Co-teaching

My official job here is “Primary English Co-Teacher,” which means that I should be teaching English, at a Primary school, with another teacher. This was impossible because of the teacher shortage detailed in previous posts. But due to some clever reallocation of teachers (here’s the short of it: ‘M’e Makoae now taking 4^th grade, Ntate Shakhane now taking 5^th grade, and ‘M’e Faso now taking a class combining the 6^th and 7^th grades), we are now in the co-teaching business.

I love it. Having the school’s teachers in the classroom with me is especially helpful in the area I was worst at, classroom management. My classes before were sort of chatty, and my lessons were peppered with me exclaiming useless things like “Hey, don’t do that!” Now they are eerily quiet, and I’ve noticed that lessons that lasted a full single or double block previously now take half the time, as I’m no longer juggling classrooms of kids who basically just want to hit each other and tell on each other.

In the combined 6^th and 7^th grade classes, something in the 40-students range, there is complete silence. Occasionally I will be writing on the board and will hear ‘M’e Faso reprimand “Stop moving around so much.” It’s terrific.

In the 5^th grade class, Ntate Shakhane backs me up on all classroom management, usually to the surprise and confusion of the students. For example, when checking homework, I might ask a student to see his homework, and when he said that he didn’t write it, I would ask “Hobaneng?” After a few seconds with no response, Ntate Shakhane would translate “Why?” which would create the funny sequence of the native English speaker asking the question in Sesotho, the native Sesotho speaker asking the question in English, and the Mosotho student looking skeptically at both. I was quickly reminded that the students were not refusing to answer the question for lack of understanding. Rather, their lack of response was their answer. They didn’t know why they didn’t do the homework: they just didn’t do it. And remembering what I can of being their age, I’m not sure I could have produced a logical reason for more than 7% of my actions, so it hardly seems reasonable that I’m asking one of my students why he didn’t do his homework.