things into my excel sheet.