What I wish I’d known before…becoming a teacher of high school students in France.
Yep, I actually CHOSE to do that on my Year Abroad as opposed to studying and long holidays and swanning around Paris with a croissant. I still don’t know why.
Number one is definitely do not speak too fast in English at an already agitated 16 year old boy who barely understood ‘hello’ in week one.
Number two would be: don’t try to fit in too much, but also don’t plan too little. The little shits (the older ones more than the younger ones) can see right through you if you’ve completed all the tasks you planned. they can see the fear in your eyes. And they WILL take advantage of your weaknesses.
In just a typical one hour lesson, I’d see frustration at not being able to communicate and one student used to always say “You don’t understaaaaand” (as a bilingual student in a foreign country, I definitely did understand) and then a breakthrough when they’d manage to string together a somewhat intelligible sentence.
I think the main thing I wish I’d known before embarking on teaching is that it’s so fucking scary to stand in front of a big class full of people who are struggling to understand you, and the only real solution is to just do it (like Nike *swoosh*). So the fear never really leaves you, you just learn to adapt to it and attempt to do a decent job every time.
Another thing I never knew which really shocked me: most teachers make their lessons up on the spot, there and then, and figure out how it’ll all pan out as it goes. This made me feel a LOT better when I had to occasionally throw something together and hope for the best. It’s very surprising to learn that in all likelihood, most of my high school lessons were just chucked together and repeated over and over again every year. Those carefully constructed PowerPoints were most likely recycled or nicked from someone else — a tactic I shamefully used more than once!
But to be honest, I learned way more about teenagers in those seven months abroad than I had learned spending five out of seven days a week for seven years in high school and sixth form. I saw my teenage self in so many of them, mainly the bored girl at the back sitting on her own because she had so few friends. (I wish I was joking hahaha)
I wouldn’t change a lot about my teaching experience in France, although I’d love to be able to redo certain lessons (the one with the love triangle where the class descended into chaos springs to mind, as does the one with the boy whose father just died and we were doing a Father’s Day lesson all about dads and how great they are #Awks). Overall, it informed a lot of my decision to postpone my teaching endeavours for a few years until I have both money and more sanity than what I currently possess. It taught (ha!) a lot about how people study and learn, and how individual it can be, and really highlighted to me the need to be as adaptable as possible. Giving a healthy amount of individual attention to each student is the dream for any teacher and learning each student and their needs and wants is really imperative to help them in the best possible way. However, in the real world in a real school, the current setup makes that almost impossible to achieve, and particularly impossible to maintain across every week and every term.
The beauty of hindsight is that it is really easy to think “if I’d known this, x and y would have been so much easier…” but I think not knowing things can be as useful as knowing things. Knowing very little about “correct” teaching methods and structures meant I was thrown in at the deep end, teaching alone and forcing me to become more confident in teaching and speaking in front of a lot of people. If anything, teaching taught me.
