Day 438: The Pit Of Despair

I teach a class at POLY that has quite the horrific reputation. This class is 1S-5, and it's the bottom level of the Grade 1 Specials (the ones that have 'graduated' up from beginning at POLY in Preschool.) They have four teachers, and I'm the one that teaches them Science.

Now teaching these kids Science feels mostly like me just talking to the wall (or myself, whoever happens to be more entertaining at that moment.) The kids have the attention span of a gnat, and the 12 of them together are pretty much crazy. They're extremely hyper and disruptive, can't focus on anything for longer than three seconds, and most of them can barely read. I honestly have Preschoolers that can read better than some of them! Back home they'd be labelled as "Special Needs" or "Learning Disabilities" but here they're all just lumped together in the bottom level and yet are given the same curriculam to learn as the Level 1 kids. Oh boy!

Teaching them everyday is very frustrating, and some days you gotta psyche yourself up before going in there. Honestly some days you really do get nothing done at all in that class as you spend most of your time trying to keep them seated, or even just trying to get them to be quiet cause they spent 15 minutes on the floor laughing because there was a picture of a frog in the Science text that they thought was hilarious. There's always fights and crying everyday, and just general chaos as the kids would all rather just goof off than learn. There's a few gems in that class who are actually really sweet and well-behaved, but most times I feel like I'm Michelle Pfeiffer in some sort of junior Korean version of 'Dangerous Minds.' Us staff have actually nicknamed the class The Pit Of Despair. Not a very nice name, but it makes us laugh when we say it, and really you gotta approach this stuff with some positivity and a sense of humour!

We've implemented a seating chart which has helped things a bit, but it still needs some fine-tuning. Finding quiet kids to act as 'buffers' inbetween the loud ones can be difficult when you're limited by a shortage of well-behaved kids! I've learned to lower my expectations with this class and just try and make it fun and stress-free. The kids aren't going to learn any more with me being angry for 40 minutes everyday, so as long as *some* progress is made each lesson with the material then I feel like a small victory has been made. Gotta love teaching!