Okay, so today I arrived about 15 minutes early for my 1:00 class. It was a class with Annie so I was expecting to have a lesson plan all laid out for me like last time and I thought I'd have a couple of minutes to look it over. I waited 15 minutes in the teacher's lounge for Annie to come in and give me the lesson plan (last time it was waiting for me in my box but since it wasn't there this time I figured she'd hand deliver it). At 1 o'clock Annie comes in and says, 'Ah, there you are, the students are waiting.' She then brought me to her class room, handed me a course outline and 5 students and we all went to the classroom next store to work. It turned out the lesson plan she had designed this time was very similar to last time's: review the alphabet, practice some new memorized phrases, and do a role play (this time as someone leaving a message for someone staying at a hotel). The lesson plan lasted almost the entire hour, we had about 5 minutes at the end in which we played hang man (to practice the alphabet of course). The second hour was with 6 students doing the same work. We finished the assigned work in half an hour. I was not going to let the students play hang man for 30 minutes to I made them right their own role play using the phrases they had memorized. That worked well and left us with about 5 minutes at the end for hang man. After that I had another two hours of classes with Annie during which time we watched a 3 minute video as a class. She gave the students 2 minutes for notes and then let them watch the video again. After that she gave them 15 minutes to write up a summary of the video. Than she sent me one at a time to have a dry run of the test they will have on a similar video in 2 months. This is a serious test and I was given a grading criteria sheet, an organized summary of the movie that they should be able to get somewhat close to, and a couple of questions ('ask them questions like these'). I was not allowed to help them during their summary and I was to ask the questions as they were written because they had studied them (even though the grammar was wrong on a couple of them). I was supposed to have each student for 20 minutes. In the end I only talked to 3 students in the 2 hours I was with Annie (all that time watching the video and preparing etc.) I was unable to talk to a student for more than 15 minutes, although for one it was less than 10, because they could not answer the questions in detail and their summaries were short. I was supposed to be able to have a conversation with them for the rest of the 20 minutes about the film but as I could not help them with words and I wasn't supposed to tell them answers, if they got stuck or didn't know, we ran out of things to talk about very quickly. After that I had an hour with Laurent, he was giving a test and had told the students that they could ask me if they had any vocab questions. That was fairly easy except for when I didn't understand the question, their was more than one possible answer, or I couldn't think of a translation. I worked 5 hours today which leaves me only 7 for the rest of the week. However, this week I will only work 10 hours because that is how the schedule worked out. I am halfway done! Laurent asked me to write some transcripts of 5 minute video clips since I have some unaccounted for hours, this sounds like good fun to me and I am excited to get starts.
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I met another American assistant last weekend. She came to my house with the Spanish assistant from the town over to spend the weekend with us (their town is very quiet and boring on the weekends). I was not very interested in meeting her because, as I put it, I have enough American friends already. But I was surprised by how much I liked her and how relieving it was to fall back into my old pattern of banter. It really does change my communication style to be living with people from other countries and I didn't realize it until I met Katie and we struck up an easy relationship because we have such a similar cultural background. And I thought I had it bad with not knowing my lesson plan until right before class but Katie says that she shows up to class now knowing anything and the teachers give her a topic, for example the social security system in America, and then she is expected to talk at the kids on that topic for the whole hour while the teacher watches. It makes my job seem like a piece of cake.
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