14/05/10

Today I was writing my lesson title on the board of my second class when my pedagogical director stopped by with a man he introduced as being from the Ministry of Education and asked if he could watch my lesson. How nerve-wracking, I had no time to mentally prepare, he was just suddenly in the back of my classroom! Thankfully he watched one of my best classes (though truthfully I have four great classes and one pretty awful one, so I am just happy he didn’t sit in on the awful one) and the students were great: well behaved, animated, and engaged in the lesson. Afterwards he showed me an evaluation form he had filled out in response to my lesson and needed my signature. I was already bracing myself for what he would say with American arrogance, anticipating cultural differences to make up most of this feedback and thus I would accept his advice with a smile, but secretly know that my American teaching style was superior. Instead I was humbled by receiving an incredibly thoughtful and helpful response to my lesson, with suggestions in areas that I agreed needed to be improved, and a few suggestions that I hadn’t considered before and could be very beneficial.
After classes had a second reading and writing lesson with my student. We reviewed what we had covered the first day and he could almost write the entire alphabet without help this time. Then I wrote out words in syllables like this: ca-ne-ta and had his sound out each syllable, then each time say it faster until we were saying a real word (caneta means “pen”). He seemed to understand the concept behind what we were doing and although he still struggled with many of the pronunciations still (rather, remembering the sounds that certain letters make) I think it was a productive lesson.