Filed under: Peace Corps Romania | Tags: creativity, Peace Corps, post-cards, Prințesă, Romania, senioritis, Teaching
I love class 8b. They can handle advanced topics, and I never EVER have classroom management problems with them. There’s a reason for this:
In a given period, only the same five students will show up for class. These are my English all-stars– they are hard-working, focused, and talented. It’s a crap shoot as to which of the other students might show up (if any), but I recently realized that I’ve sort of wrecked the learning curve for them: that is to say that I’ve become so accustomed to only having the best students in this class attend that the lessons are typically way to difficult for any other members of the class to comprehend or participate in. It’s become a downward spiral– the weaker students have a tendency not to come to class, so I plan my lessons to be challenging for the higher achievers that do come, which encourages the weaker students to ditch.
But now, with 3.5 weeks of general school remaining, and murmurs of a long-term teachers’ strike set for June, senioritis has hit hard.
Last week, I guest taught a lesson on creativity to the best class of 8th graders in the best school in Petrosani. They killed it. One girl defined creativity (in English!) as a manifestation between imagination and reality. Another boy contradicted me when I asked what constitutes creative talent because, according to him, everyone has the propensity for creative ability. They ended the period by writing gorgeous little Cinquain poems about forests and beaches and city streets. I was stoked.
I couldn’t wait to teach the same lesson to 8b. I was certain they’d rock it.
However, 20 minutes into my lesson today, I looked out across my 8b class and unhappily chewed my lip– I saw heads down on desks; I listened to two boys having a private conversation in the corner; I asked Prințesă who her favorite Romanian poet was and all I got was a strained look as a reply. “Teacher,” she said earnestly, “I am so tired.”
“I can tell,” I said.
So, for better or for worse, I acquiesced to their senioritis, dug into my bag and pulled out a pile of post-card templates that I’ve been using for sixth grade. I took my ‘craft kift,’ filled with scissors, glue sticks and colored pencils out of my nearby desk, and I let the kids design and color their own post-cards for the final half hour of class. I saw signs of life, and smiles– acquired cheaply, perhaps, but I’m not too sure I had a better option.
“Please come to class next week,” I told them all in Romanian. “I want to take photos off you, to remember you, and I will have a surprise to give you,” and they all promised that they would. Mom recently sent me 300 post-cards lauding Colorado, and I have resolved to write one to every single one of my students. With the end of the year uncertainty looming, next week may be my only chance to hand out these cards– and it may well be the very last time I interact with some of my beloved students from 8b. Yikes.
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