Teaching

A lot has been said about Georgia already on this blog, but it’s time to talk about the reason we are here in the first place – to teach!

I work with one co-teacher, Tamo, at the Jurukveti Public School #1, which is a ~15 minute walk from my house. We teach 5 lessons per day to grades 1-7 on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Being a first time teacher, I was definitely nervous before getting started. How would I like working with the kids? What would it be like working with a co-teacher? What would be my role in the classroom, and what kind of impact would I be able to make?

Now that I’ve gotten a couple of weeks of teaching under my belt, I can say that I am really enjoying it! I feel very fortunate to have been placed at this school, with this co-teacher, and with this class schedule.

My school is quite old (my host dad went there as a child), but the classrooms were recently renovated. Tamo and I stay in one classroom, and the kids come to us (at many schools the teachers are the ones that rotate classrooms). This is great because we have actually been able to decorate our room with English-language posters to help create an inviting and stimulating learning space for our students. My co-teacher has been really enthusiastic about decorating the classroom, even bringing in supplies from home.

Speaking of my co-teacher, Tamo is really great, and I feel very lucky to be working with her. Volunteers often work with up to 3 co-teachers, but she is the only English teacher at my school (she teaches at another school on Mondays and Fridays, hence my days off). She is a young teacher, so she is open to new teaching techniques, she is already familiar with many games, and she is very receptive to my ideas and suggestions. She has also worked with TLG volunteers before, so she knows how best to utilize me in the classroom and incorporate me into the lesson.

Some of the difficulties we were told that we could encounter included co-teachers who struggle to communicate in English and those that are stuck in the old Soviet ways of pure repetition and memorization as opposed to teaching for actual understanding. Luckily for me, I haven’t had either of these problems. Tamo and I have no problem communicating in English, and she does like to do some activities outside of the book with the students.

Speaking of the books, they are not the greatest, but they could be worse. We use a Macmillan series called English World. Unfortunately, a lot of the lessons and scenarios are not based in anything relevant to the children’s daily lives. There are a lot of invented characters, such as clowns, pirates, and astronauts. The kids really don’t need to know the words “space suit” or “roundabout” when they are struggling with “My name is…”

A shortage of books is a constant problem in our classes. Not all of the students have them, and sometimes the ones that do have them forget to bring them to class. Sometimes we have entire rows of 3 students each with no book to share among them. I recently went on an excursion to pick up my set of books provided by TLG, so at least we will have an extra set from now on.

Despite warnings of behavior problems and general chaos in the schools, my classes are actually quite well behaved. The class sizes are pretty small, ranging from 4 students in my 2^nd grade class to as many as 19 kids when we have 2 of the older grades in a combined lesson. The overall English skill level across all grades is fairly low since my school used to have German as the mandatory foreign-language. They just switched to English last year since it has become compulsory across Georgia.

The class schedule is still a mystery to me. Since we have 7 grades but only 5 lessons per day, this means that one group doesn’t see us each day, and 2 of the other groups are combined into one period. Which group skips a lesson and which groups are combined change on a daily basis. Sometimes the combined class is logical (like 6 and 7 or 5 and 7), but sometimes we get something crazy like 5^th and 2^nd grade in the combined period. This obviously makes it hard to plan, and it is difficult to teach to such different skill levels in one period. I have no idea how the kids know where to go and at what time each day.

One amusing thing I learned is that stickers are excellent motivation for students. I brought a huge variety pack with me, and the kids LOVE them. We give stickers to kids when they do their homework (rare - usually 3 students max out of every 10) or when their team wins a game during class. Georgian kids (like Americans) are competitive, so they get really into the games and lord it over their other classmates when they win a sticker. This is not a society where everyone gets a sticker because every kid is special. Nope, none of that crap. No one here has any problem understanding that you can’t always win, and you don’t get prizes for losing.

I have noticed that an increased number of kids are at least attempting to do their homework in order to get stickers, but mostly they just copy the homework from the few students that do it. I noticed the homework (and mistakes) were identical, so I was able to catch them on it. Guess they thought they could sneak one by the “silly Amerikeli.” As Mitch likes to say, just because I don’t speak Georgian doesn’t mean I’m dumb. The problem is, this isn’t seen as “cheating” in Georgia, it’s seen as “helping,” and what kind of friend would you be if you didn’t let your fellow classmates copy your homework?

Overall, I am enjoying my first attempt at teaching. School here is so different from the US, both in resources and in structure. Regardless, most kids here are eager to learn so long as you keep them motivated and engaged. I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester!