On Monday, I taught my first class solo. I went into V5IB with guns blazing, the kids were chatty and a little unruly. So putting on my big girl pants, I was very stern about how I would not tolerate that sort of behavior, then put on the movie we were supposed to watch. I returned the next day, Tuesday, to finish the movie and start on their Language and Culture unit (which has been mine to teach since December). Now, let me back up a little bit and give you some context. I can't keep the upper form classes straight for the life of me. In every class I shadowed I would give my little introductory spiel - "hi I'm Ms. Sheridan, I'm from America, I've come to........." But since I bounced around in just an observational capacity so wildly in the first two weeks, I have no clue what classes I've been in and what classes I haven't.
Back to the present. I had created a worksheet to go with the movie and was settling down to go over the answer and one of my questions asked about the importance of accents. Thinking I was being slick, I told them to think about my accent and the connotations it carried and it was then from somewhere in the crowd, "um, miss? we don't know who you are."
...
For a full class and a half they had just been letting some random person teach their class, no questions asked. Oh I felt like such a doofus. Quickly I apologized and gave them a brief synopsis, trying to focus mostly on geographical features that shaped my accent so that we could get back to the lesson quickly. As they peppered me with questions, I talked about how I've lived in Alabama for the past few years because I attend Auburn University and from out of nowhere I hear "roll tide!" ....excuse me, what?
Apparently, one of the boys had done his internship (all the fourth year IB kids spend two weeks in an native English speaking area working or going to school) around Tuscaloosa and because of that he became an Alabama fan. Flabbergasted didn't even cover my reaction. "I'm halfway around the world and I have an Alabama fan in my class? You have got to be kidding" I exclaimed before I could catch myself. We had a little bit of banter before I steered the class back to the activity at hand. But seriously, what are the odds?
My activity for the day was to have students get in groups and think of all the stereotypes that are associated with American English versus British English. The more, vocal, group in the back quickly started shouting fast food restaurants. I probably didn't help my case when I insisted that they hadn't lived until they tried a Taco Bell Doritos Taco Loco. Woohoo! Reinforcing American stereotypes!
The rest of my day consisted of 4th year oral exams with Ester. Pretty much student after student reading aloud texts, describing pictures, and talking about one of the preset conversation topics (zzzzzzzz). We were probably the world's worst proctors, talking and joking while the students were looking over their materials. But it made the atmosphere more comfortable and we were just trying to put the students at ease. And that's the story we're sticking to.
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