Wait, I'm teaching?

Tuesday - So let me just set this up for you. Last night we found out through Yamai that we would be teaching today. We called her to clarify and received the Vice Principals phone number to settle things with him. He told us that school would not be starting until 10 am and we would end around 1 pm. We were told to arrive around 9:15 so that we could plan with our teachers and then participate in a co-teaching model. Jevi and I felt comfortable with that.

We woke up around 8 that morning to prepare for the day. By the time Yamai had shown up, it was about 9:30. We were forewarned about this Gambian time thing, so we weren't too concerned. When we arrived at the school, we found the Vice Principal. He then proceeded to call Jevi's mentor teacher, asking him if he was coming in today. I looked at Jevi a little nervous, but he still consoled us, telling us not to worry. On our way over to the classroom, I asked him if my mentor teacher was planning on showing up. He said oh, yes. Let me call him to make sure he knows he's supposed to be here. Let me tell you, that was comforting. It went from a co-teaching, early planning model to let me see if he's coming in. Brilliant. He told the children to get into the classroom, told Jevi that he wanted her to introduce herself and put the box of chalk down on the desk. Jevi began introducing herself and then he signaled to me that he wanted me to come with him. We walked across the dusty lot to a classroom in the 9 block. He wanted me to observe a history teacher in action. There was absolutely nowhere for me to sit...there were 2-3 children at every desk. We found out that the teacher was just giving hard notes, so we decided that it wouldn't be beneficial to observe. We headed back to the classroom where we left Julia, Yamai, and Jevi. She was asking students if they had any questions about her and the United States. Students were asking a lot about our government and Obama. When the questions died down, she looked back at the Vice. He motioned her to keep going. I guess she was teaching...Surprise! I guess by support he meant that he would be in and out of the classroom, cause that's about all he did. She had students write a prompt about their Easter break. Students were then asked to share their sentences with the class as she wrote them on the board. While she was teaching, I was racking my brain for what I could do to fill an hour. I had barely any idea what they had already learned, not to mention the fact that I had 7th, 8th, and 9th graders in the classroom. My mentor teacher then showed up. I wrote on the back of my paper, "what's the plan?" We went into the other room and decided to carry out a co-teaching model. I would introduce myself, he would introduce the topic (which we decided would be one variable equations), do the first example then I would do one. We would switch like this for a majority of the period.

When we entered the room again, Jevi had the 20 students up in a circle in the front of the room. She had them play a name game. They were asked to give their first name, and then say something that they like to do that started with the first letter of their first name. Hers was: "My name is Ms. Schettini and I like to swim." Each person had to remember what the previous students had said and repeat it back to the group. They really seemed to enjoy this as did Jevi. It was fun to watch..and it helped me learn some of their names.

My mentor teacher is very energetic and fun to watch. He's definitely a talker. He was emphasizing that I was to be respected and treated as any other teacher at the school. He then moved into the lesson. It was a bit hard at first because of the language used. For example, grouping like terms. When you move a term to the other side, it cancels. They call this "transposition". It makes sense, but I was having a hard time using that language. It was obvious that my accent was getting in the way of comprehension as well. The students grew more used to me, and my mentor teacher had them clap every time I finished presenting a problem. At the end, he told me that he likes how I present the problems, although the Vice Principal told me that I needed to not ask as many "chorus questions". He said that it makes students less accountable. I don't think I agree with this quite yet, but I'll get a better feel for it as we go on.

My mentor teacher uses awesome ideas to explain concepts. While explaining the idea of like terms, he said that you want to group the family members. I thought that this was great. He also prompted students by asking them whether they wanted the variables to be on the left or the right side of the equals sign. However, I don't really agree with his method of teaching...he teaches them the algorithms and what to do with no explanation. That's frustrating. He also didn't allow any time for students to practice some of the problems on their own which caused problems for students when they attempted their homework after class was over. I was finding that they did not grasp the concept at all.

He approached me after we taught, thanked me and told me he would be over later that night to lesson plan with me. I told him that I would prefer to do it right then and there, and he said that he had somewhere to be. (I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but when we first met with him last week, he was asked to get me a math book. He said that he would drop it off at the house later because he lives close to happy camp. I didn't understand why, especially since he only dropped off one book and we were already at the school. Anyway, my flag was going up again..I figured he wanted more than just friendship). I told him that in the future I wanted to plan during the day because I didn't want to have to worry about it after school was over. He briefly stated what he wanted to do the next day, and left. I took it upon myself to plan tonight.

We came home and debriefed a bit. Poor Jevi. She has only ever worked with 1st and 2nd graders, had no prior knowledge of what these kids had worked on in the classroom, and here she is, teaching ALONE with kids that are as tall as her. She did wonderfully though, and I made sure to tell her that over and over. It was overwhelming, but we both partially expected it to happen this way. We decided to catch some rays on the roof to relax. After putting on 50 and 70 spf, we laid out for hours. We even fell asleep a couple times. It was wonderful!

Right before dinner, the power went out so we all ate by candlelight. It was pretty nice :) The power was still out when we were finished, so having no Internet or anything to do, we made some drinks and took to the roof to chat and share stories. They were hilarious. The girls showed us pictures from Kristie's wedding and some of their other adventures. It was a great time to bond. My mentor teacher never showed up...which was a good thing. We skyped some family and then hit the hay. We knew it was going to be another interesting day tomorrow.