Teaching

I realized that I have not actually written about teaching in a while.  I mention it off-handedly like at the end of my previous post, but for the most part that is about all.  There are a couple of reasons for this, but this blog does not need to be me meta-analyzing why I post what I post.

This week marks the start of the second half of the second trimester.  What that means in non-confusing talk is that I am spending this week grading the tests from my 5th and 6th graders.  I am also going to be ramping up my teaching to my 2nd and 3rd graders since the next test in science for them will be in English.  The opposite is true for my 5th and 6th graders, who will be focusing somewhat more on science in Spanish.


I am still feeling like I am in over my head at times.  I do feel like I am a much better teacher now than I was even 3 months ago.  Obviously that is good.  I hope to continue to improve and not level out, since there are definitely many areas in which I could improve my teaching.

The next few months will also be taken up with me attempting to find some direction on what my next step(s) should be.  I will be applying to jobs from here though I am unsure of how I would do a phone interview.  Over skype?  Maybe I'll just time it so any phone interviews would be after I am home in early December.

The one goal I had which I do not feel I will be able to achieve was to figure out whether I want to be a teacher or not while here in Costa Rica.  I was talking to the director of World Teach, the program I am volunteering through, and she commented on how many volunteers come here because they think they might want to be teachers.  The problem with that is teaching here is so different from teaching in the US that it is not comparable.  Just having textbooks would make things so much different for me and for the students.  Not that I know of textbooks aimed at teaching science in English as a foreign language, but it would be nice if such textbooks existed and I had some

In more interesting and exciting news, Season 4 of the Guild has started up again!