Simple Exercises

I've been thinking a lot about what I need to do for my classes since the stuff I've worked out from previous years is falling far short. There are a lot of hard decisions. For one thing it's hard to tell if banning speaking Uyghur altogether will help or hurt. It might hurt since I think the only reason some of the students have any idea what is going on is that their classmates are explaining it to them. But on the other hand it might force a few more of them to ask questions and it will be easier to keep order so I think I'm just going to have to suck it up and come down really hard and consistently on people not speaking English. I always thought that if I were a teacher I would be sort of a hard ass since I've seen first hand in my own school days what can happen if a teacher lets the class get out of hand, but since students in China are always so well behaved I've become something of a softy. I don't like punishing students even when I know it will be good over all. I think I have to work on that since more discipline might help.

I've also been thinking about some exercises where I can spend a lot of time explaining to the class exactly what they need to do which will hopefully help with some of the group work if I just make it clearer. I also need to work on not getting frustrated with the students. It's hard to know what to do when you have someone who for whatever reason, confusion, panic, not caring, simply won't say anything when called on not even something a little off. It drives me crazy but I think I need to move on more even if that allows some students to get away with not talking since it's monopolizing class time and might be totally freaking the student out for the future. Maybe I can just come back to that student later in class. I have to adjust my expectations way down so that I don't get to frustrated when they can't hit them. This a time when I wish I had some actual teacher training instead of just spending years winging it. I feel in some ways that when I get stuck I don't have a lot to fall back on. I envy Dave in some ways who's doing more actual teacher training with the Peace Corps.