Being a novice teacher can be difficult, and,in case you have a good sense of humor, hilarious. Before starting to teach ESL in the fall, I had only taught German as a foreign language to a 97% homogeneous American classroom (yep, I had one student from Japan, one from Korea and one from Kazakhstan), so there is the occasional cultural faux-pas I commit without realizing it (uhm, it usually dawns on me quickly, though).
- One example for this would be the family tree assignment. When you talk about families in the classroom, having students draw a family tree for homework seems to make sense, right? Oh well, imagine you teach a classroom full of Chinese (1 child family) and Emirati (an average of 20 siblings and 2 mothers) students. uhm... yeah. Lesson learned.
- Another glorious example of epic cultural fail is the brilliant question "so, what do you guys expect from a future partner?" (uhm, we were talking about people, using adjectives). Again, this didn't go over so well with the Saudi and Emirati students. Lesson learned. Definitely.
No comments:
Post a Comment