So I am finally getting settled in and adjusted to the many faces of MRA… so do you want the run down? I ADORE my children, a love my staff, I am passionate about teaching, but I am not crazy about the center or the curriculum. I can’t say that I am surprised. I pretty much knew what I was getting myself into before coming. Yet I still made the decision to come knowing that the experience of teaching in a foreign country would challenge my values, beliefs and philosophies. I told myself that I would come out on the other side a stronger person and a better teacher and I still believe that.
My kids are fabulous. Like I have said before, I have four year olds from around the world – Germany, France, Japan, Venezuela, and local China. They are so sweet and adorable and I truly enjoy spending the day with them (most days). Beyond just my class, I have gotten to know the children in the other three classes, and they are just as great! My kids call me all different things - some of them have a difficult time with the pronunciation and they call me Ms. Maleeeesa, Mr. Malessssa, or Mr. Leeesa (this one is my favorite).
I really like the people that I work with two. Thus far, everyone has been really nice. Of course I am close with the Courtneys, and there is one other American teacher from Pennsylvania – she is really nice too. The Chinese teachers have been really welcoming as well. I have two Chinese assistant teachers in my class – Ms. Qian and Ms. Huang. Ms. Qian speaks the best English out of all the Chinese teachers so it is fairly easy to communicate with her. Ms. Huang doesn’t speak very good English so she is really shy to speak to me, but still really kind. If you read my previous entry “Like a Bosssss” you can understand a little bit of what they go through working here. Most of the Chinese teachers hate Morgan, and they complain about him a lot but one thing that I have learned is to not trust anyone. Morgan has created a warzone of a work place putting people against each other that it seems like the Chinese teachers are always feuding in one way or another. We try to stay out of everything and just try to sympathize with them.
Of course I love the teaching part! I told myself that no matter what happened over here, I would be an advocate for children and education and fight for what I believe about teaching young children, and that is exactly what I have been doing. The unfortunate part is that I am forced to do a lot of fighting.
The Chinese culture is interesting in respects to what they believe about education. They all believe that their children are baby Einstein’s and that the most important thing is education, over social and emotional growth and fostering natural curiosity. On the other hand, my philosophy is that the social and emotion development is the most important thing at this age, and that all of the other stuff is learned through emergent curriculum, teachable moments and discovery. Now this part wouldn’t be so bad, if all of my children were Chinese… but they are not, and it becomes a battle.
On the other hand, I have two German families that believe that children don’t learn (nor should they be forced to learn) anything until they are six. My German families refuse to have their children do homework (which is fine by me) and believe that their child should just be allowed to play all day and not do lessons. Although I agree with a play based curriculum, all that I can tell them is that they are at the wrong center.
So anyway, I am given a curriculum that I am supposed to follow monthly with lessons for language arts, phonics, math, science, music & movement, art, oral language and storytelling. In addition to the academic, I have specific character building skills each week, too. The curriculum is straight out of a book and is centered on drilling children to learn English. The children are supposed to do guided reading, however, the curriculum states that they listen and follow along to a CD reading a book 3 times and call it “guided reading”. The children are also supposed to be writing and reading sentences. The curriculum only allows for two art, two music and two math/science lessons a week – one in English and one in Chinese. I don’t even want to get started on what they call an “art” lesson (cut & paste, models, zero creativity), the music lessons include teaching lyrics to children and then having individuals stand in front of the class to sing independently, and there is nothing emergent about math/science either.
Each week has a book theme and a letter of the week, but aside from that, there are no broad themes or topics, nor are there projects or extended activities. Each lesson is completely separate from the next and there is not a flow to repeat or reinforce concepts taught. For example, today I taught a lesson about the 5 senses. I had the children use their senses to taste, touch, smell, hear and see different things and then we talked about describing the different objects (it looks like… and it smells like…). The children really enjoyed the lesson, and if I were back home, I would have spent at least a week with the children investigating how we use our senses, and let them touch and taste and smell a lot of things instead of just one. I would have extended the lessons to make charts for what kinds of tastes or smells they liked more (math/science), and we could have a scavenger hunt to find things that feel different, and we could have played eye-spy… you get the point. However, I did the lesson today and (per the curriculum) we will never talk about the senses again.
The one thing that Morgan always talks about is DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE. In fact, he preaches about how the most important thing within his center is that we teach developmentally appropriate. Let me be honest – he has NO IDEA what those words mean! The curriculum is a “one size fits all.” There is zero room for differentiation, and it does not foster to different learning styles. So it is completely developmentally appropriate that my child whom does not speak a word of English has to sit through the same lessons as a child whom speaks fluent English and a beginning reader.
So Morgan gave me the OK to change my curriculum around, as long as it is developmentally appropriate. So I have decided to make HUGE changes to my room. Instead of having all whole group lessons, I have divided my class into small groups based on their developmental levels, language and literacy abilities and social/emotional skills and the majority of my reading, writing, language and phonics lessons will be done in small groups – differentiated to the needs of the group. There will be a broad theme that will overlap between all the lessons, and there will be a ton of repetition and reinforcement.
When I told Morgan about my ideas for improving my class, he told me that I am “overly ambitions” and that I am only making more work for myself. How encouraging. Of course, I am making more work for myself because now I am actually planning for MY kids, not just following a cookie cut curriculum – I am actually doing my job now and a little bit of hard work will be worth it if it benefits my children in the long run. He also think that parents are not going to like it, so I am writing a letter to my parents explaining the changes and the new class schedule, why I am doing it and how it will benefit their child. I start my new curriculum next week, so we will see how Morgan and the parent react to it.
That is the other thing about Morgan, if even one parent makes a comment about it, he will completely side with the parent and make me go back to the old way instead of supporting and trusting me as his teacher. Morgan does not have a backbone when it comes to parents. Mostly, it is because he doesn’t actually care about the children – it is a business that makes him a lot of money and parents pay that money. No matter what a parent says, the only thing Morgan will tell them is exactly what they want to hear. There is not standard for our school that Morgan will say, “this is our school, this is how we do things, if you don’t like it then this is not the school for you.” Instead, he tries to please every parent and tell them exactly what they want to hear. The only problem is that he contradicts himself and changes his mind daily.
For example, if a parent says it is ok for my child to “play fight” and he says, “That is ok with us!” Five minutes later, another parent says it’s not ok for my child to “play fight” and he says, “We don’t let our children play fight.”
Ugh… I think I am getting off topic here. Sorry, it has just been a little bit of a frustrating day at MRA. I guess I just needed to rant a little bit!
No comments:
Post a Comment