Overestimating

Estimating is not a gift I possess.  Overestimating and underestimating, on the other hand, seem to be my forte.  Whether it’s my appetite at dinner, my judgment of abilities, or my understanding of situations, I end up miscalculating somehow.  Perhaps this is a result of my indifference for everything mathematical and my affinity for everything Right-Brained.  Regardless of the origin of this insufficiency, it continues to plague my life.

For the past month I have been teaching my students about figurative language and poetry.  The summative assessment was an analysis of a poem we had previously discussed in class.  Students were asked to identify figurative language, imagery, mood and tone, to summarize the poem in their own words, and to explain briefly the main idea of the poem—all things we’ve been practicing in class.  On top of that, I showed the students yesterday how the final assessment would work and modeled how to answer the 10 questions.  Today I gave the assessment.  I learned three things: 1) My students do not listen to or follow directions, regardless in what form they are delivered, 2)  My students have no idea how to think on their own or problem solve, and 3) I have no idea how to teach them.  I can honestly say that today was one of the most frustrating days I’ve had so far at school.  Have I overestimated their ability?  Have I overestimated my ability as a teacher?  Listening to the questions and seeing the frustrated and confused looks from my students almost pushed me over the edge today.  There is a disconnect somewhere between what I am teaching and what my students are learning, and I don’t know how much of it is my inefficiency at teaching this group and how much of it is due to their laissez-faire attitude towards learning.  I understand that subject content is not a priority for most adolescents, but I’ve never struggled so hard for attention in my classroom since my first year of teaching.  I’m not saying I’m a bad teacher, but I have no idea how to teach rich, ESL students who function between a 2nd and 5^th grade level in English.  Neither my education classes nor my teaching experiences have prepared me for this position—I have underestimated the difficulty of this job.  If I wanted to find a job that would completely destroy my passion for teaching, this is it.  And what kills me is that I genuinely like my students and the people I work with.

On a completely different note…

About twice a month I make a trek to the grocery store with my backpack to stock up on food.  I am too cheap to pay for a taxi to drive me 1.3 km to my house with all of my bags, so I load them in my backpack.  This causes many weird looks during my trip.  The apartment guards just stare at me and laugh when they see me with my overstuffed backpack.  People in cars and on the street do double-takes to figure out what I’m doing.  It’s weird and some work, but I save myself $35 (pesos) every time I use my backpack!