My day as a real teacher

Last week, the woman I normally teach with in the mornings on Thursdays couldn't come to school. Since I am not actually a teacher, I was not allowed to be alone in the classroom but still I was in charge.  For the first time ever pretty much, I gave an entire one hour ingles lesson to a class of 27 Spanish six year olds, three one hour classes to be exact. This is not totally and completely new to me, as I have spent the last three months teaching myself how to teach on the job teaching English in a private academy. But boy was this experience different from teaching after school classes of eight students max. 

Additionally, the teacher didn't leave me much of a lesson plan. She told me to review everything we have learned so far, a very daunting task it seemed at first. I was lucky enough to have an English teacher with me in class the first hour but before we started he said to me "today you are the teacher and I am the assistant, the class is all yours". Whoa. Well long story short it turned out okay. The next two classes I didn't have an English teacher in the room with me, just another teacher who had a break period. So I am glad I was able to do the trial run with an English speaker in the room. 

The at first overwhelming task of reviewing everything we have learned so far turned out to be quite the opposite. Since the children are so young, the amount of material we have covered is really small but at the same time quite impressive. These little pipsqueaks have really soaked up a lot of vocabulary since I started with them in October. We reviewed the parts of the body and face (don't think I even knew the word torso when I was 6 years old!), we made a list of healthy versus unhealthy foods, (most still think hamburgers are healthy but we'll chalk that up to a cultural difference not lack of vocabulary), we talked about the members of our families and modes of communication (doesn't hurt that the Spanish word for radio is radio and the word for Internet is Internet).  Still very pleased with the progress we've made. 

And to be honest I am pretty pleased with myself. What I imagined at first would be a disaster actually turned out to be an enjoyable day. One of the three classes gave me a lot of trouble and it was very discouraging. But after talking to a few other teachers during recess they all told me not to worry because this class is a problem for everyone. Feel bad for their teacher. In the other two sections we had a lot of fun playing games, reviewing flashcards and even learning some new vocabulary. Although my day was mostly a success, I still don't think I see teaching in my future. 27:1 is never a good ratio, no matter how patient you are!