First Day Teaching

Yesterday I had my first class ever in any subject.  I felt that my experience giving presentations in college helped me to feel familiar with the sensation, but I had to come up with the activities on the fly for an hour and a half.  The class was the debating club, so it was pretty interesting.

My co-teacher just gave me some materials explaining debate, but I was not sure how much of it was already taught to them, so I couldn't really plan anything.  I knew that there were some students who had lived in America before, so I planned on relying on their help.  I was talking with one who had chosen to live in Bakersfield intentionally so that he would be away from the Koreans in LA and thus be forced to learn English.

Eventually what I ended up doing was dividing them into 5 groups of 4 and giving them topics such as gun control, homework, athletes salaries, uniforms to debate.  They said that in the past they had had a heated argument in class about whether it was better to be a girl or a boy. 

I am impressed by how intelligent they are at this age.  While I was checking in on the status of each tables debate, I walked by the table that was debating athlete's salaries and I heard one student, who had spent time in Maine, weighing the risks of inflation vs the risk of deflation, in English.  He must be one of the students who has extra schooling at private schools afterwards.  I was walking around town last night and I saw a classroom in an office building lit up and there were children still there at 8pm.