Teaching is a funny gig. You're paid (well, underpaid) to spend your week with a bunch of kids, trying your best to educate them about a wide variety of frankly useless ideas or skills, which may or may not be important to their future paths. It's an emotional and physically draining job that demands a surprisingly flexible approach. Sometimes, the kids will be completely uninterested in your detailed and perfectly wrought lesson plan. Other times, they'll get ridiculously excited about half baked activities that you came up a few minutes before (or sometimes during) the lesson in question.
The first week of the year has just passed and, thinking back on Sunday, I can't recall anything nearly as interesting as my first week at Brimbank. No 20 on 20 brawls. No "fuck you, sir"s from the kids (or other teachers). No feelings of utter desperation and depression at lessons gone wrong. This isn't to say that my lessons have been perfect, but nothing disastrous or soul destroying (yet).
I'm teaching Geography in grades 6, 7, 8, 9 and (wait for it) 10, as well as World History for one Grade 8 class. Every class between grades 6 and 8 gets to experience Geography once a week for a double period, so I've got a lot of classes (10, I think, total) and a lot of kids named Bolormaa or Amar or Munkh to try to remember. Teaching grade 6 (like 11 year olds) has been a challenge, as I literally have no experience under Grade 7 (very little at that level too) and no tricks to pull out of my teaching toolkit. They're so young and I don't really do the "jumping around the classroom like a primary teacher" thing that well. Tips are appreiciated.
I find it hilarious at times that I'm teaching so much Geography as I'm completely an English teacher at heart and have had perhaps 1 week during the M.Teach on geography and I took a couple courses at UBC on Geography circa 2002 and that's it. Seeing the kids once a week underlines its marginal presence in the school's patchy curriculum, which makes my job sometimes less pressured than the teachers at school in English who spend upwards of 4 or 5 times a week doing literacy skills with each class. Geography is also a subject that's basically can be about anything, which is liberating, except when you're supposed to be preparing year 10s for a Cambridge exam about everything (and they know nothing).
Overall, the kids are really well behaved in all grades, especially when I'm speaking to the whole class from the front of the room. What they have more trouble at is listening to each other, speaking in class, and thinking critically about anything. It seems like the learning method that they've been exposed to most would be rote learning, and the gaps in their knowledge (and skills) are striking. For example, my Grade 8 history kids who have had 2 previous years of secondary history, have never heard about sources (primary, secondary or otherwise) and seem to have problems with even thinking through what historical thinking might be, besides memorising dates and names. Geography students through to year 10 have never been taught BOLTS in relation to creating maps. In fact, they may have never created a map in 3 to 4 years of Geography in 2 languages!
English skills are highly variable from some students fluent to others who don't understand a word of English. For the most part, spoken English is good but students rely upon Mongolian when speaking to each other about tasks at hand or ideas. I don't want to be an asshole but, since the exams and all assessment is in English, I'm thinking about banning most Mongolian in class because if they can't orally work through it it in English, then they'll have no shot at a Year 10 IGCSE exam (let alone year 12 A levels).
On a personal level, Tess and I moved into our Mongolian apartment (see above), a concrete shit box that looks 50 years old but was actually only built in 1997. It's the secret police's former apartment block. After you enter the main door, you're confronted with a large pile of garbage (you dump your garbage in the hallway and someone magically takes it away), graf on the walls, and (usually) darkness. After fumbling for the light, you struggle with the heavy metal door and the odd X shaped key, turning it 4 times to the right to unlock the doon (not 3 or 5 but 4). Inside, the apartment was just renovated and is very livable. We're growing herbs (not those ones), and trying to use the modest (more accurately: terrible) produce to cook at home. We even had a dinner party last week.
Tess is in Beijing right now so I'm in UB alone for the next couple weeks, which makes this Mongolian interlude even more surreal and strange. My days have mostly consisted of going to work at obscenely early hours, coming home at 4, having a nap, eating out at Millie's (an actually decent American diner), and watching TV for a couple hours.
Survival mode, in other words.
