I moved to Ashqelon on Sunday with Michelle and Maytal, and after getting settled, I visited the school that I will be volunteering at. The school was very happy that I was there to help, and both of the English teachers were practically fighting over me, so I tried to split up my time evenly. I am going to be taking between five and eight students out of class at a time, to tutor them in small groups. I will also be helping one of the teacher's second grade classes in the classroom, because some of these classes are huge, up to 42 students!
On Monday I sat in on two classes. The first was a sixth grade class that had 24 students. They were so disruptive, getting out of their seats, walking around, looking out the window, going to the other side of the room to talk to their friends, nobody paid attention, and only a select few even had their books on their desks. The teachers at this school yell a lot, and even I was getting frustrated with these kids. The teacher asked me to say something about who I am and what I am doing here, who I will be taking out of class. I thought I would try to help out by saying, "I'm only taking kids who are well behaved," but they were not affected by that at all.
The second class I visited was with the other teacher, and it was a special ed class with only about eight kids. They were better behaved than the other kids, but I don't think I am going to be helping out with this class because they already have three teachers.
Tuesday was worse than Monday was, as far as student behavior goes. They swear (in English and Hebrew) and I don't even want to know what names they called me in Hebrew. They scream at the teacher, and continue fighting. Sometimes the teacher can't even start her lesson because she can't yell over the kids. I can't understand how kids can behave like this. I wasn't like that, was I? They have little to no consequence when they act up, though. They don't really get sent to the Principal's office, and they have to do something REALLY bad to even get suspended, and I don't think fighting falls under the category of "really bad." I also need to stop answering questions that they ask me when I don't understand them. I told a group of kids that I was from England, and I also told a couple kids that I don't like boys; and one kid in fifth grade asked me if I was single. Oh yeah, and I thought a little second grade kid was a girl, until he informed me that he was not. All these little boys have long hair though, and when they're that little, it's hard to tell sometimes.
There are some sweet kids, though. I get hugs everyday from two of the girls in the second grade. Two girls from a sixth grade class came to me during recess (which they have four times a day), to ask me if they could be in my group. And a really cute fifth grader asked me to pick him for my group. I think I will have a different effect on these kids than their normal teachers, because I am not going to yell at them. It's not my job to discipline them, so if they misbehave all I need to do is tell them to go back to class, problem solved. I'm not worried about the kids at all, despite the horrible experiences I had this week in their classes. But if something good has come out of this, it's that I now know for sure that I never ever ever want to have kids...Or be a teacher in Israel.
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