After school, I was told that there would be badminton games. I decided to watch because I knew some of my adorable grade 8s were on the team. I had never really went to a badminton game that was held at school, so I did not really know what to expect. I saw some little kids and their parents sitting on the bench. I saw a few students stood by the door to watch the games. There were a few teachers that came by to take a peek too.

It was fun to see the students’ active side. I got to talk to a few of them while I was watching too. I was cheering for one of my students when she played. It was quite an exciting game. I enjoyed watching her played too because in one of her written responses, she told me that in order to see her “evil”/”monster” side, I needed to watch her play sports. Haha. She asked me if that was why I went to watch the badminton games. Partly, yes. I like to students in another environment, other than the classrooms. However, I also want to support them. I think a few of my students were surprised to see that I got excited when she scored. They were laughing at me and said “miss lui”. haha. I enjoyed letting my students see the other side of me too. Outside of the classroom, I could be just like them, cheering for someone that they like or their friends. 🙂

After a week of experiencing full load, I was relieved that it was not as hard as I imagined. Day 2 was a bit hectic because I barely had any rest in between classes. However, I enjoy seeing my students every day.

Today my Humanities 8 students finished their essays. It would be exciting for me to read their thoughts. Hopefully, they successfully applied the OREO into their writing. Here I come, a stack of essays! 🙂 Rubric in left hand, and red pen in right. I am ready to go.

My ESL level 3 class got a bit better. Students were engaged with the discussion. I asked them to tell me the differences and similarities between schools in their hometowns and Vancouver. The grade 8s were stomping on the ground or moving close to me to get me pick them. It was a little bit overwhelming. I was not used to such pressure. It was hard to get the grade 8s calm down; at the same time, it was difficult to get the quieter students from other grades to speak up. I guess it would take me some time to manage the class better. I must say I need to be more aware of how the students behave while conducting the class activity. There were two grade 8 boys who were so excited that they started to sit on the desk to get my attention. It was not too dangerous, but it would not be that acceptable. Nevertheless, it was a good discussion. Students opened up to the class to talk about their own experiences, such as how they got made fun of after they made a mistake when they spoke. It was unfortunate. I shared about my experience too. I guess we could relate to one another. 🙂  It was nice to have students so willingly and openly to talk about their thoughts.

My ESL1/2 students are so adorable. Two of them offered snacks to me during class. One was a chicken spring roll, and another was a handful of chips. Good stuff! 🙂 I decided to set up some class rules with them, so they would know what I expected in class. Being a bilingual teacher could be a blessing and a curse. Once students discovered that I could speak in Chinese, they would want to converse in Chinese. Therefore, I needed to come up with a rule that everyone should speak in English except for a corner in the classroom. I hope it will work. Experiment time! I had some one-on-one time with level 1 students today. I sat with them to talk about their tasks. However, since I was so focused on helping the level 1s, I forgot about the 2s. The 2s were not on task, and I thought they would. I may have to come up with a better plan to circulate around the class to get them focus.

O – opinion
R – reason
E – example
O – opinion

This was an acronym that I used with my Hums 8 to get them practice with their persuasion. I thought the acronym was cute, so the grade 8s might have an easier time remembering what each letter stood for.

I began the class by asking them if they were good at persuading or arguments. A few raised up their hands and nodded. I asked them if they could show the class how they persuaded their parents. They tried to demonstrate, but they could not really show us the realistic scenario. I told them I had a formula to help them be persuasive. I handed out the OREO worksheet. I explained how it could be used. Then I gave them two murder cases for them to solve. They needed to use OREO to convince me of their suspects. It was nice to see the quieter class being so loud and engaged into the discussion. They were excited to talk about the tiny details they noticed in the pictures. It was a joy for me to see them so actively participating. After the detective cases, they needed to choose a villain and convince me of the villain was actually not as evil as some of the movies or stories portrayed. They did it in pairs. I looked over all of their work and decided that we probably would not be able to move on to talking about introduction and conclusion tomorrow. They did have a brief idea on how to use the OREO as a model to shape their argument. However, I thought their reasons and examples had not met my standard yet.  As a result, I came up with another lesson plan to talk more about OREO tomorrow in preparation for their upcoming essay. I wanted them to practice more on how to write persuasively and how their examples needed to be more specific.

Today was by far the greatest moment of my teacher’s life.

I organized some activities for my Hums 8 students to do. The activities were just aids to help them imagine themselves in the character’s situation. After the activities, we had a little discussion about the activity. We talked about the impact of inequality, especially focusing on the stratification of social class. It was interesting how the discussion somehow moved to a direction that I did not intend. It showed that students were the driving force of the discussion. We talked about bullying. It was one of the big themes in The Outsiders, and it was an important issue to discuss. Therefore, I did not stop students from talking. They were so excited to respond. They were talking about how bullying could not really be stopped. I asked them if telling an adult would help the situation. Many of the students surprisingly told me that teachers did not care. I was surprised by the response. I did not understand. Therefore, I asked why they said teachers did not care if someone got bullied. Apparently, in another class, they tried to complain to a teacher about a bully. However, the teacher did not take any action. The teacher might have told the student to stop; nonetheless, no further action had been taken. It was sad to hear. It was even more upsetting to hear that the students did not think teachers would do anything against bullying. I was happy that they were so willingly and openly to tell me about it. I was not sure how I could help. I could only tell them that I would not allow such thing in my class.

I was also happy that the discussion happened in my quieter class instead of the louder one. I felt like I connected with them more because of the discussion. I felt we bonded after this. Hopefully this would last. I want to know more about them. I want them to know that I will be here for them if they need me. It was also heartwarming that the kid who usually behaved poorly in my class said something like it was mean to ask when miss lui would leave since I told them we would have a pot-luck before I go. I did not expect him to say something like that. Even though that did not seem to mean much, I was happy to hear him say that. Ahhhh kids.

In my last block, we played a little game before I would take over the class. It was fun. The students would ask me join their group. They even suggested to name the group after me. One student was funny. He told me that we were friends, so I needed to tell him what was “hula-chuan”(hula-hoop) in English. Another student said that the would sit over here because I was sitting at this particular table. I just hope once I take over the class, they would not be hating me for giving them assignments. Right now we are on good terms, but who knows….After a month or so, they may be complaining how boring my class is. 😛 I had a good laugh with them though because they were not afraid to be goofy. They are just adorable kids. I think I am in love…in love with my job, with my students.

The remaining three school days of the week past rather quickly.

On Wednesday, we wrote police reports and news articles based on an incident in the novel. The purpose of the activity was to get students think in another perspective. I divided the first class into 2 and gave them different assignments: one group with police reports and the other group with news template. However, they quickly finished the assigned tasks. The only thing I could do was to encourage them to do the other assignment that they did not do. After they were done with both tasks, they could either read the next chapter or start writing their journal entries.  I decided to change the format for the second class because of the speediness that the previous class demonstrated. I asked the whole second class to be objective and constructed a police report. In this case, they were only noting down what was said in the novel. After that, I randomly distributed the completed police report to another group. The class needed to create a news according to the assigned police report. In this case, I told the class that they might exaggerate some of the information that was missing from the police report to make it more entertaining because that was what some news reporters do. I think the second class had more fun. The benefit of having back-to-back classes is allowing me to quickly adjust my lesson  if something does not work with the first class. 🙂

On Thursday, we discussed the relationship between the protagonist, Ponyboy and his brothers, Darry and Sodapop. Before that, I asked the two classes to summarize chapter 3 for me. However, it was a lot harder for the quieter class to respond. There were only 2 students who might “dare” to answer. There are a few students who have already finished the novel. Also, most of them did read the chapter because their journal entries clearly indicated that. Therefore, I wondered why they did not really speak in class. My SA pointed out to me that I might have to address them by names in order to get a response out of them. I was not sure if that was a good idea. When I was a student, I disliked teacher called out particular student to answer a question. Anyways, after summarizing, the class needed to come up with quotes that described the relationships. Then the class wrote a letter in the perspective of Sodapop or Darry to Ponyboy. I photocopied some pretty letter papers for them, and I think some students really liked it.

On Friday, we began the class by going over the top 5 chapter titles that the students created. In order to encourage them to be more creative, the top 5 students were given some privileges, such as prizes or given the chance to pick something. For example, we would be doing a mock trial on Monday, so the students who created better and more creative titles got to pick their roles first. I addressed the students by names to get them tell me which roles they wanted to play. The quieter class started to speak up more in class, which was a nice improvement. It was nice to see both classes seemed to be excited for the mock trial. They asked a lot of questions about the mock trial. Originally I would show a clip of a mock trial to let students experience what it would look like. However, I forgot my adaptor and no projector was available. I needed to give them a simple definition to get them understand. I also went through the agenda to hope that they recognized what we would be doing. Hopefully on Monday, the mock trial will run smoothly. I provided the classes with some tips and script on how to conduct a mock trial. I gave them time to prepare for their speech and discussion, so everyone would be on the same page. I also got the louder class to quiet down by raising my hand. It will be nice if this trick can last. 😛

This week was quite chaotic.
There was a student telling me he would be gone for 4 weeks. I needed to print out all the worksheets and assignment guidelines for him to finish. Since he would not be participating in the trial on Monday ,I asked him to read through them during group discussion. Based on the questions he asked, I needed to modify some of the worksheets. I forgot to put down the instructions on some of them because they would be class work.
I also had a discussion with another ESL teacher to talk about a particular student’s learning progress. She provided me with some worksheets that she did with that student. The teacher also invited me to observe the class that many of my ESL students from the Humanities 8 class were present. It was neat to see them in a different class environment. They were a lot more active in the ESL class. I guess they were intimidated by the “regular” students. They probably need some encouragement and chances in class to show that they can do the same thing like the other kids in class. I provided some of the “modified” worksheets for a few ESL students because they were struggling with the journal entries. I am not sure if that is fair; however, the main purpose of the entries is to  assess if students understand each chapter. I only provide them with some guiding questions and ask them to elaborate and provide some details about their opinions. I think very soon I may have to talk to a few of the ESL students ho have not been able to hand in their assignments in a row. I will have to address them as soon as possible.

Today was not my first time to go to a conference on Professional Development Day. However, it was my first time to go with so many “coworkers”, other teachers from the same school.  This morning session was hold by Tom Shimmer. It was a great session on assessment. I think it was quite helpful for us to really think about how we would assess our students: what should be assessed formatively and summatively. Right now I feel like I am on the right track; thanks to UBC’s assessment course. I also learned that it might be a good idea to not give 0s. Some students may just need the extra time to complete the assignments; however, it does not mean that they do not understand. They just need more time than other students to digest the information. Originally during that section, I was having a question in my mind about fairness. And yet, when I think about it now, I think it is still fair. Students can take the time to do their assignments and I will grade them based on the content. At the same time, I will set up a deadline. Students who complete the assignments on time will have high grades on work habit; meanwhile, students who need to take longer may have to come to finish their work during lunch time or after school. Shimmer pointed out something that I thought was very true: teachers need to react to a situation immediately rather than letting students take advantage of the no-0 system. We will have to be proactive.

After that, another session focused on inquiry and argument. The speaker was encouraging teachers to shape their unit based on a general guiding question. Everything that students are going to do in that unit will be revolving around the question and helping students to develop skills and knowledge that allow them to answer it. I thought this workshop was really helpful because he gave me a lot of ideas for the final project that I would give to my students and some creative activities that I would do to prepare my students for writing a persuasive essay. I think the way that he scaffolded students to form arguments was so interesting. He got students to critically think about the process of an argument. For example, students needed to imagine themselves as detective to solve a mystery case. They needed to provide support as to why they thought it was just an accident but not a murder. Hopefully I will be able to apply the things that I have learned from the workshops to my classes. 🙂