A child at heart

What should I do with a class that doesn’t seem to want to do anything? This was a question that I had to ask myself after my very first class at Luna. Fresh off a CELTA, the only experience I'd had with children in a classroom environment had been over a few months earlier that year, but I never had to teach any classes solo - let alone plan them.

I remember thinking ‘it’s just the first class, it’ll get better’, but after a few weeks to no avail, I did what I thought was the only option and asked Jim for help. After being told ‘at their age, you don’t really teach, you just play’, I found myself thinking ‘why the heck are they coming then?!’. I couldn’t seem to fathom that people were coming to lessons that weren’t necessarily lessons in the ‘traditional’ sense. That’s when I thought back to kindergarten, and the kind of thing that we did there. We didn’t have actual ‘lessons’, but we were still learning constantly because of the environment that we were surrounded by.

Flash forward 9 months, and here I am. Still here, still struggling at times, still not 100% sure what I’m doing, jumping around on foam number squares to ‘5 Little Monkeys’ as part of a ‘musical chairs’ type activity. Since being at Luna, I have learnt a lot about catering to the student and finding out what will enable them to have the best learning experience possible - a skill that I will hold onto further than teaching, I’m sure.