Summer English Courses!

I’ve spent the month of July getting additional teaching experience and meeting my future students. After registration, I had about eighty students. Now, in the final week of lessons, I have a fraction of that number. I’m still impressed considering that it’s summer in a beach town and attendance was pretty solid up until last week. I’ve enjoyed getting into the classroom and I hope students enjoyed the classes as much as I did. In the end, I had three classes. One class of three high schoolers and two classes of students from the 9-year school (ages 8 – 13). I had a lot of fun with the advanced learners of the neighboring 9-year school and will be seeing them once the school year starts up and I pursue projects at their school.

I was particularly pleased after a lesson where we talked about rooms in a house and objects found in the rooms. I gave the students the assignment of creating their dream homes. It’s very interesting to see what lengths students will go to, so I try and give as little restriction as possible. I had some incredibly elaborate submissions, including a floor plan created on poster paper. Over the next two years, I want to make a portfolio of my students’ work so that I will always have it to remember. I already copied some of the floor plans and the elaborate family trees they made yesterday.

The enthusiasm of the students and their dedication to learning are the best aspects of being an educator here. Rampant academic dishonesty is the worst.

Cheating is something that we were warned about and discussed countless times during training. Until you encounter it, it still remains an abstract thought. Already, just a few months on site, I’ve been asked to help students cheat three times. One instance was on a test equivalent to the SATs. It’s something that I want no part of. Students try to help each other and teachers think they are helping students. But in the end, no one benefits from cheating. If teachers or students do work for others, they are harming themselves and those they are trying to “help.” It’s such a mainstay in the system, but the Ministry of Education is attempting to eliminate it. Cheating comes at a high price: it affects the reputation of students, teachers and schools and can be punished administratively. It’s hard to correct such a prevalent aspect in Albanian education, but it’s a dishonest plague that I will certainly try to set a good example about. I might have little power in the choices that teachers and students make, but I do have the ability to refuse being any part of it.