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In the Philippines, every teacher would have experienced being a student and being a teacher. The same case is for me. I have been a student for the majority of my life, and I am just starting to experience teaching. But how does it feel like to be an international student? How does it feel like to be an international teacher?
Way back in 2010, I have experienced being an international student when my family moved to the United States for a year. There, I studied for one year (7th grade) and experienced what it's like to be an international student. Now that I am participating in this project, I will get to experience what it is like being on the other side of the coin -- being an international teacher.
In my stint in teaching in the Philippines, I taught Calculus to grade 11 students in a prestigious public school in Naga City. When I heard I was going to teach the 7th grade in the lab school, I was a little worried as to how I am going to approach my class. I got so used to dealing with students that are almost my age. Then suddenly, I am assigned to students born 7 to 8 years younger than me. What a huge adjustment, right? I wholeheartedly accepted the challenge of teaching the youngest students in our school. Anyway, this would be good practice especially when I work as a real teacher.
Sir Affandi handed me a sample lesson plan on Financial profit. Similar to my comments from my previous posts, the objectives seemed vague and the learning activities weren't really specific as to how the objectives were to be attained. What was more shocking was that the lesson plan he handed me was not only for financial profit, but also for financial loss, interest, and maybe even the rest of the topics for social arithmetic topics. I am claiming this because as my buddy would give me the lesson plan for the next topics I would teach, I noticed that everything (literally) was the same. The objectives, materials, learning activities, literally everything was the same. Maybe that is the reason why the lesson plan is not as specific as it should have been. When I offered to change the learning objectives, my buddy said not to, for some reason I don't know. So I just changed the learning activities.
My next challenge was how do I break down 1 hour and 20 minutes for one class? My bigger concern was how do I break down 2 hours for one class. To be frank, I really think that it was a huge chunk of time for one class. It was very difficult to provide more activities to those since I am used to teach one class for only 1 hour. So, preparing my lesson plan entailed more activities.
The first time I taught was in Class 7A on Financial Profit. The class time was 2 hours long, and I was not expecting to finish discussing my topic for 20 minutes! So, for the next 60 minutes, I asked the students to answer some exercises I prepared. All students successfully answered the activities, which got me to conclude that they got the lesson even if I was speaking in English. However, I finished my lesson for 1 hour and 20 minutes only. When I told Sir Affandi that I was done, he took over the class after the break.
At first, I was kind of embarrassed that I wasn't able to plan activities that was enough for 2 hours, but I said to myself, "It's fine. It's your first teaching." With that, I just went on with the flow of my next classes. Luckily for the other sections, the time period was only for 1 hour and 20 minutes so I finished on time.
Given that predicament, the planning of my lesson grew difficult. I can't think of activities to lengthen my discussion with the class. So, what I did was to follow the Constructivism Method (5E's: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate) using Problem-based learning (PBL), and Inquiry-based learning (IBL) strategies. For my next topics, surprisingly, I still get to finish my lesson in 30 minutes. I give them the rest of the time to answer sample problems related to the topic. Before the end of class, I would ask a representative from each group to show their solutions on the whiteboard I provided to them and explain their work. Sometimes, I would go overtime because some students encounter difficulties in answering the problems I give. I admit, time management was a problem for me in the Lab school. For some reason, I think I was greatly overwhelmed by the amount of time given to us to teach just one topic.
Aside from the problem I have with the time allotted for the class, I also had a problem with the language. Of course, all the subjects were taught in Bahasa Indonesia. Ma'am Nina, the English teacher at the lab school, told me that most of the students in the lab school are just starting to make progress in learning English. They understand some English, but once things get too complicated, even in the simplest terms, they would still have difficulty understanding. Most of the students also can't speak conversational English because maybe they were too shy. To solve this problem, Sir Affandi, together with my buddy, Darmia, would translate whatever I would say. Even my slides would also be translated (especially the worded problems) to Bahasa Indonesia.
What is good with having a buddy is that she can translate into Bahasa Indonesia what I am teaching so that the students can understand better. However, the sad thing about it is that, since students prefer to speak Indonesian, they would prefer asking help from Sir Affandi or Darmia, than me. I can't blame anyone for it. The downside of it was that I was unable to build rapport with students due to the language barrier.
Another difficulty I had was with classroom management. As mentioned above, I was used to having older students. So one of the big adjustments I had to deal with was on classroom management. Since the students in 7th grade are younger, I have to be more strict. Although I wasn't used to it, I had to. But a problem was on how to do classroom management especially on behavior. I was a bit hesitant, to be honest, because of the cultural differences that we shared. Maybe if I say something, it would offend the student(s), or would cause more problems than order. What I did was to just use basic techniques in dealing with misbehaviors like eye contact, proximity, or addressing it to class in general.
Given all those situations, I think I regret not putting my best into what I did. Maybe I was so consumed with the challenges I encountered that it already blocked me from putting effort into how I taught. I enjoyed every bit of my stay in Palu teaching, but I have to admit, I did not give my all. This is the lesson I will carry with me from this experience -- that no matter what you do, where you are, you should always do your best to avoid regrets.