I recently (yesterday) had to revamp all of my rules and consequences for my ESL classes. Teaching ESL is SO DIFFERENT than teaching regular. Although the students are the same age, most of my ESL kids weren’t in the U.S for elementary and middle school, where students really are socialized and taught how to behave. So, it’s my job to teach them how to act while teaching them English while trying to get them to a point where they can pass the exit-level TAKS test.
Classroom management is not my strong point. I hate having to get mad at students because I think it’s stupid and utterly ridiculous that they’re acting up in the first place. I forget that they don’t know better. I hadn’t had a huge need for it either, until I got a new student a couple of weeks ago who is the DEVIL REINCARNATED and decided to shake everything up. Now I have to be super mean, which is a tough change for kids to get used to more than halfway through the year. For example, today I made half the class stay after the bell for one minute because they were talking during their test. Literally, sixty seconds, and they freaked the fuck out. It was hilarious.
I hate being a babysitter for sixteen and seventeen year olds, but that’s the reality of teaching inner city. The reason the police and the school are so psycho about attendance (they hunt the kids DOWN if they skip), is not because they care about their education, but simply because it’s cheaper to pay me to watch them than it is to have them on the streets committing crimes and then going to prison, which is super expensive.
I totally understand Teach for America now. They need naive, uneducated (in terms of teaching education) people to do this job, because those of us with experience know it’s a fucked-up waste of our time.