After a few cancellations I had my final observation from my manager two weeks ago. She arrived before classes and would be watching my first. I was happy with this as it was a lesson I had taught the previous day twice so I knew what I was doing. And because they are one of my youngest but brightest, enthusiastic, creative and are enjoyable to teach. Yes they were my favourite class.
I rolled into class expecting everything to go well. I did everything the manager wanted which was basically repeat, correct, give everyone their chance to speak and try and make the class fun. And then I was thrown under the bus by the students.
Betrayed by five boys who should know better and who I've always tried my best to help whist making every class as enjoyable as I can! Perhaps I exaggerate but they really let me down and embarrassed me with their bad timing. So what did they do? Mocking me, parroting me, making ridiculous sentences and shouting out answers when it was someone else's turn, making fun of my questions and the repeating we did. I am relieved that there was no contract riding on this.
Doesn't sound like much but it was obvious at the time that they were doing this deliberately for a joke. All of those things they had never done before and won't do again. There was also little I could do because the previous branch manager had watered down the teachers capacity to deal with things like this. I let them know several times that this was out of order as I tried to manage the situation. If the manager was not watching me, then I would have dealt with this easily but I didn't do it so well because quite frankly I was shocked at their behaviour.
With about fifteen minutes left the manager left and the atmosphere changed. They stopped being silly as they knew I was not happy with them. Oh students! After the class I let them know they had done something wrong. I didn't punish them or shout at them but I was really disappointed. Now the class has changed. Three of the five have moved to another group and someone else now has the 'pleasure' of their company and I am left with a great bunch of kids again.
Otherwise the class went OK. Despite one horrible grammar explanation of mine I did what was wanted from the particular class. I didn't expect a good write up but I could live with that as I'm going in a few months. got the evaluation last week and it was not as good as my previous one but was probably better than average. I got some decent comments and the evaluation was positive and fair. But never trust your students. Et tu brute?
2 comments:
Got to love those days. I used to have open classes, where parents would come and observe. I'd usually have similar experiences. My favorite thing would be that the kids that didn't have their moms come would act up even more!
They really stitched me up. When I came to to teach them later in the week I was going to discipline them but two seconds in I knew I couldn't because they are just kids being kids and I still like them!
Just awkward timing from them. It's not happened in five years of manager, parent or co-worker observations so I was thinking to myself "why now?"
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