Professor Heidebrecht

It is now official.  I have completed my first day of teaching and as far as it went I have mixed feelings.  If you were able to read the blog I posted before class yesterday, my theory did work(you'll have to look at yesterdays blog for that theory).  I was not nearly as nervous as I thought I would be, and I was also able to fill up the entire hour and 20 minutes (that had been another fear of mine).  So a few impressions I had from my first 2 classes.

- The students are amazing.  Very polite and really try to understand what is going on.  They are also very helpful.
- It is going to be difficult to create lessons for my 201 class.  They know very little English and I spent most of my first class trying to explain activities to them.  The challenge over the next few weeks will be finding a type of lesson that they can understand.  If any of you have ideas I would be happy to hear from you!
- A class of 30 students is a lot bigger than I thought I was going to be teaching, which may make it hard to keep everyone engaged all the time.
- Remembering names is going to be extremely difficult.  I took a video of all the students introducing themselves, so I am hoping that will help me to learn their names as quick as I can.

All in all I would deem it a successful day.  Today will be my first day with the actual curriculum, which will be another adventure in and of itself.  I am currently at MCC so once I finish this blog posting I will finish putting together my lesson plans for my classes today.  Once again hopefully I can fill up my entire 80 minutes of class.     The nice thing is that we are supposed to stay very close to what is in the textbook so nearly all of the activities will come from the textbook.  For a new teacher this is great.  I can just pick and choose activities from the book.  The hardest part will probably be teaching Grammar, not my strongest point.