Saturday, September 13

Too much teaching assistance

I have a job teaching English to young children at a school that I think has a pretty good set up. They give us teaching plans to expand on so that we an make the class our own. They have nice sized classrooms and the staff is pretty small so we can get to know everybody.

The school employs native English speakers as Teachers and Chinese-English speakers as Teaching Assistants. I think this is a great plan because the children's accents are definitely better than most of the people who learn English in a regular school and if they are stuck on a concept their is someone who can explain it to them perfectly.

Of course my TA obviously needs to go somewhere that she can be considered the teacher. She wants to control my class that I spent the time to make the lesson plans on. She throws in games and songs whenever she feels like it. (Usually when it gets quiet and the children seem to really start focusing on the lesson. I think she takes it as boredom.) But the reason I designed a time for them to do spelling is because they showed me that they like to show off how much they can read and write. She makes "break time" in the most inconvenient time. Then she is always speaking Chinese to them so they have really started slacking. Sometimes they just use Chinese to do my projects and the boss even came in one day when they were cheering and told her to make them speak English.

I want to tell my boss about it but I'm not sure how. I know that Chinese people don't like to be confronted so I want her boss to do it. I know this TA has been there for 2 yrs but I have taught before too and they learn best when the teachers pretend they don't speak Chinese and they get to show off their writing skills.

No comments:

 
Clicky Web Analytics