An Exhausting Week

I have been in charge of the class grammar lessons for two weeks now, or about five lessons per class.

As the title suggests, it has been an exhausting experience so far. Some of the classes have been good…some of the others, well, not so much. But I will talk about those later. First I want to address my own issues.

We are covering parts of speech, something that really should have only been a review. They should have learned their parts of speech in third grade. At the very least, those are things they should have learned to tell the difference between a noun and a verb by seventh grade. I had planned my lesson to only take two class periods. Three at the most. That definitely is not going according to plan.

One class had one A and fifteen Fs on the noun review. Another class did a bit better, making two As, one B, three Cs, and fourteen Fs.

So, rather than simply reviewing the parts in a week’s time, I have been spending a class period on each part, giving them a review the next class period, and a quiz in the class after that. It seems like a very slow process to me, but I want them to know the difference between each part of speech for when they go to their later English classes. This has also been putting extra work on me, as I now have to create a review and a quiz for each part of speech when I originally was only going to give them two reviews and two quizzes.

So, even though it is exhausting, I hope that my extra work will help them.

In two weeks I will be in charge of the literature unit as well, when we finally start our first novel of the semester, A Single Shard. This ties in to my worry about the classes, or rather, the class, that has been troubling me.

To put it simply, they’re incredibly disrespectful. I have had trouble with this class before. Sometimes it is just one particular student that will not stop talking, even when he gets pulled aside by my mentor teacher. Sometimes, like on Friday, it is the entire class.

It was nearing the end of class, and we were running out of time because they had wasted time earlier on in the class period. We had been reading from a review in their grammar books. I had sorted them into small groups, and they had to pick the verbs from a sentence and identify them as either action or linking verbs. When one of the other groups were reading their sentence, a girl from an earlier group was talking to another student. I stopped the group that was talking and called the girl out on her talking before having the last few students go through their sentences.

I wish I could say that was the end of it. But, of course, it was not.

I asked them to be quiet while I was passing out their homework, but, of course, they were not. They kept talking, and I had to tell them to quiet down three more times before they finally did. I reprimanded them, asking them why they were talking when other students were talking. Why they were talking when I was talking. I told them that it was disrespectful and that I was their teacher, even when Mrs. W was not in the room (because I tend to get left alone with that class more than any other). I told them that I should not have to raise my voice to have them listen to me. I should not have to tell them to be quiet twice, let alone three times.

I am starting to dread teaching that class when I love teaching the others. How am I supposed to take over completely – teaching all day every day – when they won’t even listen to me and I’m not sure how to get them to listen without having to raise me voice like that?