Reassessment

I think I’m a pretty good  teacher; better than average, anyway.  But, I sure had a humbling experience today.  My early morning class is routine, an adult student who is very  easy to talk to.  She’s got two young boys so we talk about  kids a lot.  My four gymnasium classes went smoothly.  Even the bad class wasn’t too bad.

Then I had (as I have every Thursday) my German pre-schoolers.  I’ve been teaching them since the beginning of October, so I’ve had eight lessons with them so far this year.  There are only 4 kids in the class, and I had  3 of them last year as well.  Some days there are only 3, some days only two.

There are a lot of things I do over and over again.  I read to them, Dr. Seuss mostly.  We go through some flash cards, and a couple of them can be very  competitive.  I do the color game, where I shout out a color and the kids have to run and touch something of that color.  They like anything that involves running.  Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes is a favorite game.  They don’t have enough patience for The eensy-weensy spider.

Anyway, I just had two students today.  One boy, who is a bit of a brat but actually fairly smart and knows a lot of words in  English.  And one girl, the one I didn’t  teach last year.  The thing is, I realized today, what I should have realized two months ago, that she doesn’t know anything at all in English.  I tried to get her to count to 10.  She couldn’t.  I tried to get her to recite the alphabet.  She couldn’t.  I tried playing Head and  Shoulders, Knees and Toes.  She didn’t have a clue what I was saying.

We played the color game.  She was totally watching the boy and waiting for cues.  She didn’t know brown, yellow, green, blue or red.  I tried animals and animal sounds.  Nothing.

For the last two months, she’s just been watching the other kids, mouthing the words without  actually saying anything, and getting through the hour just by being cute,  and me not being smart enough to figure it out.

Oh, well.  She’s only four.  Still plenty of time to learn.  I’ll have to pay a bit  more attention to her in future, though.