Oh my god, high school is hard work. Every Wednesday, after a full day of teaching--given the Bulgarian schedule--I come home, eat lunch and then fall asleep on the couch for a couple of hours.  Then I peal myself off the couch and wonder how it is that first, I made the conscious choice to teach high school for a year (am I crazy?) and second, what did I put my own high school teachers through?  But the strange and wonderful thing is, I love it.

These kids are very smart and especially talented and that is, I think, why it's such a challenge to teach them.  They know a lot of English but it's by no means flawless.  They have plenty of confidence after getting into one of the very best schools in Bulgaria.  And on top of all of this, they are at the cusp of becoming young adults--so they want to be kids when it suits them and alternately they want to be adults when it suits them.

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Phew, being in high school is hard work.  I'd begun to forget just how much jostling there is for position, how mean we can be to each other, how hard it is to sit still for 80 minutes and the fact that on some level everyone wants to be liked. Pretty clearly there's a lot more at stake than just learning English.

On top of all of this, each of my seven 8th grade classes has 30 students.  Yes, thirty students.  With this many students, I could do a number of different things.  Including but not limited to the following: I could field a serious soccer team, I could staff a small restaurant,  I could put together a decent jazz band, and I more or less have a enough people for a platoon.   However, I am trying to teach a conversation class to 30 students.

This has been a challenge for me.  First, I am not sure that I've ever had a class with 30 people in it.  I think it's pretty safe to say that in high school I didn't.  The only class that may have come close in college was Biology for non-science majors which may have had 35 students but in practice the class met at 9 am and I think that we only ever averaged 20 people a day.

So what does this mean for me? Well, I can't change my class size so I try to work with it.  Luckily students sit at desks where they have a built in partner.  So I make sure that students do lots of partner work and I walk around to see how they are doing.  I've also divided each class up into smaller committees so that they can work together in slightly bigger groups.  To date, this seems to be pretty effective.

I have to admit, I was terrified to split each class into committees of between 6 and 8 people.  I thought that the talkative, sometimes out of line students would wreak havoc on the committees.  Then I let each class decide what their "committee guidelines" would be and this seems to have helped curb the overly enthusiastic.  Guidelines included: let everyone have a turn to talk, use quiet voices and to work together.

What happened in practice was that the loud students with a "smart aleck" answer for everything faded into the background.  His or her peers didn't encourage him and that was that. Amazing what some positive peer pressure will do to a person!!

So three classes later, I stumbled home.  I can't believe how tired but happy I am.  This said, it's wonderful to see my students really practicing their English, learning something new and working successfully in groups together.  I am proud of them.  So proud that I take a 2 hour nap after lunch.  High school's hard work.