So I’ll admit, my first day of teaching was as horrible as the short clip suggests, and while I wasn’t curled on the floor crying, as Brian suggested, my compatriots did find me lying upside-down with a tie around my forehead.

As backstory, on Friday September 12, I was offered some teaching hours with Cleverlearn; on Monday, I was informed that I’d be teaching; on Tuesday, I stepped into the classroom.

I was to teach 7th grade at a local public school. The only things I’d heard so far about teaching at public schools were that I would have TA’s to “keep the children in line” and that Cleverlearn tried to keep public school teaching hours low because teachers get overwhelmed, exhausted, and/or burnt out. I kept conjuring the nightmare stories from Teach for America or remembering the public school teacher blogs I had read for my education research. Rolling eyes, screaming children, paper projectiles—in a word, pandemonium. So, I spent as long as I could carefully preparing some activities and devising interesting ways to review material in the book.

I introduced myself, speaking slowly and in simple English, in accordance with the lesson they were studying. As I continued speaking, they all started exchanging confused glances and staring at me with blank faces. I was informed by the TA – who, it turns out, is actually their regular teacher, highly qualified, trained, patient, but unfortunately not a native-english speaker – that I was talking too quickly, that they don’t understand the English I was using, that, in not so many words, all the things I was doing were over their heads. All my lesson preparations and activities just went out the window, and I was staring at 75 more minutes with this class and 90 minutes with another. Oh, and also, they’ve actually already done all the lessons in the textbook, so it won’t really work to fall back on just ‘going by the book.’
How I got through that, I still don’t know. Those first 15 minutes were utter chaos, as I slowed my speaking, raised my voice, simplified my vocabulary until I was bellowing monosyllabic commands at a classroom clearly out of control. There was a break about 45 minutes through, which really became the official time period to act the way they had already been acting. This is what they usually do during break…

Once they start swinging the pole at each other, I exit as quickly as possible – I didn’t see it, I’m not responsible, I can’t even communicate with them, and I’m totally not dealing with it.
The classes were a nightmare of embarrassment – having 30 students just ignore you – and shame – completely on the fly, I came up with the stupidest and most inane activities…I still shake my head at how much I wasted their time. The first day of teaching at public schools was unfortunately awful, and it made me so gun-shy for my later classes…