Boys Will Be Boys...

After one of our peer teaching sessions, Sangeeta, our course instructor, said to me, "Jenna, I find you to be a little too stern. With these English Language Learners, you need to smile more." As always, I took the comment personally, but Kyle reminded me that we'd been teaching at Hogg, not India. Not smiling was my survival tool, and being businesslike in the classroom saved me from being eaten alive on many occassions.

So, I've embraced her advice these past two days of teaching. Like Kyle said, I have "actually enjoyed" teaching, and we have both found this teaching practicum to be the most enjoyable part of the course. The rides home from teaching have been jovial--filled with feelings of success and unadulterated adulation for our adorable Indian students. Kyle and I both commented on how fulfilling it was to just "teach"; management just wasn't an issue. It was heavenly, and I was finally feeling like I really could "smile." That is, until today...

Packed into the van, we drove down the winding streets of Kolkata. We were all equipped with our materials. I would be teaching our students about Movies, and Kyle would be teaching about World Travel. We asked our observer, Sangeeta, about our school. "Well," she said, "it's an all-boys school. Your classroom management is going to be tested. Girls are good; boys are trouble." Our honeymoon with Indian schools was over. We, or at least I, arrived at Natajinagar Vidayamandir more nervous than

when we had started out that day.

The warm-up to my lesson (Simon Says) went smoothly. They all wore short-sleeved blue shirts and navy bottoms and were equally adorable as the female students that we had taught the previous days. However,that's where the similarities ended. Whereas my smiling face and saying "OK, eyes up here and listen" turned the girls into silent wonders, those same words did nothing for the boys. Instead, there was pinching, yelling, squirming, and laughing. Things completely fell apart when I tried a partner-activity where the boys lined up in two lines facing one another. I asked them to reach across the aisle and touch hands with their partner, which quickly turned into a mosh pit of 20 boys. Needless to say, the lesson was unfinished and unsuccessful at the end of the 40 minutes.

When I walked out of the room, the "smile" that I had easily put to use the past two days had disappeared. The feelings among my classmates were similar,who used adjectives like loud, squirrelly, and inattentive to describe the boys. Instead of the usual optimism, comments like "How am I supposed to get them to be quiet when they can't understand me?" and "They just wouldn't listen" filled the ride home. Kyle and I both remarked that this experience more closely resembled what teaching is really like--a fact that our classmates didn't seem so thrilled about .The mood became even more sullen when we found out that we would be returning to the same school tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a new day, but I've definitely learned some things that will help me tomorrow. Boys will be boys, whether in the U.S. or India. And, smiling isn't a management system; I'll be putting my "smile" in my back pocket-- at least for tomorrow.