02-19-2008
My first day in an American school
I was so anxious about attending my first
class in Phoenix Country Day School in Paradise Valley Arizona. The school is
of course fabulous; the teachers are really nice and welcoming. At first I was
introduced to the head of the upper school. I gave her a present for the
school; it was a Moroccan pottery plate with the name of the school written on
it. I also gave her a piece of jewelry. She was very happy with both presents.
Later, we attended a faculty meeting. The
agenda was written on board before teachers went in. again I was introduced to
other teachers and to the head of the whole school. He was very nice and said
that he was looking forward to my visit to their school.
The first topic of the meeting was a kind
of report about the scores of students of PCDS (Phoenix Country Day School) in comparison to other schools;
this comparison allows diagnosing areas of weaknesses that the students of the
school have, and allows by the same way to find solutions.
The second topic was a “lockdown review”.
Teachers are reminded of the drills they should do with students in case there
is an emergency: a shooting or any other accident. They will be going through
the whole simulation pocedure on Thursday.
The third topic was about the admissions
policy of the school. The head of the upper school said that to prepare
students and parents for high school, students’ parents receive information
sheets that they should complete and that include everything about the students; this will help the teachers
have background knowledge of all students and help in case of
problems.
The meeting took place in a rather relaxed
atmosphere, there was food served, teachers could come and go into the room and
a lot of interaction was going among teachers.
We later went t o the office of the head of
school, a very nice man; we chatted a bit and I gave him a gift from my
students to the school. It is a painting done by one of my students: the name
of our two schools are written in a very beautiful handwriting with a picture
of two hands shaking and the sentence: our two schools the symbol of
everlasting cooperation.
Then we came back to the classroom. Gigi
starts the lesson, it is about health and the vocabulary is about doctors,
illnesses and medicines. She writes the words on the board but uses a lot
of English in explaining the words. The students are participating
actively. There are 9 students in the class. Gigi’s TTT is quite high. I can see that
the procedure is different from the procedure we use in Morocco. We give
students the opportunity to guess and deduce word meaning and whole texts. The students’ pronunciation is a bit hard to decipher
maybe because there is little exposition to French out of the classroom.
At about 11:30 we went to the school restaurant and had lunch. I had
a pizza, a small salad and some fruit. I
had lunch for free and I will have it the same for the coming 5weeks. The restaurant
is huge and there are different kinds of foods. I can say that the pizza was good
and so was the salad. I am open to any new tastes.
Before Gigi started the lessons she gave me
the opportunity to introduce myself to students, and so I talked about my job,
my city and my country. Students also asked me questions. One of the classes
prepared some paintings and beautiful words about valentine and gave them to me
as gifts. It was very nice. I taught the advanced placement class from the
first day of my presence in school.
There are normally 4 students in that class, but one was
absent so I had to teach only 3 students. Can you imagine yourself teaching 3
students? Here I should just tell our American partners that they should not
have compared the teaching settings they are used to here in America to our
very difficult working conditions of at least 50 students in the class. I have
already started to value myself as a teacher, and I have definitely started to
value my students who study in classrooms with broken windows, no colorful
walls or head projector and yet try very hard to speak English and manage
somehow or another to speak it quite well.
I prepared a small lesson on the spot
called ”what words do you associate with…?” students are given words like:
love, father, teacher, friendship. They should give the first word that comes
to their mind. Later, the same game goes on, but this time students are given
words and are asked to provide sentences they associate with the words. As a follow up,
again students give me nine words that I write on the board and they are asked
to use all the words plus whatever words they want to write a poem. The result
was just fabulous; they came up with nice little poems that they are asked to
finish at home and bring the following day to be corrected and eventually hung
on the bulletin board.