I’m Mr. Blair.

“Write your name on the board,” the Class Two teacher instructs me.  She speaks pretty well, probably because she lost her hearing relatively late.  I turn around and grab a piece of chalk and am about to write “Paul” for the children to see, but I hesitate, and I write something different— “Mr. Blair.”  Somehow this formal acknowledgement of my adulthood feels uncomfortable.  I turn around again and begin my first-ever teaching job: Class Two Creative Arts.  I begin the way I’ve seen others do it— I say “Hello” multiple times, dramatically, until I have all eyes on me.  Thanks to my accidental teaching experience in Class One, I knew not to expect too much, so I start easy.  According to the text book, the children are already familiar with squares, circles, rectangles, and ovals, so I should pick it up there.  My gut told me to expect otherwise, so I thought I would use the first class to better understand the students: what are their names, and can they follow basic instructions?

I ask for a volunteer who comes to the front of the class.  I draw his face on the board with chalk, intentionally leaving out the nose and ears, and I ask the students for help.  They tell me what’s missing, I finish, and then I have a few students work together to draw my face on the board.  Having set the example, I ask the children to pair off and do the same, except in their notebooks instead of on the board.

The desk the children share is large and horseshoe-shaped, which helps ensure that all children have an unobstructed view of the teacher (sign language is inherently visual, after all).  I do laps around the giant desk and provide feedback on the drawings, and I also guide the children who clearly don’t understand.  The workbooks are new, and they have blank spaces where the children should fill out ”Name” and “Subject.”  Not all children were capable of filling both of these out.  As some children begin to complete their drawings, I have them write the name of their subject, which, as it turns out, is incredibly difficult for one pair, neither of which know their names.

So by the end, everyone basically followed the instructions, although some students also copied random text from the board, some of which was written by another teacher earlier in the day.

The pictures are, of course, amazing, as all second graders’ are, so here’s a nice photo of them for you to click on:

That was today.  Yesterday I was given the textbook for this class and for the same subject in Class Three, which I start teaching tomorrow.  Since the textboooks took all of ten minutes to read, I spent the day yesterday completely rearranging the library.  I wish I had taken a “before” photo so you can see the improvement, but oh well, here’s the “after:”

The photo is a bit misleading because it’s so serene— what usually happens is that kids come in and use the computers while I’m trying to install things on them, and they manage to, among other things, delete files and switch to Safe Mode.  And then they kick each other until they cry.

To combat this anarchy, I have begun a system in which children sign up on the whiteboard and only six can be in the room at a time.  This works better than the free-for-all that proceeded it, but it has a few problems:

• The younger kids don’t understand the process.
• Also, many of them don’t know their names, which makes it difficult to put them on the list.
• The older kids can physically push the younger ones out of the way to ensure that they get to be on the top of the list.

Those are the problems I’m working on.

The nice thing, though, is that after the children finish their turns on the computer, they actually look at books!  More specifically, they look at pictures in books, but it’s a start.  It seems that joining in the “computer user alumni” club, all aggression disappears.  Hopefully after all 150 get a turn, it will calm down.