Yeah, that would be very different. And difficult. You’re like a guest actor in their education sitcom- you’re there to up the show’s rating but you have to do what the director (superiors) and the other actors (students) want.

So, tap dancing? Maybe a little improv?

If that’s the case, just aim to be a damn good faker and enjoy being there.

Thank you for the reminders Emmo. But actually, i meant to say that I realized how much I actually am NOT a real teacher in the sense that I still feel like I’m faking it as I go (which I am, not having had any of the training that you or Preet have had.) I think too that we were all mostly hired less for our actual benefit to students and more for getting prestige points for the school. So however much I flap my arms and insist that the students pay attention, sometimes I get the feeling that we are all just being humored not only by our students, buy institutionally.

Also, I would love to teach the beginnings of analytic thought, but I’ve found that asking “why” questions are a little beyond most of my students’ vocabularies…

One thing you could do though- see if you can keep track of when their big exams are. You already know that they’ll tune out if they have something to study for, so schedule time for them to tune out. Teach for half the class then devote the other half to work time. Then some can work on their other stuff and you can do some one-on-one work with those that struggle with English. That way you are in control of their off task behavior and you get to zero in on some kids that need help.

Yep, there will never be a classroom where all the students are at the same learning level or interest. You just do the best you can. The most useful things to teach are curiosity and how to find/analyze information- these kids of yours have many years of schooling left to do and then the rest of their lives to learn. It’s not all resting on your shoulders.

Enough teacher talk.

My favourite writer story- Originally Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Huck Finn and Jim would be going up river. Twain gave up on it for a while, years, losing interest or writer’s block.

When he returned to the story, he changed it so that the pair traveled down river, and that simple change caused the story to pour out of him.