Practice Month Part 2

On my first day of practice I had only one group of students. ‘Oh, that’s easy!’ Yeahhhhh I’ve never been more naïve in my life. It was a group of 7 pre-school children (5–6 y.o). I was in a wonderful mood, had my lesson plan ready, prepared interesting games for them. My supervising teacher wasn’t present. It started fine, I introduced myself, and the kids seemed nice and cute. In just 5 minutes they got tired of being angels… They started running around, jumping, screaming (literally. Without pausing. Just yelling), tapping into my laptop (they closed one very important document and I lost it forever!!), jumping in their shoes (!) on the chairs and desks, pushing and beating each other… You may ask why I couldn’t stop them. Well, I tried my best! I swear! I consider raising voice unprofessional, I will never touch or insult students. So I had to stand between them (so one of them accidentally even kicked me) while they were fighting, tried to explain (in English… but switching to Russian in the most desperate moments) that they weren’t allowed to behave like that, tried to engage them dancing, smiling, playing…

To be honest, it was a nightmare. My first words after the class were ‘I will never be a teacher and will never have kids’. Has my opinion changed? You will read in my next posts;)