Teaching in the IB (International Baccalaureate) is a difficult way to begin teaching. In the beginning of the year, I had to figure out the many components of the program. I also had to learn the curriculum and how to actually manage a classroom. The first few weeks, I came in an hour early and stayed until 6:00pm trying to figure out what the heck I was doing.
I found myself making up policies on the spot the first few days of school. The first was my homework policy. During my first class, one of the students had asked for my policy. In a spur of the moment, I told them for every eight homework assignments I would forgive one. If they missed more than one, I would call home. I completely made that up on the spot, but I followed through and it was my policy until the last day of school. This was one of many occurrences I utilized the phrase: “Fake it till you make it.”
I love my students, I really do. However, that does not negate the fact that they are quite difficult behaviorally. It makes sense when you think about it. Our student population on average is financially very well off. Many have grown accustomed to people waiting on them and getting what they want. This has led to some of them having respect issues. They do not quite know how to talk to authority in a respectful manner. Now, when I say they, it is not fair to group all of my students into this category. I would just claim that there are a larger percentage of students who were more difficult to manage. I just found that having a positive relationship with them helped in most instances. To obtain a few of those positive relationships, a negative one had to form first. This generally came in the form of a parent phone call in the first few weeks of school. My first phone call was the second day of school. With many of my students, they had absolutely no respect for me in the beginning of the year. They are used to teachers coming and going. Here is a young looking guy who now says he is in charge. Many do not have automatic respect for the teacher; it is a respect that you have to spend many months earning.
One of the biggest challenges in the beginning of the year was the language used in my classroom. Although Arabic is not allowed in English classes, students do not refrain from using it anyway. In the beginning, I wondered why students were not allowed to use their own language when conversing with classmates. I quickly learned the reason. If students are speaking their own language, many times it meant they did not want to teacher to know what they were saying. If our students really struggled speaking English, it would make sense that they would want to revert back to Arabic as much as possible. But this is not the case for the vast majority of our students. I did not begin learning the bad words in Arabic until a fight broke out in my classroom because one grade 8 student called another boy’s mother a dog. Yes, this is quite the insult in our school. I began inviting students into my classroom in the morning to teach me the curse words and bad phrases in Arabic. The kids stopped the language quite abruptly after about two weeks of being very strict about it.
I think I am reaping many of the benefits of international education. There is a new standardized test that we are administering twice a year, but it is not a focus in anyway, shape or form. My pay, rating, or instruction is not affected like it could be in the States. I also seem to have much more planning time. Although I do come in early, I was usually out the door by 3:00 or 3:30 in the second half of the year (my contract hours are until 3:00). I did not feel like I was ever slacking by leaving at this time. Instead, I actually have time to plan during the day with my colleagues. This year, the NJ Certification Office changed their requirements for certification and one month later they instituted them. That has now led me to be on a provisional license until I teach for two years in NJ under their evaluation system. This is a system that I wholeheartedly disagree with. I am not going to go into detail, but go ahead and look it up. It is just one of many examples of how outside forces impact your teaching in the States. There have been very few instances where I have been affected by policies in a negative way.
My teaching is mostly project and inquiry-based. It is very different than the textbook, worksheet, and direct instruction approach to teaching. I can count on one hand the amount of times I have spent more than thirty minutes at the board during a class period. This has allowed me to delve into my own interests. This year, I ran a three-month stock game where we explored many of our standards through the stock market. Students bought, sold, and kept track of the gains and losses of their stocks they purchased. They had to justify through mathematical reasoning why they purchased the stocks they did. This is just one example of quite a few where I have my students explore mathematics using a real world concept. This is different than giving students a few word problems or working on isolated real life applications during one day of class. We dive deep into concepts like the implications of budgeting and planning a trip, urban renewal, and improving oneself through data and statistics to name a few. These concepts can take up to two months to truly explore and understand through our units.
Coaching the middle school boys’ soccer team was one of my favorite parts of teaching this year. It was the first time I was actually the head coach, so I know what I need to change for next year. I definitely was not tough enough in the beginning of the season, which led to our team not being aggressive enough compared to other teams in the league. However, my favorite part of coaching was off the field. A few of my players were much better on the field than in the classroom. In no way am I saying they aren’t smart; I am saying they lack motivation and a solid work ethic. As their coach, I was in control of the activity they care about the most. If poor work ethic or behavior was going to impact their opportunity to play, they worked hard to remedy that situation. It really helped to gain positive relationships with the students and helped my classroom management with my players who I also taught.
From what I have learned this year, gaining positive relationships with students is absolutely the most effective way to have a successful classroom. This may sound easy, but it took months and months of work. They were sometimes fragile and had to be broken and rebuild with my more difficult kids. There were times after a rough class where I would shut my door on my prep, play music, and try my best not to think about work just so I could keep my sanity. But, my first year was overwhelmingly a positive experience. My positive experiences easily drown the negative ones out. I am excited for next year, but for right now, I am more excited for a break this summer. Time to rejuvenate, see family and friends, travel, and have some bacon and a cold beer.
Ma’a Salama Kuwait. See you in August.