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I'm not enough

11/13/2014

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This more or less seems to sum up how I feel right now. I'm not enough. Of anything. The other teachers are talking about my classes, the students are talking with their teachers about my classes, they're all speaking to my liaison and all on top of what I heard last week when my field director came to observe my class. Basically, the teachers are trying to figure out what's going on for me to have such noisy classes and the students told them they don't understand me when I'm teaching. So I need to do easier things than what I have been doing. If this is not the case, then you must be tougher and your rules must be simpler. I don't really know which class either. I always feel bad for my Monday and Tuesday classes because they're often the first run of my lesson and I'm not as clear on Monday as I am on Friday. I know they want to help, and I do want to be better, but it hurts so much right now. I did bring a student in for spraying a can in my classroom on Monday, I did take points and collect about 5 notebooks from students who were throwing. I've noticed I have students that just repeat everything I say because I sound funny or because they're mocking me, who knows? I've changed my points system, I'm trying to really lay down the consequences and I know that I am sometimes hard to understand. It's reawakened all the old insecurities I had the last time I was in a teaching position in college and my site mate is telling me to let it go, but that's so much easier said than done when you take this kind of job and all that criticism so personally. Because I see that pattern in all the feedback I've gotten, that I need to be more assertive. And it hurts to think that even now as I'm working harder to be that assertive teacher, I still make so many mistakes, I'm inconsistent, I forget things, and even as I fight to be better it's just not good enough. I almost cried on the way home today when I got the news that the other teachers were trying to figure out what the problem was with my extremely noisy classes. That's their job and they are doing it very well, but once again I can't help feeling all my inexperience and disappointments with myself weighing on me. To know what a poor job I am doing and how that must look to colleagues I respect a lot, especially given that they really do all the hard work with grammar and preparing for their exams, just really really gets to me. And I'm afraid I shamed students or made them cry with something too difficult to understand. 

On the flip side of all this, I was told that students just get really excited about my class so I shouldn't punish them for being excited....I just don't know where to draw that line. I did everything wrong during that first week and I almost feel like I need to start from scratch again. I'm planning on going to Changsha to take part in another teacher's English corner and it's at the WT headquarters so I guess I can talk to others when I get there. It'll be nice to be back in Changsha (more specifically, the corner of Changsha that I know) and maybe get some help when I'm there.
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    I'm a 3rd year WorldTeach volunteer.
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    The views stated on this blog are mine and do not reflect the opinions or positions of Worldteach.

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